Cato's Tim Lynch on Doublespeak

DOUBLESPEAK. I just read Tim Lynch's paper, published by the Cato Institute, in which he takes on the doublespeak of the current administration. Anything at all that is designed to unsnarl official language is welcome, of course, but Lynch's paper seems rather superficial given the dimensions of the assault on language initiated by the conservative movement in the U.S. Perhaps it would be more accurate to talk about the arch-conservative movement. No one would accuse a president like Nixon of being anything other than a conservative, and there are certainly members of the Democratic Party who deserve the label, but the real abuse of language seems to have begun in the Reagan administration. It was during the Reagan years that the then still forming neo-conservative cabal began to take control of the language. My favorite at the time was the use of "right wing" and "conservative" to describe those in the still extant Soviet Union who were on the side of maintaining the Soviet system. Thus, it was bad to be a conservative or a right-winger if you lived in the USSR but a very good thing here. This particular example is a good one, I believe, because it has all the trappings of the genre that now threatens to debase political discourse entirely. What is at work is a kind of psychological warfare designed not merely to confuse the unitiated, but to annoy one's intellectual counterparts on the other side. It is a phenomenon familiar in sports where part of the game is "psyching" your opponent, "throwing him off his game." The visual counterpart that best expresses this in political terms is probably Nixon throwing his arms in the air and throwing off two "Vs" or victory signs with his fingers. "They hate it when I do this..." he was once heard to say. The whole purpose of co-optation, of course, is to neutralize an opponent. The latter day use of "red" and "blue" states provides an example of how the right in the U.S. uses every opportunity to co-opt. There was a time not so long ago when labelling a state a red state would have implied that it was left wing, even pro-communist or pro-socialist. The Republicans have now grabbed the red flag.