Don’t want our public discourse dominated by the right wing? Then don’t use their language

Back dur­ing the Bush error, when the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute was found­ed, lead­ing experts in lin­guis­tics and and cog­ni­tive sci­ence (like Dr. George Lakoff) began an effort to teach pro­gres­sive activists and elect­ed offi­cials how to reframe and reclaim our pub­lic dis­course from right wing demagoguery.

That work con­tin­ues today and has tak­en on a new impor­tance in the wake of Don­ald Trump’s Elec­toral Col­lege vic­to­ry, which has put the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca on a path to becom­ing a full fledged klep­toc­ra­cy and kak­istoc­ra­cy (a state or soci­ety gov­erned by its least suit­able or com­pe­tent citizens).

“Fram­ing is about reclaim­ing our pow­er to decide what’s impor­tant,” George Lakoff explained in a Jan­u­ary 2018 post. “Fram­ing is about mak­ing sure we set the terms of the debate, using our lan­guage and our ideas. Con­ser­v­a­tives have beat­en pro­gres­sives at this for decades. It’s time for a change.”

What the right wing has long under­stood is that words mat­ter. Right wing intel­lec­tu­als and media per­son­al­i­ties know that words mean things.

So the right wing has empha­sized fram­ing and mes­sage dis­ci­pline to a huge degree. The rea­son right wing pun­dits on cable tele­vi­sion so often sound coor­di­nat­ed is because they are. They’re all work­ing to pro­mote right wing ideas and keep them at the fore­front of Amer­i­ca’s pub­lic discourse.

Every time pro­gres­sives use the right wing’s lan­guage to talk about the issues, we’re help­ing them pro­mote their ideas, whether we intend to or not. Even negat­ing a frame rein­forces that frame. That’s the first les­son of Lakof­f’s clas­sic Don’t Think Of An Ele­phant, which every pro­gres­sive activist should read.

In the open­ing pages of Don’t Think Of An Ele­phant, Lakoff explains that when he com­mands his stu­dents not to think of an ele­phant, that’s just what they do. They can’t help it. They pic­ture an ani­mal with a large trunk, tusks, and flop­py ears. And that’s because, again, negat­ing a frame rein­forces that frame.

The right wing knows that if they can get the lan­guage con­nect­ed to their ideas into wide­spread usage by the mass media and even their oppo­si­tion, they’ll be able to dom­i­nate our pub­lic dis­course. So they work very hard at doing just that. It’s why they invest­ed so much ener­gy into com­ing up with an epi­thet for the Patient Pro­tec­tion and Afford­able Care Act. Their goal was to make that epi­thet more ubiq­ui­tous than the offi­cial name giv­en to the law passed by Congress.

Word choice is thus of the utmost impor­tance. Words are like flags: Write or utter the wrong word, and you’ve just hoist­ed a flag for the oth­er side.

Word choice is incred­i­bly impor­tant. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, not every­one gets this, which is why from time to time you’ll hear the ridicu­lous put down That’s just seman­tics.

“Seman­tics are about mean­ing, and mean­ing is with­out ques­tion the sin­gle most impor­tant thing in any com­mu­ni­ca­tion. If mean­ing has no mean­ing, then peo­ple are just mak­ing ran­dom nois­es,” notes author Tom Chris­tiansen. “So seman­tics is not a mat­ter of no import as they would have you believe, but indeed the one sin­gle mat­ter that is of unde­ni­ably para­mount impor­tance.”

Unless we reframe, we will end up talk­ing about the right wing’s ideas by default. We need to be mind­ful of our own word choice and call out the mass media when they use loaded lan­guage in sup­pos­ed­ly objec­tive news coverage.

That’s exact­ly what a coali­tion of orga­ni­za­tions com­mit­ted to wom­en’s rights and repro­duc­tive jus­tice did this week when they demand­ed that the BBC stop using the phrase “heart­beat bill” to describe leg­is­la­tion passed by right wing dom­i­nat­ed state leg­is­la­tures to deny women the free­dom to decide to end a pregnancy.

“As an inter­na­tion­al broad­cast­er with a glob­al week­ly reach in 2018 of 376 mil­lion peo­ple, [the BBC] … has a duty to avoid being com­plic­it, how­ev­er unknow­ing­ly, in the aggres­sive cam­paign by anti-abor­tion extrem­ists world­wide attempt­ing to rob women of their rights and care,” wrote rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Marie Stopes Inter­na­tion­al, the Planned Par­ent­hood Fed­er­a­tion of Amer­i­ca and the Inter­na­tion­al Fed­er­a­tion of Gynae­col­o­gy and Obstetrics.

The BBC’s news direc­tor Fran Unsworth dis­mis­sive­ly respond­ed: “We would not aim to adopt it as our own descrip­tion of the leg­is­la­tion… I do not think our report­ing can avoid the fact that the phrase is now in com­mon usage.”

That’s the kind of response that makes a right wing intel­lec­tu­al smile.

Oper­a­tives work­ing at right wing think tanks know they’ve suc­ceed­ed in influ­enc­ing (if not dom­i­nat­ing) pub­lic dis­course when some­one in Unsworth’s posi­tion decides that lan­guage con­nect­ed to their ideas should con­tin­ue to be used in copy sim­ply because it is “now in com­mon usage.”

Unsworth’s ratio­nale for reject­ing this rea­son­able request is nonsensical.

Pro­fan­i­ties and racial slurs are also in “com­mon usage”, but you gen­er­al­ly won’t see such words in the BBC’s copy because the use of such lan­guage by a news orga­ni­za­tion com­mit­ted to neu­tral and objec­tive report­ing is unacceptable.

“This phrase was cho­sen very care­ful­ly by peo­ple who want to end access to legal abor­tion to insert dan­ger­ous­ly emo­tive lan­guage into the com­mon ver­nac­u­lar,” IPPF’s Dr. Alvaro Berme­jo not­ed in response to Unsworth’s com­ments. “The right thing to do is to stop using it. We call on the BBC to think again.”

Berme­jo’s response is spot on. This is exact­ly how a pro­gres­sive activist or elect­ed offi­cial ought to respond when get­ting push­back from an insti­tu­tion like the BBC that is resist­ing aban­don­ing the use of loaded language.

We may not be able to con­trol what the mass media says or uses in their copy, but we can con­trol what we say. We can mod­el the behav­ior we want to see, and we can be per­sis­tent in call­ing on news orga­ni­za­tions that claim to be com­mit­ted to objec­tiv­i­ty to live by that val­ue and avoid loaded language.