Politics and Political Language
Peter Schultz
- "'Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase...into the dustbin where it belongs'" (Elkins 431).
Politics and its language make lies seem truthful and murder respectable. So, politicians who are killing children and other civilians speak of “collateral damage,” as if that justifies the death, the incineration of the innocent for reasons, allegedly, of national security. It is interesting and not often enough commented upon that politics turns decent, law-abiding humans into killers, as in one case that I know of, turning a Boy Scout into a Vietnamese-killing Marine. It turns out that the “distance” that separates a Boy Scout from a killer is no further than a challenge to “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” Quite a few answered that question by signing up to kill Vietnamese.
I am reading a book entitled A Nation Diagnosed: Trump Derangement Syndrome and the Politics of Losing Our Minds, by Wade T. Reason. Reason’s analysis of TDS leads him to conclude that “It [has] become a feature of political life – not a bug.” But what Reason fails to emphasize enough is that TDS is merely a feature of political life; it is not an anomaly, and it is not unique the era of Trump. TDS is just a way of disguising the character of normal politics, that the political arena is composed of allies and enemies, and that enemies are always seen as “deranged.”
As a reflection of this, the left, the resisters also engage in TDS, making Trump into an existential enemy. As a comedian said: “We didn’t want to beat Trump. We needed him.” Exactly. Both the Trumpers and the resisters need enemies, especially existential enemies, just as the US and the USSR needed existential enemies after WW II. So, the Trump Derangement Syndrome was not derangement at all. It was just a label given to what is normal politics. Or, perhaps, TDS was and is derangement, meaning that politicians are, normally, deranged, sick, or narcissistic. So, when Reason says that TDS “normalizes the abnormal,” the implication is that politics, normal politics, “normalizes the abnormal.” For example, the bombings of Nagasaki and Dresden, the Holocaust, the Vietnam war, the British repression in Kenya, 9/11, Bush’s worldwide War on Terror, 1/6.
As Reason points out, “Trump didn’t divide America – he reflected it.” “The culture wars didn’t begin with Trump. Neither did political polarization, racial tension, class resentment, or distrust of the media.” As Ta-Nehist Coates put it: “Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause, A mirror, not a mastermind.” In other words, Trump is merely a reflection of politics as it exists in the United States these days. “We weren’t one country waiting for unity. We were two countries sharing a flag. [Trump] stopped pretending otherwise.”
