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Neo- Conservative Jargon |
Introduction
Neo-conservative jargon, also known as Rushspeak, is a large, elaborate, and highly evolved semantic system concealing a grossly expanded, and unusually effective, form of name calling. Phil Agre, a very smart UCLA professor, calls it "systematic stereotyping."
Political jargon, of course, is nothing new in the United States. It has always been essentially the systematic application to politics of public relations/advertising methods, however they were understood in whatever era. One major purpose has always been to identify the good guys (you) and the bad ones (everyone else). Washington lingo abounds with quaint, old expressions for different Congressional cliques and interest groups. In more recent dialogue, the left has contributed its buzzword transforms of "fascist" and "warmonger," while the right has given us all their all-purpose straw man, the "liberal."
The use of jargon became a standard rhetorical procedure after World War II, with the rise of the academically rigorous, social-scientific, public relations and campaign management industries. Both of these encouraged and refined a writing and speaking style long on psychologically calculated buzzwords and mediagenic catch phrases, and very short on facts. We've seen the subsequent dumbing-down effect on politics, which came out of World War II as a relatively intelligent affair. A succession of presidents, and their spin-meisters, rather systematically convinced a lot of people that complex ideas were inferior to simple ones (1960s), that complex ideas did not exist (1980s), and that even simple ideas were dangerous and probably shouldn't exist either (post-S11).
But neo-con jargon is way stronger, and more pervasive, than any capital-pundit media crud. Like the Washington obfuscation, it's been created largely by campaign offices, hired PR guns, and expensive think tanks. Unlike this stuff, though, it's gone viral, taking on a life of its own, growing and evolving and becoming more potent as it rips through the culture. Ever since, American politics have had a disease.
While this jargon did not actually create the 1990s belief system variously called "Angry White Males" and "Dittoheads," it does explain the system's wildfire spread through the more conservative populations of the United States. What first looked like a mostly spontaneous reaction to bad government and mass media "spin" has turned out to be anything but. It was the systematic adoption of a jargon created, often quite cynically, by personalities in these media.
Even so, neo-con jargon successfully dodged the light until it thickened some already toxic clouds gathering around the 2000 election. As people from both sides took to the Internet in support of their candidates, and as the "flames" flew ever thicker, several perceptive writers simultaneously noticed a pattern. Sharing and comparing this voluminous "hate mail" quickly revealed its disturbing use of the same words, in the same order, again and again, in widely separate rantings from people who showed no sign of having collaborated to "get their stories straight."
This was obviously no attack campaign. It was way more interesting than that. The mail was deconstructed, picked apart, tweaked, and generally subjected to all the tools of post-modern analysis, until all its conceptual girders and beams showed. What was left was clear. It was the jargon, a system of new meanings for old words, an appropriation of language itself by a group seeking to organize reality along its terms.
Neo-conservative jargon is therefore an attack on English itself. It's perpetrated by the lazy, the evil, the ambitious, the scared, and anyone else seeking to stop political dialogues with a minimum of real, intellectual effort. It is the application of the slippery linguistics of advertising and spin doctoring to politics, usually by converts who are not even aware of the process. It's dishonest, it's destabilizing, and it's a danger to national security (to use some more recent jargon). It's bad.
Why the Jargon Works
Neo-con jargon draws heavily on hot-button pushing, strawman bashing, fact omission, context shifts, and the Big Lie technique of propaganda. It starts with the classification of all the world's humans into groups, and the stereotyping of these groups. Take someone with whom you disagree. Find others who resemble them. If you can't find any, make them up. Identify the most grotesque character traits from one or two of of this group's more repellent, and well-publicized people. Failing such a ready-made strawman, just build one out of composites from folk history and old TV. Failing that, just make something up. Apply this resulting cartoon to the whole group. Use rhetoric or smear to put the targeted person into the group, demonize all its members, and neutralize the person by association.
Repeat the process every time you need to silence someone. Stereotype everyone in the world. Stereotype yourself, wrap your body in glittering generalities, by appropriating and re-contextualizing all the old symbols - flag, country, mom, truth, beauty, good coffee.
KEEP AT IT. This is the most important part. Keep clubbing everyone else with these facile stereotypes, until more complex ideas drop from sheer attrition. As the buzz increases, take over talk media by guaranteeing them a large, vocal, lucrative audience of similarly clued-in jargoneers. This, too, is essential. It gives the electronic soap box needed to keep putting out the lie, 24/7/52, until it replaces everything else. In many parts of the United States, it has done just that.
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What the Jargon Has Done, and Still Does
Neo-Con jargon is currently so common and easy that most practitioners do not even know they're doing it. It has armed one side of the American political debate with a nuclear missile that can instantly marginalize any political foe, anywhere, in a few easy sentences. It's almost a do-it-yourself character assassination kit. Pick your target, construct your straw man, omit a fact or two, and let the stereotypes fly.
As we know, the worst semiotic damage has been inflicted on everyone's favorite whipping boy, that poor, much-maligned "liberal." The all-purpose "Red" has been replaced by the all-purpose "liberal," and pretty much without dispute from liberals themselves. In fact, it's almost black-comedic watching liberals buy into the smear, further discrediting their cause by crudely, and transparently, trying to rename it.
Another real good example, seen on all the world's op-ed pages whenever a war brews, is an evil demon called the "peacenik" (figure 1). This comical stereotype, taken from bad 70s TV and half-remembered editorial cartoons, is trotted out whenever millions of extremely diverse people need to be turned overnight into fat, balding, neo-commie time-warps with beads and peace symbol earrings. And why not? It works. It works a lot better than the former accusations of treason. It never fails to delete from the mass consciousness just about every person who would dare to get in the way of good, old-fashioned, conservative, mass hysteria.
The Middle Ages, as we know, had a similar type of social fear sink. They called them witches. Many were burned. In this more enlightened age, we do not have to burn our liberals and peaceniks. The jargon has already done that for us.
Like any jargon, neo-con-speak works best when it's being sprung on the unsuspecting. Most other jargon systems read to the unitiated as gobbledygook, but neo-con jargon has the advantage of still sounding more or less like standard political discourse. The outsider is fine until trapped into attempting a rational dialogue, at which point it becomes only too clear that some very old words have very new meanings.
Talk shows, as we've seen, would go to dead air without the jargon. It gives their hosts absolute power to stop any discussion stone cold dead, while avoiding the cutoff button and its unseemly appearance of censorship. Woe betide the poor guest that tries to use dictionary definitions of such words as "humanist," "freedom," or "patriotism." Typically, they end up feeling as if they have been in a foreign country, or in a shredder.
Why the Jargon Is So Dangerous
The chief social danger of neo-con jargon, or any political jargon for that matter, is that it does people's thinking for them. Like all effective propaganda, it's predigested. It's also a form of intellectual inert gas, since it's guaranteed to expand along all lines of least resistance, until it fills entire spaces and pushes everything else out. It seeps into the common wisdom. It passes for fact. Don't take your valuable time listening and thinking. Get all the information you need about a person in mere seconds, from their appearance, accent, or affiliation. Who needs facts?
In its deification of laziness, neo-con jargon severely threatens the integrity of the English language. When the afflicted see how easy politics really are, they tend to apply the same principles to other parts of life. Ultimately, such people become stripped of any capability for analytical thought. Throw mass media into the loop, and get just what we see: a political debate stopped dead in the water, bobbing sickeningly, drifting from one overpublicized flap to the next.
We've seen, then, that neo-con jargon is not so much Orwellian, denying people the means to express complex ideas, as it is Reaganistic, simply rendering complex ideas unnecessary. We have created a semantic parasite, a facile memetic fog, a do-it-yourself marginalization kit, a by-the-numbers obfuscation tool, which allows anyone with even a mediocre command of the language to dangerously and wretchedly oversimplify everything in sight. This is not what democracy looks like.
The aforementioned Phil Agre has written extensively on the jargon. He's against it. He sees a slippery slope here, an unredeemable semiotic quagmire that, once entered, can have no survivors. In fact, he despairs of any future for information exchange itself, unless neo-con jargon is again and again dragged out into the sunlight of analysis, deconstructed, and shown for what it is. And what it is, at its dishonest core, is plain old BS - bull-pucky, field cakes, steamers, turd pies, organic fertilizers, the crock - just another load of that well-known article.
This appropriately taurine metaphor suggests what is probably the only working countermeasure against neo-con jargon. Like all BS, it dries up and blows away if it's in the sun too long. Carefully cited reality, and a renewed committment to rational exchange of information with carefully defined terms, can restore the proper functioning of many brains. Many others, of course, are most likely damaged beyond repair. But we can try.
We have to.
Phil Agre's Jargon Watch writings:
From Red Rock Eater News, mostly around the 2000 election. Phil has dealt extensively with issues regarding neo-conservative jargon and how it blocks the free flow of ideas. He also attributes much of the chaos around the election to the jargon's clogging of the media.
The New Science of Character
Assassination
How the jargon was used to capture the media, make the campaign
always about Gore, and ultimately cost him the election. (Oh,
wait; he won. I always forget that. :-) )
Who Invented "Invented?"
How Gore's "I invented the Internet" urban legend was
spun and massaged by jargoneers.
The Role of Projection
in Politics
Agre picks apart his many protest letters, both for use of the
jargon and for the effects of the Internet on information flow,
or lack thereof.
The New Jargon
Agre's milestone essay, reprinted all over the Internet, about
the "cult" of "antirational jargon," as illustrated
(again) by the analysis of examples in his "hate" mail.
Understanding Jargon: A Short Bibliography
Short by Ph.D. standards, but pretty comprehensive for the rest
of us
Updated periodically
Other Writers:
Spinsanity.org
Amazing site that systematically debunks political hooey, one
example at a time.
Ann Coulter: The Jargon
Vanguard
Passionate essay on the jargon, and Coulter's contributions to
it. (Coulter, remember, is the neo-con columnist even National
Review couldn't stomach, after she wrote post-Sept 11 that
the Middle East should be conquered and "Christianized.")
Jargon 101: Pardons and
Punditry
Use of the jargon by the anti-Clinton industry.
ABM
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