'Talking Right,' by Geoffrey Nunberg

They Write the Songs

Review by STANLEY FISH

In some quarters repairing the Democratic Party has taken the place of baseball as the national pastime. All you need to play is, first, an analysis of what the Democrats are doing wrong (which is usually an analysis of what the Republicans are doing right) and, second, a strategy for regaining the political advantage. Most of those who enter this sweepstakes are (relatively) strong on the diagnosis part and woefully weak on the remedy part. Geoffrey Nunberg's "Talking Right" is no exception.

Nunberg's thesis is that if you want to get people to do certain things — vote for your candidates, support your policies — you must first get them "to talk in certain ways." Capture the field of language and the political field will be yours because the words everyone responds to will have the meanings you have conferred on them. Over the past quarter-century, Nunberg says, the Republicans have been so good at this that even those on the left "can't help using language that embodies the worldview of the right." So, for example, if the word "values" turns up in a political conversation, it will be understood without reflection to refer to a specific set of stances — pro-family, pro-American, pro-merit, pro-religion, anti-special-interests, anti-quotas, anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage, anti-assisted-suicide.

Of course these are not the only values, and Democrats are free to argue for an alternative set, but if the contest is between those whose values come to mind immediately with the very mention of the word and those whose values have to be explained —"I'm not against traditional marriage, I'm just for anti-discrimination" — the game is over before it begins. "The left has lost the battle for the language itself," Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, declares at the outset. "The challenge facing liberals and Democrats is to recapture that ordinary language." That, he announces, is "what this book is about."

Actually, no. What this book is really about is the rueful admiration Nunberg feels for the ability of the political right to appropriate what he (following Richard Rorty) calls the "final vocabulary" of American politics. A succession of lively chapters explains how the Republicans turned "government into a term of abuse"; torpedoed affirmative action by introducing and promoting reverse discrimination; made "liberal" into a word of accusation; redefined the middle class so it encompassed everyone from the proprietor of a corner grocery to the president of the United States (all standing in alliance against the effete mob of latte-drinking, Volvo-driving Eastern seaboard snobs); invented a cultural divide that masks the economic divide between the haves and have-nots; narrowed Franklin Roosevelt's four freedoms into the freedom of corporations to do what they like; drove a wedge between "patriotic" and "liberal," so that one cannot be said to be both; and, in general, "radically reconfigured the political landscape" in ways that even liberals themselves accede to because the right's language is now the default language for everyone.

On the way to proposing a counterstrategy (it never really arrives), Nunberg pauses to engage in a polite disagreement with his fellow linguist George Lakoff, who has provided a rival account of the conservative ascendancy. Lakoff argues that Republicans have articulated — first for themselves and then for others — a conceptual framework that allows them to unite apparently disparate issues in a single coherent worldview. "As Lakoff tells it," Nunberg writes, "the same principles that lead you to favor the flat tax would lead you to oppose abortion and favor abstinence-only programs." But there is a simpler answer to the question of what connections link conservative social and economic views, Nunberg says: "There aren't any." In place of a conceptual unity, there is only a rhetorical unity (Nunberg doesn't use the word, but the entire history of rhetoric from Quintilian to Kenneth Burke stands behind him), a "hodgepodge of conflicting metaphors, symbols and rules of thumb . . . self-interest and moral principles in different proportions," all woven together not in a philosophically consistent framework but in a narrative "that creates an illusion of coherence."

Once again, the Republicans have such a narrative — "declining patriotism and moral standards, the out-of-touch media and the self-righteous liberal elite . . . minorities demanding special privileges . . . disrespect for religious faith, a swollen government" — but "Democrats and liberals have not offered compelling narratives that could compete" with it. Eighty pages later he is still saying the same thing. "The Democrats need a compelling narrative of their own." No doubt, but it is a need this book does not supply. What it does supply is the kind of debating point Nunberg correctly dismisses as ineffective. Democrats, he says, should shore up their position on religion not by arguing for secularism but by explaining that secular values protect freedom of religion by not allowing a particular sect to occupy the entire religious space. That's not a bad argument, and it's a familiar one in judicial debates about the First Amendment's religious clause, but it won't fly in the political arena, if only because, as Nunberg says of a feeble Democratic slogan, "you have to do a little mental stutter step" to understand it.

Nor will you get much political mileage by pointing out, as Nunberg does, that conservative pundits sometimes say journalists are inevitably subjective (when they complain that most mainstream reporters are liberals) while at other times they ridicule postmodernists and left-wing academics who question objectivity and absolute truth. Again, the observation is accurate, but it does no useful polemical work. Instead, it pays still another compliment to the ability of conservatives to play both sides of the discursive street whenever it is to their advantage.

So a book that promises to teach liberals how to defeat the political right ends up being a paean to its resourcefulness. Cheerleading may be the intention, but resignation, bordering on despair, is finally the effect. The message seems to be, these guys are just too good; there must be something we can do. But all Nunberg can think to do is claim for the left an advantage that is irrelevant to his book's project: "Liberals have a linguistic advantage of their own, in the form of truth." That is to say (and he says it), the right's success is built on a structure of "distortions." "We" are truth tellers; "they" are political liars.

This notion is particularly odd given an earlier section of the book in which Nunberg does a nice critical number on what is surely the most overrated essay in the modern canon, George Orwell's turgid, self-righteous and philosophically hopeless "Politics and the English Language." Commenting on Orwell's distinction between words politically inflected and words that plainly name things, Nunberg points out that plain language is as political as any other and will probably be all the more effective because it "seems to correspond to concrete perception." The point, as he has been saying all along, is not to strip all of the political overlay from your language but to make the language that carries your political message the lingua franca of the public sphere.

This is not to disdain the truth; in the final analysis the question of what is true and false is paramount. But Nunberg isn't offering a final analysis here, only a rhetorical and political analysis. His claim that he is allied with the truth against the forces of conservative darkness may be endearing, but it is utterly unhelpful.

From the Times Book Review.

Part of the tragedy of the triumph of the radical Right, the crypto-fascists, is that they are generally wrong about everything past a few very basic points. That's why Iraq has been a screw-up in every way possible for one example.

It's more tragic because the majority of the people really agree with the crypto-fascists. The American-haters running our country have persuaded the people to vote for stuff antithetical to them by the use of words, by selling gold-plated $#!t.

Which is the ultimate lameness and irrelevance of the Dems: They don't know how to speak to the people and they are learning how to do it or the need to do it. No way can they win except in fluke circumstances where the Republicans lose the races for themselves.