A New Language

Just passing on something wonky, but crucial and urgently true, that Heather Cox Richardson said toward the end of the Grounded video podcast (scroll down for transcript), which was one of the two I mentioned yesterday.  The host asked her, "Imagine you're helping prepare a future university history professor who will teach a class on the rise of Donald Trump to students in the year 2075.  What are the major points you would want to make sure that are not forgotten about what's happening right now?"

Here's the beginning of her answer:

Well, I don't think anyone's going to forget because it's pretty obvious, but the use of language by the radical right in the United States, beginning in the 1980s, but really taking off in the 1990s when you had people like House Speaker Newt Gingrich literally distributing lists of words to use to describe Democrats versus Republicans.  And the Democrats were words like traitor and weak and you know, poverty, and the Republicans were things like patriots, strong, powerful, really taking off in the 1990s*, and how that dovetailed with with the use of language and what became known as virtual technology in the former Soviet republics, where people who were working in politics quite deliberately created a false reality in order to get people to vote away their democracy. And I think that because I study ideas, I think that control of people's minds through the use of certain kinds of rhetoric is really the story of America in this moment.

And it has been building for a very long time. It's a mistake, I think, to look at Trump as an individual who came from nowhere. He was built by this system and took advantage of it. And that central misuse of disinformation and that concept of disinformation and its dovetailing between the U.S. and the former Soviet republics and then its amplification through social media is, I think, the story of this era. And one of the reasons I think it's so important for those of us who are grounded in reality to push back. In many ways, we are fighting a war today. 

The use of language.  Language matters.  They're good at it; us, not so much.  The 80s were nearly a half century ago, which is plenty of time to create a new reality, intentionally constructed for specific purposes.  Plenty of time to change the way people hear about and speak about the political landscape and (although for the most part they don't know it) their own lives and their own political behaviors.

We need to, somehow, make the language of both truth and compassion central to our culture.  The language is there; we need to agree to it, and use it.

* - This was also the time of the rise of AM talk radio, including Rush Limbaugh, and the rise of Fox News.