This past election, Republicans won not only the Presidency but also gained a majority in both houses of Congress. Many liberals are dumbfounded at how conservatives could have trounced them so thoroughly, but the answers aren’t that hard to see. One of the things conservatives have managed to do, not just in this past election but also for some time now, is to appropriate the rhetoric of the politics. Conservatives have managed, through years of hard practice, to be the first to snag the good catch phrases. We liberals have been slow to pick up on this. Usually, by the time liberals have caught on to what’s going on, we end up playing defense, which is never a good political strategy.
Let me give you a for instance:
Conservatives coined the term: tax relief.” Sounds harmless enough until you dissect it. The word “relief” carries all kinds of baggage with it. When we hear the word relief, we think of an onerous burden, something that can’t be borne, some thing painful or distasteful. “Relief” implies the removal of this painful, distasteful burden. “Relief” also implies a person who will be providing the relief – a benefactor, a rescuer. And if the person providing “relief” is a benefactor, then any person opposing them is a villain. Now hook the word “relief” to the word “tax” and you have a powerful political tool. “Tax relief” implies that taxes are an onerous, painful, distasteful burden, something that we need to be relieved of, and it implies that there is someone who will provide that relief – in this case, the Republicans. Any Democrat who tries to fight against this idea is immediately painted as an evil person, as some one who does not want to relieve you of your painful burdens. See how it works? Democrats can’t fight against the Bush tax cuts because they’d be fighting against the “relief” that the Republicans are providing from the onerous burden of taxes.
What the Democrats need to do, if we plan to have a say in how this country is governed, is to take back the rhetoric of politics from the Republicans, to take the rhetorical high ground. Instead of fighting defensive actions against the Republicans’ carefully crafted rhetoric, we need to craft better rhetoric FIRST, rhetoric that puts the Republicans on the defensive. To show you what I mean, let’s look at another Republican gem – family values.
Republicans have done a superb job of painting a Rockwellesque portrait of what an American family should be through the use of the term “family values.” According to the rhetoric, families consist of a mom, dad, kids, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, all living together in bucolic harmony. It’s Happy Days, and Father Knows Best, and the Donna Reed Show all rolled into one tidy little package. It’s everybody’s ideal of what a family is. Never mind the fact that such families are scarcer than hens’ teeth today; it’s the image that counts. And if you propose another image, then you are threatening the sacred image of the family that the Republicans – with a lot of help from the religious right - have built up.
No, you can’t fight against it; you can only trump it. What Democrats need is an even stronger vision of what constitutes values – maybe “human values” as opposed to family values. Democrats need a term that includes all people in all types of family settings: single parents of both sexes; childless couples; grandparents raising their kids’ kids; teenage mothers; orphans; gay and lesbian unions; all people. We need new, inclusive rhetoric, not more exclusive rhetoric. Because that’s essentially what terms like “family values” are – exclusive. They comfort some. But they chill far more than they comfort. If “family values” means you belong to a Christian family with a mother and father, etc, etc, what does it say to the single, Buddhist father doing his best to raise two daughters on his own? It says, “You don’t fit the mold. You’re not a family.” And it says the same thing to the single woman and the divorced retiree and every one else who doesn’t quite match the Leave It to Beaver family image.
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