Winning the battle of words is a long step toward winning any political battle. The side that defines the terms in which an issue is posed is likely to prevail on that issue, by wrapping its argument in the flag or high principle, or catering to voters’ biases. The caption of a recent, and widely reproduced, Reuters article provides an example: “Pro-defense senators push fight against Gaddafi.” There was a time when war was called war, not defense. We might have a more honest discussion of foreign policy if there were still a War Department, as there was prior to 1947. However, in that year, it was folded into the new Defense Department. Since then, those who want to save or rule the world can describe military policies, expenditures and operations, however dubious, as part of national defense.
The further we go into the twenty-first century the more things resemble George Orwell’s vision of the late twentieth. Our militaristic stance not only makes a mockery of the term “defense,” but comes close to “War is Peace,” a slogan of Oceania, one of the perpetually warring coalitions in Nineteen Eighty-Four. We have many pretty labels for militarism and its methods; consider the name given to the invasion of Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom, or to the war in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom. (The “enduring” part is accurate, at least). Think of the description of torture as enhanced interrogation.
Such euphemisms are examples of doublespeak, a term coined by the National Council of Teachers of English. It is language that “diverts attention from, or conceals, a speaker’s true meaning. . .making the bad seem good, and the unpleasant attractive or at least tolerable. It seeks to avoid, shift, or deny responsibility, and ultimately prevents or limits thought.” 35
The Republican budget goes beyond doublespeak, to the inspiration for that term, doublethink, Orwell’s word for the core of Oceania’s mind control. This is not merely the use of misleading terms, but “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” The Republican plan to reduce the deficit while cutting taxes is a perfect example.
Are its contradictions the result of deliberate deception or self-delusion? Orwell thought that doublethink was both: “The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.” Another term might be willful ignorance.
How can the right convince people that their programs work and liberals’ do not, when the evidence is to the contrary? Oceania had it down pat. The Party slogan was “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” 36 The Party did that by changing reports of the past, including rewriting news accounts. Our conservatives don’t have that advantage, but are making progress toward the same goal, revising history. They do it directly, by claiming that tax cuts always increase revenue or that Keynesian economic polices never work. They do it by pretending that they always have opposed deficits. They do it by winning the battle of words, by calling regulation of business an assault on liberty, describing financial manipulation as the working of the benign market, labeling imperialist adventures as defense of the homeland, describing inequality as virtuous independence, and labeling any movement toward social justice or shared benefits as socialism.
Not long ago, I mentioned a book entitled Flat Earth News, the title describing the tendency of discredited stories to persist in the news media. A companion in imagery is Zombie Economics,37 which details how flawed economic policies have continued to influence policy, even after repeated demonstrations of their falsity. Other books telling the same dismal tale are Freefall 38 and The Return of Depression Economics.39 Their message is twofold: those policies brought on the current recession and, unless reversed, they will prolong it and lead to another. Not only does the House budget repudiate those lessons, Republican policies, budgetary and otherwise, cancel the last hundred years of history, in the process expunging part of their own legacy, especially anything connected with the embarrassing Theodore Roosevelt.
35. The Oxford Companion to the English Language, p. 320
36. Oceania quotes from Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 270, 44.
37. By John Quiggin (2010)
38. By Joseph Stiglitz (2010)
39. By Paul Krugman (2009)
