openpolitics.com

Writing long articles always involves muscle strain, but the parturition of this piece (which ran in the summer of 2014) was excruciating, because the material seemed to lack any conceptual edges. The ferment had been billed in the press as a “culture war.” And yet the two sides of the conflict—in terms of beliefs, ideological lineage, and language—were almost entirely the same.

.. The trouble in San Francisco, I realized, wasn’t that the warring tribes followed different doctrines. It was that they followed the same doctrine, abstractly stated, but had less and less of a way to gather and work from the abstract into the specific. Everyone was operating as a good San Francisco liberal, struggling against the establishment, outside the system, for the people.

Ironically, this meant there was less and less system left, no common terms by which the whole community could move ahead. Public language, as I put it in the piece, was coming unmoored from public process. I wondered what the future would bring if the rhetoric of our best ideals kept moving in this direction—if people of a single political identity couldn’t agree on the real sense of the words that, they were certain, gave voice to their values.

.. public conversation has begun to seem performative, incapable of producing results.

.. Self-defining language has grown easy to pass around but hard to translate into social results. “Diversity,” we know, is crucial. Yet the word means disparate things to a housing activist, a tech executive, and an admissions dean, and they end up talking past one another.

.. our community is the people who appear to understand our language, more or less, the way we do.

.. The Trump campaign, since its inception, has traded in counterfactual hyperbole, praeteritio (“a lot of people say . . . I won’t say”), and dubious innuendo. But using words as if they have no definition marks a shift.

.. Trump does not demur when it’s suggested that abstract nouns such as “bigot” and “founder” have meanings he’s transgressed. (“He’s their Most Valuable Player,” Trump said, of Obama, by way of clarification, three days after his isisremarks. “He was the founder.”) Oddly, though, the outlandish words seem not to obscure his message. When he makes his isis-founder remark, there are immediate cheers.

.. When newscasters quote Trump’s statements back to his representatives, they reply, “That’s not what Mr. Trump is saying”; his words aren’t held to convey a fixed message.

.. To know what Trump means, despite the words that he is saying, you have to understand—or think you understand—the message before he opens his mouth. That way of interpreting language is unassailable because it allows no persuasion, only self-revelation: the words don’t convey information but, like candles and jasmine perfume, serve as aesthetic trappings, prompts that may lead listeners to locate certain passionate moods in themselves.

.. In a climate where common language is not held accountable to common meaning, “taking a stand” becomes a mostly theatrical exercise.

.. He can say anything these days—because the rest of us can, too.

.. It is hard to talk about politics and language without mentioning George Orwell.

.. His point was that, especially at such moments, imprecision and easy idiom in public language carry political stakes.

.. I’ve increasingly found myself a supporter of messy public process: the legislation pushed through government slowly, in curtailed form; the interminable, fruitless-seeming town-hall meeting; many of the government’s lumbering, error-prone efforts at regulation. These processes are cumbersome, often wasteful, and inevitably infuriating. But at their best they have the virtue of occurring in a common arena, the place where all parts of a population meet. They force us, if we hope to get anything done, to translate our values and thoughts into language that communicates broadly.