Prior to the Republican sweep of Congress in 1994, Newt Gingrich distributed a memo, from the political action committee GOPAC called Language: A Key Mechanism of Control, that helped extend his party´s rule of congress for 12 years, 1995-2007. It wasn't based on the traditional gaining more voters from non-Republican constituencies, but actually polarizing politics on purpose to rally the GOP base and win more votes by demonizing their opponents. It was negative campaigning to the extreme. However it wasn't based on passing techniques like radio or newspaper, but more abstract; language itself. What Gingrich wanted was to change the way Americans thought about the two major parties and politics in general. The strategy was to use the pulpit of mass media, any kind, to attach positive words to oneself and negative words to your opponent. This has always been done, but the kicker was not just to attack the person but the organization they represented. In previous elections, Republicans and Democrats would still have a basic respect for each other´s party because they knew they would have to work with them to pass legislation. So attacking a whole party, which was made of millions of voters you wanted to peel off in the future, was seen as foolhardy.
But Gingrich had a new plan, Congress should be transformed into what the parliaments of Europe where political parties are united by ideology and work to stop any bills they do not favor regardless if they are popular. Many Parliaments have what is called proportional representation, where no matter how small a percentage a party gets it will still win seats (usually a percentage same as their vote total, 5% vote means 5% of the seats). This proliferates multitudes of radical, fringe parties who can simply refuse to join coalitions and prevent working governments from being formed. Further, this creates a system where no party can be large enough to pass anything unless it wins a clear 51% majority, meaning that the goal becomes not to forge compromise but try to destroy the opposition parties and ram through legislation on close party-line votes. That is why Margaret Thatcher could push though far more right-wing bills in Britain than Ronald Reagan in the United States, despite Britain being significantly more left-wing. So, if the more conservative United States adopted such a model, the liberal victories of the 30s and the 60s could finally be rolled back.
Gingrich did not begin the fight to create a fringe party system the way they were set up in Europe. The European Parliaments are that way because of the written law, by their Constitutions or subsequent legislation. Gingrich in contrast did not intend to use any formal routes. One reason is that for most of his tenure in Congress he couldn´t. From his start in Congress in 1979 to his ascension as House Speaker in 1995, his party was in the minority to the Democrats. And the Republican leadership, chiefly Bob Michel who was House Minority Leader 1981-1995, did not share his views of polarization. Even when he did become leader of the House Republicans, it was only for four years from 1995-1999 meaning he had to make a strategy which would outlive him and create a body of viable successors.What Gingrich had to do was an internal, de-facto coup. This had to be done he thought with the power of language which connects with ordinary Americans much better than pragmatic, ¨establishment¨ compromise.
In the memo, which is of course simplistic, the key is to "speak like Newt.¨ There´s good reason as to why he is the only former Speaker to continue being a relevant figure in American politics, over a decade after he was disgracefully ousted from the failed impeachment of Bill Clinton. All his style consists of is using emotionally charged words, positive for his side and negative for the other, to speak to the powerful irrational side of human nature. Phrases like honest, strong, liberty, freedom, abusive, cheater, weak, and bureaucracy are common words ingrained into our minds with meanings reinforced by our education with very specific unambiguous meanings. In the political sense, this is used to make unpopular or immoral ideas popular. Popular and good ideas do not need to be attached to these words to be what they are, which is their weakness. Aid to the poor, peace in the Middle East, and human rights are commonly held as socially desirable. Tax cuts for the wealthy, bank de-regulation, pre-emptive war, and austerity do need to be augmented because they are unpopular. Language defends the "indefensible" by using a Trojan horse, sneaking in policies with an appearance of being beneficial for all. For example, Ronald Reagan sold tax cuts to the wealthy which is not popular as ¨across the board tax cuts¨, going not just to the wealthy but to the poor. I am not making this up, Reagan´s own budget director David Stockman used the phrase Trojan horse in an interview with The Atlantic to describe how the Reagan administration sold supply side economics to the public.
The concept of the politicization of language was popularized by the well known novelist George Orwell. In 1946, before his magnum opus 1984, he published Politics and the English Language. Orwell argued that Totalitarian regimes justified their oppression by debasing language into simple emotional phrases that are either totally positive or totally negative. Ideas can be condescending into unambiguous phrases and ideally into single words which will invert the natural human suspicion of power into total submission, convincing people that freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. He described it thus:
¨In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.¨
Readers of 1984 will notice how the English language in the novel´s dystopian future is further simplified to the combination of larger words into smaller phrases. Instead of English Socialism, it is ingsoc.
Orwell´s conclusion on the politicization of language was thoroughly negative, it should never be tried because it aids tyrants. But Newt Gingrich would discover Orwell´s writings and re-interpret it to be positive in the direction of human liberty. He came upon this by way of Frank Luntz, a pollster for Patrick Buchanan and Ross Perot in the 1992 presidential election. Luntz became Newt Gingrich´s pollster for the Contract of America. Gingrich discovered Luntz at a Republican retreat:
¨The concept of it was hatched in Salisbury, MD, at a Republican retreat. I was fortunate enough to have been invited to do a presentation about how the American people didn't trust politicians in general and, quite frankly, didn't trust Republicans in particular. And Newt Gingrich was there, and he listened to the presentation, and he said: "We have to do it differently in this election. We have to find a way to communicate that takes all of these policies that we believe in, that the Democrats don't, and articulates that difference. How can we do it?" I presented at that presentation a proclamation. I got the idea from a Massachusetts campaign I was involved with. Gingrich saw that, and he came up with the phrase "contract."
I didn't create the "Contract with America;" I was the pollster for it.¨
Luntz was hired by the Republican National Committee and during that time helped Gingrich produce the GOPAC memo Language: A Key Mechanism of Control. One fact is important to establish, Luntz and Gingrich did not start the semantic game in the Republican Party. The groundwork was laid by Richard Nixon and his Vice President Spiro Agnew who built a winning campaign in 1968 by claiming Conservatives stood for the ¨silent majority¨ and against the ¨liberal elites¨ in the media and universities. Ronald Reagan, using his acting experience, made the harsh Barry Goldwater attack on government into art by actually using quotations from Democrats Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy like ¨we have a rendezvous with destiny¨. Institutionally it was Lee Atwater, strategist for Reagan and Bush´s campaigns in the 80s and future RNC chairman, who figured out how to translate the ugly, racist appeal to southern states founded on attacking civil rights legislation socially acceptable. It is done by using abstract positive language:
¨You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.¨
The lesson for contemporary politics is that the right-wing wins not merely on policy, but on semantics. This is how even though a majority of Americans favor expanding background checks for gun purchases and raising taxes on the wealthy the Republicans can oppose them unilaterally and get elected. And further, lose and still be respected. When Mitt Romney lost the 2012 to Barack Obama convincingly, exit polls still showed a majority of voters still felt that Mitt Romney was closer to them ideologically than Obama. If this was not so Obama probably would have got more of the vote easily. Obama then only won by appealing to the self interest of at least some of voters who choose to vote against their personal beliefs.
Luntz and Gingrich´s strategy has been so successful that a plurality of Americans consider themselves Conservative even as they report favoring Liberal positions on important issues. Polling firm Gallup claims that about 40% of voters consider themselves Conservative, 35% moderate, and 20% Liberal. Gallup has measured this since 1992 when moderates were the majority with 43%. They remained the majority until about 2009 when Obama became president, but were declining slowly since 1992 around when Gingrich´s Republicans emerged.
Liberals and Democrats have fought these tactics by essentially playing into them. Instead of combating Conservative ideology head on, they have tried to convince voters that it is their policies that are truly Conservative. Bill Clinton proclaimed the era of big government over in 1996 and proceeded to sign center-right policies on welfare, taxes, trade, and regulation for fear of doing anything that would imply he is on the wrong side of the right. Today Democrats sold healthcare reform as being the true Conservative plan, stressing its past support from Bob Dole and the Heritage Foundation. The same goes for Cap and Trade which is argued for by saying it is a market-based model inspired by George H.W. Bush´s handling of acid rain. The hope is to act Conservative enough to provide cover to pass truly Liberal reforms. But this has failed with the above and even more examples because the opposition knows the game and instead moves further to the right (which is automatically defined as good, the more the better) and votes against it. Republicans gave no votes to ¨Obamacare¨ and filibustered Cap and Trade in the Senate. The same goes even for legislation that gets passed. Democrats loaded up the 2009 stimulus with tax cuts, included no tax increases whatsoever, and less spending than many Liberal economists believed was necessary to fill the immense gap of consumer spending. But with all these giveaways, the overwhelming majority of Republicans voted against it. Even though it became law because Democrats had Congress in 2009, their fear of being too Liberal made them water down the bill to get votes that the strategy promises should never be given.
The only way out of this bait and switch is to change the semantic game. Trying to play it the way the Republicans do will fail because they have been successful in demonizing Liberal groups and causes.
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