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Political Words, Political Games

Dan Skinner

Let’s be honest: The Right has won the American language war, and the Left has helped them do it. From “Partial Birth Abortion,” the “Death Tax” and the “Patriot Act” to the Pro-Life/Pro-Choice debate, the Left has been arguing on a linguistic terrain constructed and continually redefined by the Right.

The problem with this is simple: there is no way to win a debate in which one is confined to another’s words when language is the central battlefield of politics. The side that is able to define the terms and control the images that present politics to the public is the side that is likely to win.

Luckily, a way out of this can be found by returning to the work of sociologist Erving Goffman, a curious but crucial writer whose “Frame Analysis” was seminal in showing how humans “organize experience.” While I keep “Frame Analysis” close by my bedside for its endlessly interesting snapshots of “reality,” Goffman’s essential contribution was in explaining how to deal with dominant discursive and phenomenological frames. A strong frame, he argued, can rarely if ever be refuted—not by seemingly contradictory facts and not by logic. This is because responses to a carefully framed political discourse end up strengthening the authority of the language that defined the issue in the first place. In order to avoid being caught within a political opponent’s language, the issue must be reframed anew. New political strategies require new rhetoric.

Accomplishing this will require a strictly regimented rhetorical diet on the part of the Left—no cheating allowed. While prescriptive language has been given a bad name by years of Chomskian linguistic theory, politics requires a conscious and deliberate approach toward language that may feel restrictive, nitpicky, and unnatural in practice Step one is realizing that the American Left has been arguing for years with terms that are the products of a conscious right-wing rhetorical strategy, most recently groomed by the upstart pollster Frank Luntz.

A case in point: How successful will the Left be in defending the right to an abortion if it merely squabbles over whether it is a good idea to kill a partially-born fetus or not? This is a battle that cannot be won, no matter how strong a counterargument can be put forth (which is what most pro-choicers intuitively do). Returning, as many have done, to the medical terminology of “Extraction and Dilation” is about as ugly and detached from human understanding as the Right’s myopic argument that gun ownership is morally justified because the Constitution says so. Arguing that the procedure is extremely rare is even weaker, and engaging in a debate over the beginning of life, or the viability of the fetus is still more dangerous territory. If the Left engages in a debate over where on the continuum between gestation and life a baby may be “killed,” it has reinforced a highly subjective—and probably irresolvable—way of framing the abortion issue. This tactical issue illustrates the importance of linguistic determinations in politics, and shows how broadly “language” needs to be construed.

Abortion needs an entirely new discourse. The religious Right has been able to reduce the issue to a simple proce\dure, with graphic images and Biblical quotations placed alongside one another as proof of the horror. In response, the Left will need to offer images of its own. The idea of “abortion-on-demand”—another slick rhetorical move on the part of Luntz and Company—makes it seem as though women gleefully skip down the street, pop into an abortion clinic, “demand” an abortion, and then go back to a picnic in the park. The Left needs to reframe the issue from the perspective of women themselves. For most women, the decision to have an abortion is torturous, with lifelong consequences. Contrary to what the misogynistic, patriarchal Right would have us believe, these are not simple questions, easily resolved.

The debate over abortion presents the Left with an opportunity to do what it did best in the 20th century: treat political issues in terms of their effect on real people and not as mere abstractions. From the 1930s to the 1960s the Democratic Party was seen as a party that, in defending human rights, focused on the individuals without whom a conception of “humanity” is meaningless. To wrest the abortion issue from the Right, some women who have gone through this difficult process may need to become public leaders and put a human face on a difficult and personal subject. The shame needs to be removed from abortion so that an open and honest discourse can be pursued. Pro-choice men must refuse to argue on any territory other than the effect abortion has on women themselves. The Religious Right will have more difficulty reframing individual accounts and personal experiences than any other aspect of the abortion issue, particularly because it has proven unwilling to provide an ample safety net to deal with unwanted babies that are not aborted.

As the public is not always politically astute, all political wars of words are won on the basis of the definitions and terms that frame issues. These are the primary building blocks that shape how people think about and react to politics. The Left is going to have to be more careful with its words, educating friends and family about the degree to which the words they use every day are in fact creations of a branding campaign by the Right. Americans need to be reminded that the “USA Patriot Act” to which The New York Times and mainstream newspapers across the country casually refer is actually a devious acronym that stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. Forgetting the origins of our words is to forget the genealogy of the political strategies that put us in the current political predicament. There has been nothing patriotic about Bush’s war on terrorism, and it is the Left’s responsibility to reject language that obscures this fact.

In his book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, comedian Al Franken suggests that comedy could be the Left’s best tool for reframing the Right’s politics. Goffman would disagree. To simply point out inconsistencies, factual errors, and lies is not enough. Instead, the Left needs to be ruthless in the creation of a new political discourse that allows Americans to see issues from a different and truly compassionate perspective, yet doesn’t engage in tit-for-tat language wars with the Right. Bush’s opponents may choose to join in the game of chess that he has started, but they will lose every time. The American Left and the Right play different kinds of games, requiring different strategies, aimed at different goals. The Left needs to find its own game, and stick to it.