Double Talk: Guidepost for the Fall Campaign Subversion of Language Aids Collectivist Advance

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Words are the building blocks of language, the Myriad bridges between men, the very essence of communication.

Yet words can do double-duty. They can clothe the half-truth, or provide welcome escape hatches for promises that go astray. Words become especially fuzzy and shadowy in the hot air of politics. Politics, like liquor, makes people boastful, quarrelsome, and careless with the truth. Under the strange catalytic action of politics words are no longer simply communicators but become confusers, beguilers, seducers.

(And revealers. Words reveal, usually inadvertently, our biases and prejudices. For example, during the Suffragette’s Movement that led to women’s right to vote, one staunch feminist said to another: "Brace up, my dear. Just pray to God. She will help you.")

We live in an age of catchwords and half-truths, an age in which men become infatuated and even seduced by words — words whose true meaning becomes lost in reveries and fantasies. The process is old but the speed, boosted by mass media and modern electronics, is new. So fast are political words involuted that the Orwellian Revolution of mass hypnosis has arrived. (Witness, for example, how quickly "McCarthyism" was transformed into a smear word.)

Semantic subterfuge is not, however, limited to the politician. At times, we all, I think, switch the King’s English to suit our purposes. How many housewives are satisfied with the label "housewife"? Not many, as befuddled census takers have found out. Recently the Long Island Federation of Women’s Clubs recommended that housewives be henceforth known as "homemakers." The Census Bureau has since tried "home managers." Women’s colleges are experimenting with "domestic economist" and "domestic executive."

And in politics, miracle of miracles! The lobbyist is as extinct as the dodo. In all of Washington and the state capitals there’s not a single lobbyist to be found. Instead, there are hundreds of "congressional liaison officials," "legislative representatives," and "legislative research specialists."

It’s clear, I think, that the word-juggling that the politicians do is similar to that which we all resort to, at one time or another, in our private affairs. But the crucial difference between political words and ordinary words is this: political words are almost always etched in political power. And political power is the most fearsome power on earth — more fearsome than the atomic bomb. For, remember, when the bomb is dropped, the decision to drop it is a political decision.

Politics is the struggle for office — that is, for the power of the state. Thus we should ask ourselves: What is the state, what is government? This is the question Washington directed to himself in his Farewell Address. He said: "What is government? Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force! Government is like fire, a good servant but a poor master. . . ."

The state, in other words, is the policeman’s club and the soldier’s gun. It is a legal monopoly of force — the only legal repository of force in society. No other institution — whether the church, the university, the corporation, the fraternal organization — is so empowered.

The state, with the monopoly of force, is necessary because we are not gods but mortal and quite fallible men. The state is necessary because evil and good coexist in men. And, since power is a corrupting force, it follows that the state may well be able to punish the evil in men but be quite unable to cope with the evil in itself.

This dilemma was the one faced by our Founding Fathers. Their answer was limited government, a government of expressed and sharply delimited powers, a government which shared the sovereignty with the states, a government restricted by a written Constitution.

Yet nowhere in the Declaration or in the Constitution did the Fathers say that our state was or was not intended to be what is now the greatest semantic shibboleth of our times — a "democracy." Quite the contrary, the Federalist Papers made quite clear that the framers of the Constitution were fearful of democracy — meaning majority rule by the populace at large. And yet while the Founding Fathers had no illusions about the people, they had no illusions about the politicians. Ours was to be a government of laws, not of men. Said Jefferson: "On questions of power, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

But the plasticity of words has dangerously weakened our bastion of liberty, the Constitution. For today, the Constitution is proclaimed a "living document." Translated into English, this means that the Constitution has become as elastic as rubber and as watertight as a sieve.

Consider the plasticity of political words in the case of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose biography forms the basis of a current play on Broadway. In 1932 FDR ran on a platform of economy, a balanced budget, the preservation of the gold standard, and political integrity. FDR promised to rid us of "bureau on bureau and commission on commission." Then the world witnessed, in the frenzy of what is now called the "100 days," the greatest deficit spending and swiftest expansion of Government bureaucracy probably in the history of the world.

In 1936, FDR declared: "In the past 34 months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of the people’s Government, this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy, such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people."

This is a prime example of political semantics. Supposedly democracy purifies politics and mollifies power. Yet was not Hitler democratically elected to office? Mussolini? Peron? And in our own country, Frank Hague and Huey Long? And in office, how did these demagogues maintain and expand their power? Through the enormous power of words — by innuendos and promises, by smears and lies.

Among the easiest and most seductive of political subterfuges is the promise that the state will "pay" for this or "pay" for that. The state will provide "free" schools, "free" medicine, "free" roads, "free" libraries. Free? The profoundest lesson in the thousands of books on economics by learned men all the way back to Aristotle adds up to this: there is no such thing as a free lunch. It thereby follows that there is no such thing as that old shibboleth, "Federal aid." How can it be called "aid" if the Federal Government seizes money in the states and then returns the money — minus a terrific bureaucratic bite — to the states?

A similar semantic trap lies in the idea that the state can somehow provide jobs. The state can "create" employment, we’re told, when it builds roads, dams, parks, and now missiles and post offices. And where does the Government get the money to "create" employment? From taxes, including the greatest hidden tax of all, inflation. And quite obviously, the tax money spent by the Government cannot be spent by the taxpayer. In short, the Government provides only as many jobs as it destroys. Worse, the Government in its discriminatory taxes against middle and upper income groups destroys the main sources of capital — capital which not only could have provided jobs but greater economic strength vis–visthe Soviets.

So this is the never-never world of politics with its strange upside-down language. We fight to make the world safe for democracy only to find it unsafe and in the hands of "the dictatorship of the proletariat." We promise the mothers and fathers of America "again and again" not to send our boys to fight in foreign wars but off they go before the next year is out. We seek to prevent Procter and Gamble from merging with Clorox Bleach on the grounds of monopoly but look the other way when the CIO merges with the AFL. We send out troops when the "civil rights" of nine schoolchildren are threatened but we smile when literally millions of workers are forced to join unions against their will. We plead for economy in 1957 and go all-out for spending in 1958. We tell the citizen to exercise restraint in incurring debt and we raise our own debt limit by $10 billion. We reclaim land and irrigate farmland with vast valley projects and when the surpluses become too great we put the farms in the Soil Bank and pay farmers not to farm. We worship freedom but pay with our freedom to buy security.

And we wrap the whole thing in a package called "the middle of the road." It’s all like George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in the novel, 1984: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.

This article originally appeared in the September 22, 1958, issue of Human Events. It was based upon remarks that Dr. Peterson made earlier that year before the Women’s Republican Committee of One Hundred of New York.