Central to the Presidential
election are the issues of the role of the Federal government in our society
and what should be the future of such Federal government programs as Social
Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Central also is what the role of the Federal
government should be in the regulation of personal behavior, especially in the
realm of sex and sexual relations.
Closely related to the
latter is the matter of the place of organized religion in public life, and the
matter of whether or not particular religious views on such matters should be
embedded in the law, both civil and criminal. Central also are the economic
issues of the concentration of wealth, what is taxation for, and given the
unsustainable Federal budgetary deficit, the role of government in dealing with
these problems. As well as others, such as whether being fed dog meat as a
child in a country where such a practice is common equilibrates with
transporting your dog in a dog carrier strapped to the top of your car.
In the political battles
that occur over these issues, words matter. As it happens, many of the words
presently used in the mainstream media and political culture are mis-leading
and do not reflect reality. These terms are usually those that have been
created/established by the Right Wing and their paramount wordsmiths such as
Frank Luntz. (He is a very clever fellow [1]. Would that we had one like him on
our side.) They are used not only by the Right but also by the media and often
by what qualifies as the "Left" in the United States. This practice
automatically gives the Right a leg up in any debate on any of the above issues
as well as many others. This is a situation that has to change if any of the
battles with the Right are going to be won. Consider the following.
Let's start with the term
"conservative." The GOP candidates are all vying with each other to
see who can out-"conservative" the other. But none of them are out to
conserve anything. They all want to go backwards, and indeed spend a lot of
time telling us that they want to go back to "America the way it used to
be" (you know, no unions, no civil rights, no legal abortions, no Medicare
or even Social Security, no environmental or financial markets regulation, and
etc.). This is actually REACTIONARY politics and that's what our side should
begin calling their side.
"Entitlements."
When referring to the benefits provided by certain government programs for
which people have paid for many years, like, for example, Social Security and
Medicare, many politicians, of both major parties, use the term
"entitlement." The (strong) implication is that someone is getting
something for nothing, or is getting something only because of who they are
(often "poor" or otherwise somehow "undeserving"). But no,
they are getting it because they have paid for it. On the other hand, if a
hedge fund manager gets $4 billion in a year (and one did in 2011), feeling
that he is entitled to such a payout because he is such a smart and grand
fellow, even though he "earned" it just by trading pieces of paper in
an unregulated market, that's called "fair compensation." And so, the
term "entitlements" should be replaced on our side by something like
"earned benefits."
The term "Social
Issues" refers to abortion rights, gay civil rights, end-of-life options,
stem cell research, treatment and disease management, and in particular the
interest of the Radical Religious Right to control personal sexual behavior
through the use of the criminal and civil law (as mentioned above), thus
imposing, through the use of the law, a particular religious ideology on the
population as a whole. "Social issues" is a nice neutral term that
emotionally defuses the whole thing for the Right, making it appear that there
is some kind of balance to what they want to achieve. However, all of the
issues that come under the rubric are based in the religious positions of a
particular minority of the population. When Karl Rove got anti-gay marriage
state constitutional amendments on the ballot in the 2004 Presidential election
in order to get right-wing Christians to the polls to vote for GW Bush, he was
not doing it because it was any old "social issue." It was a
right-wing religious issue. Therefore, our side should stop calling these
matters "social issues" and begin calling them what they really are,
"RELIGIOUS ISSUES" or better yet "RIGHT-WING RELIGIOUS ISSUES."
While I'm on this subject,
let's consider the term "evangelical." On the one hand, many
right-wing Christians are evangelical in the way they promote their religious beliefs.
But there are many evangelicals who are not right-wing. They just get lost on
the shuffle. We should stop using the term "evangelical" and call the
right-wing religious types, Christian and other (and there are Jews and Muslims
who fit right in with them politically), what they really are: the RADICAL
RELIGIOUS RIGHT or some variation thereof.
On the matter of abortion
rights in particular, we should not use the term "pro-life." Given
the Religious Right's policies towards people in general after they are born,
they are actually not "pro-life" but only "anti-abortion,"
and then only in a very narrow sense. They are not broadly anti-abortion in
terms of prevention because then they would be strong supporters of sex
education and birth control. Thus indeed they are they are: ANTI-ABORTION
RIGHTISTS, and that's what our side should call them.
Finally, consider the term
"big government." From the Right, government is terrible if it does
things like regulate the financial markets that when they were allowed to run
wild put the country into the current economic mess from which it is recovering
very slowly (and they are champing at the bit to destroy the mild re-regulation
put in place to try to prevent the collapse from happening again). But
"big government" is absolutely at the top of their list when it comes
to such matters as criminalizing the religious belief that life begins at the
time of viability and for some, the use of contraceptives. Presently, our side
gives the Right a virtual monopoly on the use of the term, the way they want to
use it. In the fight against them that is a monopoly that needs to be broken.
After the Fall of France at
the beginning of the Second World War, when Great Britain stood alone, Winston
Churchill spoke of mobilizing the English language and taking it into war. The
other side has done this and done it very effectively. It is way past time for
our side to begin doing the same thing.
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1. Politicus USA, October
30, 2011, "The Secret List of 14 Words Republicans are Never Supposed to
Use," http://www.politicususa.com/14-secret-gop-words.html
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