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BOOKSJuly 28, 2006

Speed Reads

By Aaron Britt, Ryan Grim

Talking Right, the latest from rock-star linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, delivers not only the most tongue-trippingly truculent subtitle of the year but also a fresh and well-argued take on the Democrats’ so-called “messaging problem.” Nunberg’s previous book, the studied and droll Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Confrontational Times, was a collection of short essays on the usage, etymology, and sometimes hidden meanings of political and cultural buzzwords; here he tackles something bigger and more insidious: the right’s control of popular political language. Though much has been made of the Republican commitment to “staying on message” and the party’s ability to sway, even create “truth” through shameless repetition, Nunberg argues that the problem here is deeper than oft-repeated conservative catchphrases such as “the war on Christmas” or “culture of life.” He parses it thus: “[T]he real sign of the right’s co-option of American political culture has been its ability to dominate that core vocabulary and make it the norm not just among its own circles, but in the larger American conversation about politics.” Perhaps the clearest example, and one that continues to vex the left-leaning, is how the right has made “liberal” a dirty word. Fifty years ago, politicians across the spectrum, from Hoover to Eisenhower to Kennedy, wanted to ally themselves with the label, but these days the L-Word is like political scabies: shudder-inducing, wildly unpopular, and tough to shake. He posits that conservatives have so sullied the term that liberalism comes off as less a political ideology than as “middle class lifestyle choice.” Nunberg claims that the right’s linguistic success is bottomed on redefining certain irreducible terms like “values,” “elite,” “patriotism,” and “liberal” in a 30-years-in-the-making swell of specious cultural populism. He lays out the right’s strategy to co-opt the language of populism, wresting it from its economic and political roots (where liberals have always been friendlier to the down-at-heel) and recasting it as a cultural struggle between the tastes, lifestyles, and mores of “the average American” and “coastal elites.” How do you keep a white middle-American Christian who pulls down $120,000 a year feeling perpetually under attack? Convince him that the liberal elite sneer at his faith, his car, his pastimes, and his politics. An avowed leftie, Nunberg digs into the political lexicon with obvious partisan relish. Dems are the presumed audience here, and then only those who get a masochistic thrill from having their hackles raised. As with many works that characterize “the right” and “the left,” Talking Right’s rendering of the actions and intentions of each occasionally suffer from reductionism, as in the author’s claim that “Conservatives may not have a lot of enthusiasm for laws or campus codes that restrict hate speech in the literal sense of the term, but they know that the phrase conjures up an image of speech that’s outside the boundaries of civilized behavior.” He buttresses his findings, however, with facts and figures taken from savvy searches of media outlets. In parsing the stigmas against the term “liberal,” he finds that “[e]ven in supposedly ‘liberal’ papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post, liberals are four times as likely as conservatives to be described as ‘unapologetic’ or ‘unabashed,’ ” suggesting that somehow conservatives have less to be ashamed of. By relying on this brand of research, Nunberg keeps his data outside the realm of academia and firmly planted in everyday political speech. His observations are trenchant, questioning whether lefties should even try to use the language assigned to them by the right and largely adopted by the media. And his discoveries, both linguistic and cultural, help decode our current political language while offering the occasional surprise. For instance: Republicans buy more brie.

By Ryan Grim

Matthew Continetti graduated from Columbia University in 2003 full of hope for the Republican Party. He moved to Washington to be part of the conservative movement, and he now writes for the Weekly Standard, a prominent right-wing magazine. Three years and one political meltdown later, Continetti has produced a charming book, The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine, the product of his front-row seat to the implosion of the movement he joined. Charming, because Continetti approaches his subjects with an innocence that can’t be anything but. To the author, the Republican Party is an idea rooted in liberty—if only its leaders would have the courage to follow their conservative convictions, a new world could dawn for all Americans. Paradise was lost, in Continetti’s mind, when Tom DeLay overthrew Newt Gingrich and took control of the House of Representatives. Instead of working to slay the beast that is big government, as Continetti thinks Gingrich was on his way to doing, DeLay beefed it up by allying the party with business lobbyists to an unprecedented degree. DeLay let it be known on K Street that Democratic lobbyists would have no access to his revolution. Lobbying firms and trade associations were told they had better hire Republicans only, or else. DeLay’s plan became known as the K Street Project. The Project’s consequences, Continetti allows, cannot be pinned entirely on DeLay—lobbying rules established by Democrats in the ’70s set up any political party to fall into the corrupt grasp of the lobbying cartel. Even so, the author hangs on to the idea that it was DeLay’s advancement of “K Street Conservatism” that drove the Republicans’ car directly into that wall. Both theories have an element of truth to them. Yes, DeLay deserves plenty of blame for corrupting the movement and selling it to its corporate masters. And yes, lobbying regulations affect the way lobbying is done. But Continetti’s wrong to think that DeLay betrayed the conservative movement by his embrace of K Street. That’s what Continetti misunderstands about the party he has hitched his wagon to. The quote he excerpts on the back jacket of his book is telling of this quaint confusion. He writes: “ ‘You’ve got to understand, we are ideologues,’ Tom DeLay once told a journalist. ‘We have an agenda. We have a philosophy. I want to repeal the Clean Air Act. No one came to me and said, “Please repeal the Clean Air Act.” We say to the lobbyists, “Help us.” We know what we want to do and we find people to help us do that. We go to the lobbyists and say, “Help us get this in the appropriations bill.”’ ” “It was a stunning admission,” writes Continetti. “Lawmakers, DeLay was basically saying, relied on paid lobbyists to get bills passed, not the other way around.” The only stunning thing here is that Continetti is stunned to hear that Republicans and big business share the same interests and work together to accomplish that agenda. Though The K Street Gang may be lacking in critical analysis, it makes up for it in its detailed and well-constructed retelling of the Jack Abramoff scandal, tracing the con artist’s roots back to his College Republican days when he, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist were inseparable comrades. To Continetti’s credit, the largest question that remains by the end of the book centers on these last two men: How is it that they don’t currently share a cell with their fallen friend? What Continetti misses, though, is that there are deeper reasons behind the party’s collapse than corruption. Or one deeper reason, at least. Just as Vietnam broke liberalism’s back, Iraq is doing likewise to the modern Republican Party.—

CP