Why Democrats and Republicans Literally Speak Different Languages
But the two major parties are now divided by a common language: Democrats discuss “comprehensive health reform,” “estate taxes,” “undocumented workers,” and “tax breaks for the wealthy,” while Republicans insist on a “Washington takeover of health care,” “death taxes,” “illegal aliens,” and “tax reform.” When did the two major political parties create their own vocabularies?
.. Around 1990.
.. Americans have for decades signaled their political clique with specific terms—as when Southerners refer to the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression,” or Northerners call it the “Great Rebellion.” What is different today, the researchers said, is “the magnitude of the differences, the deliberate strategic choices that seem to underlie them, and the expanding role of consultants, focus groups, and polls” to entrench two separate political lexicons within the same polity.
.. For roughly 120 years, the probability of correctly guessing a speaker’s party by listening to a one-minute speech was about 52 to 55 percent, nearly random. But suddenly, in the early 1990s, rhetorical partisanship exploded.
.. “The 1994 inflection point in our series coincides precisely with the Republican takeover of Congress led by Newt Gingrich” and his Contract With America, they find.
.. In The C-SPAN Revolution, Stephen Frantzich and John Sullivan quote Newt Gingrich as saying he would have never been the Republican leader without C-SPAN. Fox News launched in 1996, and its success covering the conservative movement encouraged MSNBC to shift more and more leftward over the next decade, until finally there were two clear channels for partisan messaging.
.. Coming up with a catchy name for the Iraq War doesn’t change a single substantive fact about its outcome. Despite what you’ve heard, harping on the words “radical,” “Islamic,” and “terrorism” is not a foreign policy. It is the reduction of a complex international crisis into a diction contest.
When politics devolves into a war over word choice, it is probably a sign that all hope for a more substantive debate has already been lost.