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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Words Linguistics
professor Geoffrey Nunberg presents a diagnosis and
prescription for liberalism in his new book, Talking
Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising,
Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading,
Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show. This book may have
the finest subtitle I’ve seen in years. Nunberg
shows how Democrats and liberals have lost the battle of words in conveying
what they stand for in ways that resonate with voters. He clearly documents
how the Republicans and conservatives have done an outstanding job in
choosing words and phrases that work. While Nunberg
identifies the problem and diagnoses it, his prescription provides less than
a clear road map for a cure. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter
5, “The Volvo Dodge,” pp. 63-66: He’s
silent majority. . . but he keeps making
noise. —John Updike, Rabbit Redux, 1971 From a
linguistic point of view, branding is simply the process that turns the
associations or overtones of a word into part of its meaning. That’s what
marketers and advertisers are paid to accomplish, but it can happen without
their efforts, in either a positive or negative way. Rolls-Royce comes to
stand in for opulent luxury; the DeLorean becomes
a synonym for a commercial flop; the favorite prefix of McDonald’s becomes a
sign of cheapness in words like McMansion and McJobs. With
political labels, branding involves coloring the purely descriptive meaning
of a label with the stereotypical traits of the people who wear it. In
extreme cases, the original meaning of the term may be obscured as its
connotations are made the basis for a new meaning. That can happen to a label
anywhere on the political spectrum: over the years it has been the fate of
words like tory, bolshevik,
populist, and fascist. But the Democratic left has always been
susceptible to a particular kind of
stereotyping by its opponents. People don’t usually require a convoluted
story to explain the political views of bourgeois conservatives or
proletarian radicals. But it takes more ingenuity to discredit the motives of
people who don’t seem to be motivated by obvious self-interest. So
conservatives have always tried to dismiss those concerns as the signs of
baser motivations like social pretension, dilettantism, or effete
sentimentality. In one
form or another, that maneuver has been a staple of the pseudo-populism of
the American right since the 1840 “cider election.” The intellectually
challenged William Henry Harrison was an Ohioan from an aristocratic Virginia
background whom the Whigs successfully repackaged as a cider-sipping
frontiersman in the Jacksonian mode, sending him
out on the campaign trail in a wagon topped by a log cabin and attacking his
Democratic opponent Martin Van Buren as an effete Easterner who ate off gold
plates, put cologne on his whiskers, and was “laced up in corsets such as
women in town wear”—an effete snob avant Ia lettre. Attacks
like those have left their mark on the language in a long line of disparagements
for people who seem to subordinate their own class interests to the cause of
social justice. In the 1920s, a Wall
Street Journal editorial described supporters of the progressive Robert
La Follette as “visionaries, ne’er do wells, parlor
pinks, reds, hyphenates [foreign-born Americans], soft handed
agriculturalists and working men who have never seen a shovel.” Parlor pink was a particularly deft
touch, which managed to convey bourgeois affectation, ideological timidity,
and effeminacy at the same time. (Time magazine
coined the variant pinko in 1926.) A few decades later, the
acerbic right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler contributed
the adjective bleeding-heart, a
durable phrase that reduces all altruism to girlish sentimentality. And in the
1950s, egghead evoked Adlai
Stevenson’s minimalist tonsure by way of adding an anti-intellectual note to
the mix. (It was around then that William E Buckley famously quipped that he
would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Most of
those disparagements echoed antique class resentments—as the conservative
writer Peter Viereck put it, they were allegations
that had been “made for centuries by pseudo-wholesome, ‘pious’ peasants
against ‘effete’ noblemen.” Until recent times, the right dismissed liberals
as an influential but relatively small group of intellectuals, bohemians, and
bourgeois fellow-travelers who were motivated by infantile rebelliousness or
misplaced sympathy for the downtrodden. But in the late 1960s, the tenor of antiliberal rhetoric began to change. Now the right cast
the net much more widely, to include a wide swath of middle-class American
society that was defined more by its tastes than its political convictions. The moment
was propitious for that shift. The Nixon years may have been a troubled time
politically, but they were also the high-water moment of postwar prosperity.
Wages hadn’t yet begun to stagnate, inflation was at reasonable levels, and
consumer goods were becoming ever more accessible. To many, it looked as if There were echoes of that
new language in the way people were characterizing the newly discovered
“Middle Americans” in terms of their cultural tastes and consumer
preferences. Kevin Phillips described the group in his influential 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority as
“the great, ordinary, Lawrence Welkish mass of
Americans from * “Head
for the heart of Emeryville’s manufacturing district, specifically, Semifreddi’s Bakery, where you can lunch blue-collar
style on upscale sandwiches, salads, focaccia and
soups (tomato rice with Swiss chard and lots of freshly shaved Parmesan the
other day) in a warehouse-type setting.” (San
Francisco Chronicle, December 4, 1991). Anyone who cares about politics will
enjoy reading Talking
Right. Steve Hopkins,
March 23, 2007 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the April 2007
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Talking
Right.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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