Why Definitions Matter

You may have noticed that we Americans have trouble communicating. We may–or may not– talk to each other, but talking is not the same thing as communicating.

One of the reasons we are so polarized is that we not only occupy different realities, we use the same words to describe very different things.

I’ve previously pointed out that “conservative” does not accurately describe a radical MAGA movement filled with White “Christian” Nationalists. Labeling every social program, no matter how modest, as “socialist” confuses modern mixed economies with soviet-style, authoritarian regimes. But the problem goes beyond propaganda and intentional misdirection, because we can’t solve our problems if we can’t describe those problems accurately.

In an article awhile back Vox illustrated that problem. The first paragraph was eye-opening:

A person who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can’t find one — is unemployed. If you accept that definition, the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is a stunning 26.1%, according to an important new dataset shared exclusively with “Axios on HBO.”

The article then noted that the official unemployment rate excludes people who might be earning only a few dollars a week, along with people who have stopped looking for work for whatever reason–perhaps a lack of available jobs or child care. The definition of “unemployed” that we use affects our evaluation of the severity of the problem. As the 2020 article pointed out, that year, if we had identified as unemployed anyone over 16 years old who wasn’t earning a living wage, the overall rate would have been 54.6%. For Black Americans, it would have been 59.2%.

The Axios article gave the backstory of our current measurement metric:

The official definition of unemployment can be traced back to the 1870s, when a Massachusetts statistician named Carroll Wright diagnosed what he referred to as “industrial hypochondria”.

By restricting the “unemployed” label to men who “really want employment,” Wright managed to minimize the unemployment figure.

Wright went on to found the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and he brought his unemployment definition with him.
To this day, to be officially counted as unemployed you need to be earning no money at all, and you need to be actively looking for work.

More recently, Gene Ludwig, a former U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, founded the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity.  According to calculations by that institute, in January of 2020, when the official rate of unemployment was 3.6%, the true rate was seven times greater — 23.4%. Whether you agree with Ludwig that the higher number is the “true” unemployment rate is less significant than the fact that most Americans don’t understand what the official number measures.

What would be helpful–what would allow us to actually communicate about jobs and wages– would be a report that broke down the data into categories: these are people actively searching for jobs who don’t have one; these are people whose jobs don’t pay a living wage; etc. That sort of report would allow voters and policymakers to focus on the actual issues involved. As it is, a single number that excludes everyone who has any sort of employment–whether part-time or poorly paid–obscures reality.

We can’t fix a problem we can’t properly define.

Insufficient jobs and insufficient wages are two very different problems. The Biden administration has done an admirable job of creating new jobs, and various economic reports indicate that the administration has also presided over significant wage gains, but few of us have the time or ability to delve into the official data of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and to calculate what percentage of workers has escaped the “under-employed” category.

This problem of accurate–or at least agreed-upon–definition isn’t limited to employment figures. Some years ago, I was looking into arguments about the U.S. balance of trade, and realized that those official calculations only included tangible goods–not services or other intangibles. So if we were sending printed books (or cars or widgets) abroad, those got counted; but if Americans were selling publishing rights (or providing design services) to consumers in other countries, the value of those exports wasn’t included. (I don’t know whether that is still the case.)

What was that bible story about the Tower of Babel?

We live in a very complex society, and wide differences in culture, education and expertise add other complications to even the most sincere efforts at communication. But–assuming we elect people in November who are committed to running a functional government–we really need to look at the way official data is compiled and reported.

Using the same words to talk about the same things would be a start….

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Words and Meanings

Can we Americans talk to each other? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be no, and the intentional misuse of language is one reason we can’t.

I think it was GOP strategist Frank Luntz who first advised his party to obscure its goals by using phrases that softened/concealed meaning; he even wrote a book back in 2007 titled “Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear.” As Deborah Tannen pointed out in 2003 (link unavailable),

Take the repeal of the estate tax. An “estate” sounds like a large amount of money. Indeed, before President Bush persuaded Congress to legislate a phase out of the estate tax, only the largest 2 percent of estates were subject to this tax. But change the name to “death tax” and many more Americans become sympathetic to repeal. After all, everyone dies. Death is bad enough without being taxed.

How many would get all worked up about an exceedingly rare abortion procedure (that the Alan Guttmacher Institute estimated represents less than one-fifth of 1 percent of all abortions performed in the United States in 2000)? But attach the name “partial-birth abortion” and a second-trimester fetus becomes a half-born baby. 

Who among us wants to call ourselves anti-life? Win the name game and you’re more than halfway toward winning the battle. Win enough naming battles and you’re on your way to winning the war.

Since the demise of Roe v. Wade, we’ve all become familiar with arguments about what it means to be “pro life.” Nice human beings all want to be supportive of life, but Red state legislators are rather clearly unconcerned with the lives of rape victims or women with dangerous pregnancies; they are also unconcerned with the health and wellbeing of those babies they’ve “saved” once they’re born. (And how “pro life” is the GOP’s all-in support for gun “rights”? Is defense of permitless carry really consistent with calling oneself “pro life”?)

The use of language to mask what’s really going on is hardly limited to the abortion debate. Take the indiscriminate use of the word choice. Choice is a great term; it can be positive–as in citizens’ ability to choose a religion, a marriage partner, or whether to procreate (choices the GOP’s Christian Nationalists oppose), or it can be a word that masks less positive “choices”–destroying the public school system via “school choice,” or “choosing” not to open your place of business to Blacks or gays. 

That latter “choice” brings me to another highly contested term: religious liberty. Who isn’t for religious liberty–the right to believe or live as one’s conscience dictates?

What today’s MAGA GOP means by religious liberty, however, is their right to remake the law of land in order to privilege fundamentalist Christianity–to return women, gays, non-Whites and non-Christians to the subordinate status in American society that their religion dictates. Requiring obedience to civil rights laws violates that dominance. (Serving that slice of pizza to a gay person clearly imposes upon their religious liberty…) 

The publication of Project 2025 provides evidence that intentional misuse of language continues to shape far-Right discourse; for example, the effort to destroy the civil service is presented as a path toward “efficiency.” (In this case, that may even be a proper use of language–dictatorships are usually more efficient than messy democracies.)

Project 2025 is also strong on “family values”–another term favored by a political party that certainly doesn’t value “those” families. What Project 2025 calls “family values” are policies that discriminate against LGBTQ+ citizens and women, and emphasize the importance of traditional nuclear families.

There are other words that obscure rather than illuminate. A recent favorite is “weaponization”–an accusation hurled at government officials applying existing laws to Republicans. Another is actually a new word: “woke.” Woke-ism is basically a commitment to fundamental fairness for all American citizens, which raises the question why it produces so hysterical a negative response.

These newer terms join old favorites like “socialism”–the Rightwing’s preferred label for any social program. Social Security and Medicare were originally opposed (and still are) as “socialist.” (Again, as with “efficiency” the label isn’t incorrect–just pejorative. The U.S., like all modern societies, has a mixed economy, with a robust private sector protected by socialized efforts like police, fire protection, garbage collection and other collective services.)

I’m sure readers can come up with other examples. Disinformation would be impossible without the ability to disguise truth  by misusing and distorting language. I believe it was French diplomat Charles Maurice De Talleyrand who famously said that “God gave humans language so they could conceal their thoughts from one another.”

No wonder Americans are having difficulty communicating…. 

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Speech Versus Action

A recent report on an upcoming Supreme Court case from the New Republic made me think–definitely not for the first time–about the widespread misconceptions around the First Amendment.

Most of the people who read this blog are aware of many of those misconceptions. Probably the most annoying is the most basic–it constantly amazes me (okay, irritates the heck out of me) how many Americans don’t know that the First Amendment, like the rest of the  Bill of Rights, protects only against government action.

I still remember a call I got when I was with Indiana’s ACLU; the caller had applied for a position with White Castle, and had been told that his extensive tattoos were incompatible with their customer service standards. He demanded we sue White Castle for infringing his Free Speech rights. I had to explain that–had the City Council passed an ordinance against tattoos, that would have violated his First Amendment rights, but White Castle is private–and has its own First Amendment right to determine the manner of its own communication.

The case described in the linked article isn’t that clear-cut. It  involves an often-contested “gray area.”

The Supreme Court will hear Counterman v. Colorado in April to decide whether prosecutors must prove that a defendant meant to threaten someone with harm, or if they can opt for the lower threshold of whether a reasonable person might interpret a defendant’s actions or statements as a threat. Where the high court ultimately comes down on this distinction could be consequential in an age when it’s easier than ever for Americans to threaten not just each other, but also election workers, FBI agents, members of Congress, and even Supreme Court justices. How far does the First Amendment go to protect them?

In my classes, I took a rather unorthodox approach to this question, and a number of similar issues. While you won’t find my distinction in legal treatises, it seemed to help students understand the purpose–and limits– of the Free Speech clause. The fundamental distinction I drew was between speech (defined as communication of a message) and action.

The distinction doesn’t rely on whether there was verbal communication.

If I tell you that this cubic zirconium ring I’m selling is really a diamond, and charge you accordingly, I have engaged in fraud–a behavior. The First Amendment won’t protect me.

If I text and telephone you every hour and call you names, that’s harassment–a behavior. The First Amendment won’t protect me.

If I burn an American flag, I am sending a message (we know it’s a message, because  most Americans understand it and find it offensive). That message is protected by the First Amendment.

The problem for law enforcement arises when it is unclear whether we’re dealing with behavior–a genuine threat–or the expression of an opinion. (As lawyers like to say, it’s a “fact-sensitive” inquiry.) Social media trolling has vastly complicated this determination.

At the heart of this case is a campaign of harassment that seems all too familiar. The plaintiff, Billy Counterman, used multiple Facebook accounts to send hostile messages to an unidentified local musician in Colorado. Among the numerous messages that Counterman sent her were ones that read, especially in the context of the years-long barrage, as threats. “Fuck off permanently,” Counterman said in one of the messages. “You’re not being good for human relations,” read another. “Die. Don’t need you.” The target, who never responded to him and blocked him multiple times, ultimately contacted Colorado police, who charged Counterman for violating the state’s anti-stalking statutes.

Colorado law defines the offense to describe anyone who “repeatedly follows, approaches, contacts, places under surveillance, or makes any form of communication with another person … in a manner that would cause a reasonable person to suffer serious emotional distress and does cause that person … to suffer serious emotional distress.” Notably, under the rulings of Colorado courts, prosecutors aren’t required to prove that the defendant intended to threaten a person. They instead must only show that a reasonable person would have taken the statements as threats, which is a much easier threshold to clear at trial.

In the lower courts, the troll was handed a sentence of four years under the state’s anti-stalking statute.

This is one of those “hard cases” that –as the saying goes– sometimes make bad law. Four years seems pretty excessive for being an online asshole; on the other hand, such trolling far too frequently becomes a “heckler’s veto”-defined as behavior that allows  people who disagrees with a speaker’s message to shut that message down.

It remains to be seen how the Court will treat online harassment, but it sure seems like it falls on the “behavior” side of my explanatory line…..

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The First Corruption Is Language

Jeffrey Isaacs, a distinguished professor of political science at IU Bloomington, had a very thought-provoking essay in Common Dreams.It was evidently triggered by the issuance of a Chinese State Council position papers asserting that China is a “democracy that works.” The paper argued that the “Chinese model” is superior to the “Western model,”–that it is more efficient, promotes solidarity, and is not “an ornament to be used for decoration.”

As Isaacs notes

Most readers of the piece will rightly focus on the manifest hypocrisies of the Chinese power elite and its intellectual supporters who justify terrible violations of human rights.

But this rhetorical appeal by authoritarians to the values of “democracy” is nothing new. It has antecedents in the official rhetorics of Italian fascism, German Nazism, and Russian Communism—all of which claimed to represent a “higher form” of “folk democracy” or “proletarian democracy” or “people’s democracy.” In more recent times, Hugo Chavez presented himself as a proponent of an anti-imperialist “protagonistic democracy,” and Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary’s increasingly authoritarian regime, famously declared in 2014 that Hungary was an “illiberal democracy,” pointing to Singapore, China, India, Turkey, and Russia as his models. And we must not forget, of course, that Vladimir Putin long extolled his regime as a form of “sovereign democracy” that placed national traditions above global commitments and regarded “human rights” as a “Western” abstraction.

As Isaacs goes on to discuss, the Chinese claim to be a democracy is just the most recent iteration of a longtime debate over what the term means.  “Democracy,” as he reminds us,  is a “complex and essentially contested” concept, and arguments  over the connections between liberalism and democracy have been central to modern politics.

But we don’t need to look to mid-20th century totalitarianism, or current-day anti-liberal authoritarians in China or Russia or Hungary, to see versions of this contestation. For it is taking place before our very eyes in the U.S., in the form of a Republican party that is deliberately assaulting core norms and institutions of liberal democracy and doing it in the name of . . . democracy itself.

In the essay, Isaacs highlights a critical and too-often overlooked element of America’s current political impasse: the misuse–the intentional corruption–of language in service of propaganda and power.

He reminds us that GOP “leaders” from Tucker Carlson to Mike Pence have made it their business to commune with Viktor Orban, and that Republican efforts to “Orbanify” U.S. politics don’t just adopt Orban’s authoritarian legal tactics–they also mimic his rhetorical ones.

Isaacs is quite right that when Trump and his MAGA supporters pontificate about “democracy,” they mean something quite different from  American liberal democracy.

They mean the popular sovereignty of “true Americans.” They do not mean by this universal adult suffrage, they mean voting restrictions designed to limit the participation of “undesirable” and “un-American” people. They do not mean by this a system based on robust debate and free and fair party competition. They mean a system that opposes “fake news” and “liberal science,” that privileges their own media and their own academics and their own partisan advantage, and regards any alternatives as “enemies of the people.”

This essay–well worth clicking through and reading in its entirety–reminded me of the following exchange from Alice in Wonderland between Alice and Humpty-Dumpty:

When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less. ‘ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

Communication is difficult even when the participants to a conversation agree on the meanings of the words they are using. Tone, body language, professional and “hip” jargon can change the connotation of otherwise simple exchanges, even when no misdirection is intended. When language is is corrupted–when, in the words of Tallyrand, words are chosen “to conceal true thoughts”–we no longer have the critically-important ability to engage in productive conversation.

Language is what allowed humans to emerge from caves, to collaborate, to investigate, to create. It’s not only essential for intellectual and emotional expression, it’s the primary vehicle through which humans transmit culture, scientific knowledge and  world-views across generations, the way we link the past with the present.

When words no longer have objective content–when we lose the ability to understand what other people are really saying–the resulting chaos empowers the worst of us.

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Strategy And Language Matter

One of the more under-appreciated consequences of living in information “bubbles” is  lack of recognition of the realities of political communication. 

Because I write this blog, I routinely access messages from the left, right and (dwindling) center, and it has become obvious that Americans who reside in silos are simply unaware of what the people in other bubbles are hearing and thinking. They aren’t only “preaching to the choir”–they believe most of the church is singing their hymns. 

I will admit to a partial bias in that direction myself–as I read claims made by those promulgating the “Big Lie” or bizarre beliefs of QAnon adherents, I wonder how any sentient person could believe such nonsense. But then, I remind myself that an uncomfortable number of people do believe these things–and that the language we employ to communicate with their fellow-travelers matters.

In my own silo, too many people have forgotten that. Too many see arguments about strategy as lack of commitment to progressive goals. 

We saw this most recently with the disastrous “Defund the Police” slogan. No one I know disagreed with the goals of the “defund” movement, which were eminently reasonable. But people with even a moderate understanding of political strategy understood how easily that slogan could be weaponized against progressive candidates.  Purists defending the slogan by insisting that it “just needed to be explained” were incredibly naive.

If there is one thing Republicans do well, it’s demonizing and weaponizing progressive terminology. It began a long time ago, when the GOP managed to turn “liberal” into a swear word, or a synonym for communist. They have had somewhat less success with “socialist,” mostly because they accuse any government action–most recently, repairing infrastructure–as “socialism.” (Or in Marjorie Taylor Green’s case, as communism.)

That one talent–turning progressive words into weapons–can derail well-intentioned but clumsy efforts to avoid hurtful language. 

Michelle Goldberg recently wrote about one such effort to demonstrate “wokeness” via terminology.

If you follow debates over the strident style of social justice politics often derided as “wokeness,” you might have heard about a document called “Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts.” Put out by the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges Center for Health Justice, the guide is a long list of terms and phrases that some earnest people have decided others in the medical field should avoid using, along with their preferred substitutes.

Some of these substitutions make sense; health care professionals shouldn’t be referring to people who’ve been in prison as “ex-cons.” Some are a matter of keeping up with the times, like capitalizing Black when talking about Black people. Some, however, are obnoxious and presumptuous and would impede clear communication. For example, the guide suggests replacing “vulnerable” with “oppressed,” even though they’re not synonymous: it’s not oppression that makes the elderly vulnerable to Covid.

As Goldberg points out, “Advancing Health Equity” would probably be ignored, if it didn’t “inadvertently advance the right-wing narrative that progressive newspeak is colonizing every aspect of American life.” Parts of the “diversity, equity and inclusion” movement are admittedly heavy-handed and feckless, and the rest of us keep having to answer for them.

John McWhorter, recently made much the same point in a column about the use and misuse of the term woke. McWhorter traced the emergence of the term and its original utility–and the subsequent success of reactionaries and White Nationalists in weaponizing it.

“Woke” has also followed a trajectory similar to that of the phrase “politically correct,” which carried a similar meaning by the late 1980s and early 1990s: “Politically correct,” unsurprisingly, went from describing a way of seeing the world to describing the people who saw the world that way to describing the way other people felt about the people who saw the world that way. Some in the politically correct crowd on the left had a way of treating those outside it with a certain contempt. This led to the right refashioning “politically correct” as a term of derision, regularly indicated with the tart abbreviation “P.C.” The term faded over the years, and by 2015, when the presidential candidate Donald Trump was declaring that “political correctness is just absolutely killing us as a country,” “woke” already had greater currency.

There probably wasn’t much progressives could do about “woke,” which began as a useful descriptor. But as Goldberg points out, there is a lesson here, and activists who actually want to win elections need to learn it. Language matters–and reluctance to use terminology that is a gift to the GOP isn’t evidence of a lesser commitment to the cause.

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