Accurate language is not just the sign of clear thinking, it is instrumental to clear thinking. We need to create language that properly reflects important distinctions and generalizations, and supports the mental activity of doing this. The Republicans who lost in this years elections exploited and distorted language practices codified by Gingrich and managed to win doing it. This year's election results might properly be interpreted to mean an end to the hegemony of Gingrich's language distortion. To bury it, we need to create evocative language to describe our own ideas. Here, we argue for a descriptive word for the Republicans who brought us Bushworld.
The creation and labelling of mental categories is a natural and inevitable mental activity. The act is a fundamental language act, something that happens subconsciously and beyond our control. Labels help us to think about things that have some fixed relationship to other things as groups.
In the political arena, labelling has been exploited by Republicans going back at least to the 1980's. Can anyone say "tax and spend Liberal?" I guess that's our "shibboleth." When Gingrich argued in the early 1990's "control the language and you control the argument" he was advocating for a process that included the deprecation of fair and evenhanded labels for ideas that he disagreed wtih and promotion of misleading and artificially saccharine lables for ideas he agreed with.
Interestingly, it worked. At least it worked for a short while. People bought the labels and they swallowed the meanings that were attached to them. But one of the curious things about human understanding is its wonderful plasticity. Hypothetically, imagine you take a person who understands language well enough to know that the word "good" generally equates to getting some sort of pleasure. Imagine next that for a very long time, each time they hear or use the word "good" used to describe anything, it turns out that the thing being described causes pain, anxiety, misery, and suffering. At some point, the mind begins to reinterpret the meaning of the term "good."
My bet is that the trouncing of the Republicans in this election suggests a fundamental shift in the way people hear and understand what we will call Gingrich Speak.
Assuming this is true, we stand to learn two things, at least. One is not to emulate Gingrich's error. Try to use language that is as carefully descriptive of the point you are trying to make as possible. This does not rule out colorful language, use of good symbols and so on. But it does require a strong consonance of meaning between the symbols and the actual meaning. Speaking truly does, in the long run, matter. And it matters profoundly. "Blue sky initiative" evokes blue skies. It better be about actually promoting them, not about undermining them.
The second thing we might learn is that it is essential to create descriptive language that discriminates between two categories that are properly disctriminated between or unifies disparate entities in ways that have compelling categorical bounds. There has been a real crackup in the Republican party. The neocons, the conservatives, and the religious fundamentalists have agreed to disagree. And they are all pointing fingers and yelling at each other. They already have labels. But there are Republicans who may not properly represent the ideas of these groups.
One example is the Bushistas who sold out every group. One might argue that the Bushistas came closest to representing the interests of the neocons. I am certainly in no position to argue against that idea. The big-ticket things driven by the Bushistas came close to realizing the neocon agenda. But there was a level of profound sleaze and corruption among the Bushistas that, while probably being endemic to the neocon point of view - realpolitik being what it is, probably is not textbook academic neocon idealism.
Kuo, I understand, argues that Bushistas never took fundamentalism seriously, but rather that they mocked it and mocked fundamentalists for being simpletons. Finally, social and fiscal conservatives believed Bush betrayed them with massive deficits and a kind of open-door policy to immigrants. So Bushistas do not properly belong to any of these groups.
What our language lacks, it seems to me, is a term that represents the knot of Republicans who cynically bought and traded in the currency of ideas promoted by the Bushistas. They exploited Gingrich's language ideas, gained power, and traded political favors for money or greater influence. What we have seen so far is that most, perhaps all, of them were Republicans. But as we have argued, many of them may not properly fit under the other labels.
The first inclination is to label them Bushistas, because they seem to all behave in a rather similar way, supporting and exploiting Bush's agenda for political gain. But one wonders whether this confuses a dog with its tail. Or with its bark. In some ways, the Bushistas are the White House operatives in the Bush administration are merely expressions of a larger phenomenon that has been growing in the Republican party since Reagan or Barry Goldwater.
We need a kind of language to describe either the particular group of Republicans voted out of office for crorruption, and for the people who believed and behaved in the same general way. More than this, it seems, we need language for the ideals of the group. Because this group expresses ideals that keep coming back to bite us here in the US.
So, here are some possible choices and some arguments for each.
1) Rabid Dog Republicans - so called because they bite everyone they can. Not because they want to. Nor because any societal or personal gain is involved, but because thats is how rabies is spread.
2) Torrid State Cabalistas - we note that the center of gravity of this dark force lies in Missisippi, with its most powerful arms being in Texas and Florida.
3) GatorPugs - building on the same argument, allegators live in swamps, are powerfully destructive, and interact with others beings only when it very directly involves eating or reproducing.
4) F**king Feudalists - this evokes the notion expressed by Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglass debates that the fundamental idea we are fighting against is "the divine right of kings." And while one of its expressions was defeated in the civil war, the idea endures and thrives. These guys just want to claim the products of everyone else's labors as their own. The label, for all its strengths, has some practical limitations.
5) MalOefs - bad eggs smell bad and if you swallow what they offer, they can make you very ill, possibly dead.