Watch Your Language

While the shock of the election result is beginning to wear off, the question of how to get through the next four years and limit the damage remains. I have seen some great articles offering actions to take. I agree that we must get smarter immediately about how to approach our elected officials, and I rejoice that people are finding and sharing ideas for this. I am glad there are people talking about organizing street protests and generally making sure that we don’t accept this presidency as normal. But I also think it is long past time that we stopped losing the language wars.

To understand what I mean, try looking up the word “liberal” in the dictionary. After explaining the political term, the British Dictionary has for the non-political meaning, “giving and generous in temperament or behavior.” How did that become an insult? How did it become necessary to replace the word liberal with progressive? It didn’t happen by accident. Right-wing commentators, even before they created a media empire for themselves, started a deliberate campaign to vilify liberals and stigmatize the word. They sold a tale of “tax and spend”, attaching it to the word liberal so often that finally they only had to say “liberal” to achieve the desired effect. This is not the only way they have used language against us. It becomes impossible to have a serious discussion of reproductive rights as soon as the term “baby killer” enters the conversation. Likewise, the campaign to weaken the Affordable Care Act started with two new additions to the language: Obamacare and “death panels”. We don’t have to accept these distortions to our language, but we have far too often.

More to the point though, we are about to begin the reign of a government that will provide us a golden opportunity to turn the tables, and we must not miss it. President Donald Trump will give us the best chance we have ever had to stigmatize the word “conservative”. Of course, the right wing today is not conservative at all; they seek to destroy, not conserve. No matter. We can and should take the word away from them, in the same way that they took “liberal” from us. We must use the word conservative at every opportunity as we discuss the grotesque abuses of power we can expect over at least the next two years. We must also explain what the constitution actually says, and in so doing wrest the word “patriotism” from their grasp. The right wing has seized on the Second Amendment to prove their patriotism. Fine. That leaves the rest of the Bill of Rights for us. We can outdo them in patriotism when it comes to freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble and protest, the right to a fair trial, the separation of church and state, and on and on. It’s all a question of how we frame the argument.

For a more specific example of how this can work, consider one of the first bills introduced in the new Senate. It is S11, formally known as The Jerusalem Embassy and Recognition Act. Simply, the bill cuts all funding for US embassies by 50% until the US Embassy to Israel is moved to Jerusalem from its current location in Tel Aviv. The actual move was approved in a largely symbolic gesture in a 1994 law, and every president since then, including George W Bush, has been wise enough to make sure that the actual move did not take place. But Trump promised during the campaign that he would actually carry out the move. So let’s make it as embarrassing as possible for him. Consider that enormous cut in embassy security funding, and let’s start calling this the “Benghazi bill”. As for the move to Jerusalem, we should discuss that part of the bill as the “Terrorist Provocation Act”. We can and should make the case that Trump, entering the White House with the lowest approval ratings of any new president, is seeking ways to provoke a terrorist attack on the United States in order to boost his popularity.

Yes, I am calling on us to play dirty. We have a war on our hands, and we having been losing it by playing too nice. We may be “giving and generous in temperament or behavior,” but we have before us a chance we can not afford to miss.

Let’s take it out with some music: