The Language of Power

George Carlin at the National Press Club, May 19, 1999. Full version available here.

Perhaps the most direct academic and literal connection to Orwell’s thesis in Politics and the English Language is George Carlin’s Brain Droppings. While Carlin’s tone dances between amusement and sarcasm, his point is perfectly clear: that the impulse to “euphemize,” as he called it — what Orwell referred to as “the ready-made phrases” that “come crowding in” and replace critical thinking with prepackaged ideas — has profound effects on our politics: on both the conceptual and practical aspects of seeking justice. The vague jargon of political discourse accommodates a “reduced state of consciousness,” Orwell argues, “if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.” It is this manufactured emotional identity, the authors argue, that keeps people from identifying truths and solving problems. Carlin’s most potent example is of the changing linguistic constructs for what we now call PTSD — first from shell shock to battle fatigue, then operational exhaustion to post-traumatic stress disorder — and now, just as the acronym ptsd. Each iteration, coined not by the sufferers, but the institution of the military, drifts further from clarity, further from the “mental image” of human suffering. Carlin put it this way in summation: “I bet if we still called it shell shock, some of those veterans would have gotten the help they needed.”

In the drone warfare program under Obama, the President claimed as recently as last summer that civilians casualties were as low as 2.5–4.5%, while nearly 95% of those targets neutralized (murdered, illegally) were enemy combatants. This is an impressive statistic — and the agencies are aware of this — it is the primary metric through which they make the case for the drone program as the legitimate future of American military power, following the fact that US service members are in no real danger. The figures were immediately disputed and perceived as an almost insulting low-ball estimate. These are the kinds of numbers non-democratic states offer as evidence of their success, and it was made possible only through the opacity of political diction — in producing these numbers the Obama Administration defined “any military-age male killed in a drone strike as a militant” regardless of their identity. In other words, if you are killed by the United States in a drone attack and you are a male and could feasibly carry a rifle, that makes you a terrorist. The fact of your targeting and death is evidence enough. The victim’s innocence in this case can only be proven posthumously through extensive documented evidence of identity and personal history, a threshold unnecessary in the process of identifying the target as a militant in the first place. A student of literary history would struggle deciding whether this was more Orwellian or Kafka-esque. The divorcing of events from language has enabled the perception of the Obama administration as peacemakers, despite the deep breaches of international law.

“Democracy” and the End of Meaning

Though the rise of Trump has brought on a torrent of lament about the end of democracy, any sincere assessment of regressing democratic states must confront the realities of power — the wealthy elite have always had representation in the form of one party or another. The difference today is that the supposed party of the people has been populated with technocrats, political elites and agnostic professionals who have little idea how to defend democracy in word or action.

Within the study of democratic states, students quickly learn that democracy is not a binary switch between non-democratic or democratic; rather, it operates on a spectrum — generally articulated in four different categories: illiberal democracy, procedural, liberal, and substantive. The contrast between these iterations of democracy are not necessarily a difference in kind, but in degree. Illiberal democracies may have regular elections and universal suffrage, but lack protections for individual civil liberties expected of democratic states. These might include nations like China and Iran, where regularly scheduled votes are participated in by tens of millions, but no real diversity is available among the options and due process is considered a luxury.

Procedural democracies, on the other hand, fetishize the process, and are overly reliant on rules, dates and events to define democracy. While the logistics of democracy are integral, the reality is that process is simply a method for achieving democracy, not democracy itself. Procedural democracies are a bit trickier to define — but the United States is probably the most notable case. A perfect example of this is the electoral college, which for the second time in 16 years has elected a President who the majority of the nation voted against. But we respect this outcome — why? Because of the process, the history, the glory of the founders and their legally enshrined wisdom. It suddenly becomes secondary that the purpose of voting in a democracy is about counting who has more votes, not whether they live on one side or another of an arbitrary border between rural Iowa and rural Illinois, neither of which truly existed when those founder put quill to parchment. The scholar and diplomat Richard Falk, has written beautifully on the subject of America’s obsession with procedural democracy and the challenges that represents to real, substantive democracy. More recently, Fareed Zakaria has gone one step further in describing the regression of American democracy as illiberal in its very nature.

Liberal and substantive democracies, alternatively, are what we might very reasonably consider real democracies — those that are concerned with the equitable political power of citizens, guaranteeing liberties and rights, and producing governments and legislation representative of the people’s will. The technocratic academic jargon we have just examined does democracy a major disservice here, much to the point of Politics and the English Language.

“In the case of a word like democracy,” Orwell wrote, “not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.”

To label states without protections against government overreach, individual liberties or minority rights democracies of any sort is an exercise is ridding language of its meaning while giving it the emotional veneer of public consent. “It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear” — the very practice Orwell warned vehemently against is the contemporary basis of American political discourse.