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The Language of Politics

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Clarissa

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It looks really silly when people try to explain the political movements they dislike using their own very limited vocabulary of political terminology. See the following, for instance:

For Democrats are the Party of Government. They believe that government is more nobly motivated than a private sector that runs on self-interest and the profit motive, and that government can achieve goals private enterprise could never accomplish.

To liberals, government is us, the personification of the nation.

It’s really hard for the author of the linked article to realize that not everybody is haunted by the urge to invest “Government” with human characteristics and relate to it as a Good Daddy or a Bad Daddy. I happen to know quite a lot of Liberals. The only Conservatives I know are members of my own family and they are only conservative for Quebec. Everywhere else, they would be a bunch of irredeemable Lefties. So when I imagine any of the Liberal / progressive folks I know coming up to me and telling me that “government is more nobly motivated” and “government is us, the personification of the nation”, I’d think my friend was running a high fever and would offer hot tea / medicine / chicken soup / to accompany the sufferer to the doctor. People just don’t think in these terms (or express themselves in  this embarrassingly cloying language).

I always tell my students that English does not translate literally into Spanish. The same is true about the language of politics. You can’t take a bunch of terms and concepts that are meaningful to you and say, “The other guys think the exact same thing but in reverse.”

16 responses to “The Language of Politics”

  1. Benoni Avatar
    Benoni

    It’s a strawman, pure and simple. They take “the government can provide certain protections to benefit us” and translate it to “THE GOVERNMENT IS LITERALLY GOD”.

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  2. David Bellamy Avatar
    David Bellamy

    The italicized text is pretty much what I believe, unless conservatives control government.

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    1. David Bellamy Avatar
      David Bellamy

      I do not see why anyone would find this objectionable at all, although I know that Libertarians feel the exact opposite.

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      1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
        bloggerclarissa

        The main characteristic of American Liberals is their profound opposition to the government. Liberals marched on Washington for Civil Rights, protested the war in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, denounced the invasions of 3rd World Countries, denounces the NSA spying, the War on Drugs, the insane spending on defense, Guantanamo, torture – I could continue for an hour but I have to go to work. 🙂 These are not people who believe in “nobly motivated personifications.”

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      2. David Bellamy Avatar
        David Bellamy

        However, we believe that government is the way to address these problems, even while being the cause of them. Conservatives seem to want to destroy government. We can see where that leads by considering Somalia. (Anecdotal evidence is all we have or can have; a controlled experiment where one society has a government and another identical one does not is not likely to be carried out any time soon.)

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        1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
          bloggerclarissa

          I will believe they want to destroy government when they lobby for defunding the pentagon. For now, all they want is to destroy the welfare state, it seems.

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  3. Evelina Anville Avatar
    Evelina Anville

    Well as a liberal, I do think that the government, as an entity that does not run on profit, is far better than the private sector for running many programs (health care, social security, education, food safety etc.) So I think that’s what Buchanan (author of the article you linked to) is getting at. But of course, you are right and the Buchanan article is full of hysterical visions of what “liberals think.” And as you point out, the article is really a series of “reverse projections.” It’s conservatives (well some conservatives–like Buchanan) that approach the free market as if it wields magical power. The free market will somehow ensure that everybody has good health care!; the free market will ensure that all food is safe to eat! etc etc.

    I actually find it curious that conservatives are so obsessively focusing on the Affordable Health Care website and acting like that alone signals the failure of “Obamacare.” At some point, the website is going to be fixed and it’s going to work. What are they going to focus on then? The relentless attacks on the website strike me as politically short sighted.

    As a side now, have you ever read what Buchanan says about race? It’s absolutely appalling. You can read it here if you are bored or morbidly curious. http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-a-brief-for-whitey-969

    Here is a snippet of the insanity:
    “First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.”

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      “Well as a liberal, I do think that the government, as an entity that does not run on profit, is far better than the private sector for running many programs (health care, social security, education, food safety etc.)”

      – I agree with this statement in its entirety. But “a more nobly motivated personification of the nation” is something quite different. 🙂

      “I actually find it curious that conservatives are so obsessively focusing on the Affordable Health Care website and acting like that alone signals the failure of “Obamacare.” At some point, the website is going to be fixed and it’s going to work. What are they going to focus on then?”

      – It’s the continuation of birtherism. They couldn’t find anything in Obama’s life or personal trajectory to hound him about, so they attached all their hopes to this hopeless issue of his birth certificate. These are very good signs that signal complete desperation.

      ““First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.”

      – At first, I laughed and said, ‘GOOD parody!’ And then I realized this was what parodies were based on. Scary shit.

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      1. Evelina Anville Avatar
        Evelina Anville

        “At first, I laughed and said, ‘GOOD parody!”
        I know what you mean. I first read it as a quote in a liberal article critiquing Buchanan. And I actually thought the author was misrepresenting Buchanan. I couldn’t believe he actually said/wrote that. So I looked it up and found the article myself. And yep: Buchanan published that. It’s crazy. He is “far right” but he is a major political figure. Not some crazy person on the street talking to himself. How does he write such insanity and still remain a figure in American politics? It’s frightening.

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        1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
          bloggerclarissa

          I didn’t think it was Buchanan-the-famous-politician at first when I just started reading this website I linked. But then I realized it was him and really wondered. . .

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    2. Evelina Anville Avatar
      Evelina Anville

      Ooops. Did something wrong with the last comment so it got caught in moderation under a different alias. Below is my brilliance again! 😉 And you can delete the comment in moderation to avoid repeats. :):

      “At first, I laughed and said, ‘GOOD parody!”
      I know what you mean. I first read it as a quote in a liberal article critiquing Buchanan. And I actually thought the author was misrepresenting Buchanan. I couldn’t believe he actually said/wrote that. So I looked it up and found the article myself. And yep: Buchanan published that. It’s crazy. He is “far right” but he is a major political figure. Not some crazy person on the street talking to himself. How does he write such insanity and still remain a figure in American politics? It’s frightening.

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      1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
        bloggerclarissa

        I’m sorry, this happens because of the ongoing massive spam attack. I had to tighten the discussion settings because I’ve been getting hundreds of spam comments a day.

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      2. Evelina Anville Avatar
        Evelina Anville

        Oh. It was my fault. I mistyped my e-mail address!

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  4. Shakti Avatar
    Shakti

    When people talk about politics this way, they’re mouthing words. They are talking in code to their intended audience.

    Clarissa, how conservative/liberal is Quebec compared to other provinces? I don’t really know anything about Canadian politics except that Quebec has pretty strong secessionist leanings (I had a French professor who believed Quebec was being exploited for its resources by the rest of Canada but she didn’t go into the history) and Quebec is the reason that all items sold in Canada have French and English on the back. I’d guess Alberta is a more conservative province but then I’m making assumptions about a gas and oil industry making people conservative.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      Quebec is the most progressive province of all Canadian provinces by far. It has the strongest welfare state, 70% of people believe in evolution (as opposed to 56% in the second most Liberal province), religion is not an issue because barely anybody practices, the reproductive rights are not in danger, college tuition is about 10% of what it is in the rest of Canada, etc.

      This is precisely why moving to the US from such a liberal place was a rude awakening for me.

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  5. NancyP Avatar
    NancyP

    I would be more specific. The government is employed by “the people”, and in theory, serves “the people”, and if “the people” don’t like some action, electoral politics and judicial review are two formally established methods of obtaining change. In theory, the government is responsible to the American populace as a whole. In practice, representatives of private profit-making interests perform a significant amount of bribery of elected and appointed officials.

    When corporations receive taxpayers’ money outside the free market (preferential contracting resulting in high cost to government; tax breaks, etc), no one notices. When poor people receive food stamps or medical care funded by the government, it’s called “welfare” and the recipients are stigmatized as lazy no-goods.

    When corporations or wealthy individuals keep money in financial instruments rather than using a portion to invest in creating new products, no one notices. When poor people use food stamps and thus buy American-grown food, it’s called “sponging” and not consuming and keeping U.S. farmers afloat.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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