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<h1 class="gmail-hed">Why Democrats and Republicans Literally Speak Different Languages</h1>
<p class="gmail-dek">The Republican
National Convention proved yet again that the GOP talks about America
and U.S. policy with an entire unique vocabulary. It hasn’t always been
this way.</p>
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<span class="gmail-credit">Mario Anzuoni / Reuters</span>
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<div class="gmail-article-above gmail-fluid-container"><div class="gmail-article-cover-extra-wrapper gmail-show-share"><div class="gmail-article-cover-extra"><ul class="gmail-metadata"><li class="gmail-byline"><span><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/author/derek-thompson/" title="Derek Thompson"><span>Derek Thompson</span></a></span></li><li class="gmail-date">
Jul 22, 2016
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Politics</a>
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<p>On Thursday night, Donald
Trump and other speakers at the Republican National Convention talked
about “radical Islamic terrorism,” “illegal aliens,” and “Crooked
Hillary.” In a few weeks, at the Democratic National Convention, you
likely won’t hear any of these terms. The Obama administration refuses
to associate terrorism with Islam, for fear of legitimizing it.
Democrats are far more likely to talk about “immigrants” and
“undocumented workers” than aliens. And it will be quite shocking, at a
level far beyond Ted Cruz’s speech on Wednesday night, if a keynote
speaker addresses Hillary Clinton with her <em>nom de Trump</em>.</p><p>For
several decades now, Republicans and Democrats have become more
polarized. There are plenty of reasons for that, including the demise of
the Southern Dixiecrats and the geographic sorting of the country into
ideologically homogenous neighborhoods. But the two major parties are
now <a href="http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/74737/what-is-the-origin-of-the-phrase-two-nations-divided-by-a-common-language">divided by a common language</a>:
Democrats discuss “comprehensive health reform,” “estate taxes,”
“undocumented workers,” and “tax breaks for the wealthy,” while
Republicans insist on a “Washington takeover of health care,” “death
taxes,” “illegal aliens,” and “tax reform.” When did the two major
political parties create their own vocabularies?</p><p>Around 1990. That’s according to <a href="http://papers.nber.org/tmp/60512-w22423.pdf">a fascinating new paper by the economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro and Microsoft Research’s Matt Taddy</a>.
Americans have for decades signaled their political clique with
specific terms—as when Southerners refer to the Civil War as the “War of
Northern Aggression,” or Northerners call it the “Great Rebellion.”
What is different today, the researchers said, is “the magnitude of the
differences, the deliberate strategic choices that seem to underlie
them, and the expanding role of consultants, focus groups, and polls” to
entrench two separate political lexicons within the same polity.</p><p>In
the paper, they have a simple but specific definition of partisanship:
“the ease with which an observer could guess a speaker’s party based
solely on the speaker’s choice of words.” This definition of
partisanship scarcely changed between 1870 and 1990. For roughly 120
years, the probability of correctly guessing a speaker’s party by
listening to a one-minute speech was about 52 to 55 percent, nearly
random. But suddenly, in the early 1990s, rhetorical partisanship
exploded.</p><hr><h3><strong>The Rise of Partisan Language in Congress</strong></h3><img src="cid:ii_156182609953adcc" alt="Inline image 1"><a href="http://papers.nber.org/tmp/60512-w22423.pdf">Gentzkow et al</a><hr><p>“The
1994 inflection point in our series coincides precisely with the
Republican takeover of Congress led by Newt Gingrich” and his Contract
With America, they find. Gingrich’s revolution helped to introduce
and/or popularize terms like “tax relief,” which at the time were seen
as a distinctly conservative frame, as opposed to “tax cut” (or, more
partisan, “tax giveaway”).</p><p>But the polarization of language did
not stop when Gingrich left Washington. The Contract With America kicked
off a neologism arms race, a prolonged attempt by members of both
parties to coin catchy new terms for their pet policies, particularly
for taxes, immigration, and health care. This neologism burst—defined as
words and phrases first popularized after 1980—continued through the
end of the 20th century and into the 21st century. Both Republicans and
Democrats became more disciplined about defining their agendas in
partisan-specific terms and getting other members of their parties to
speak the same language.</p><hr><h3><strong>The Rise of Partisan Neologisms</strong></h3><img src="cid:ii_156182608f134fe9" alt="Inline image 2"><a href="http://papers.nber.org/tmp/60512-w22423.pdf">Gentzkow et al</a><hr><p>Another
inescapable variable here is the significant shift in media technology.
Between 1984 and 1992, the cable industry spent more than $15 billion
expanding its infrastructure—the <a href="http://www.calcable.org/learn/history-of-cable/">“largest private construction project since World War II”</a>—and the number of cable channels nearly tripled in that decade.</p><p>The
diversity of media, alone, cannot explain the growing partisanship of
language. After all, in the 19th century, there were hundreds of ethnic
newspapers in the New York and New Jersey area, alone, serving
socialists, conservatives, Jews, Swedes, and Italians. But the cable
revolution was different by an order of magnitude: Each channel had the
potential to reach tens of millions of cable-subscribing voters.</p><p>C-SPAN
was introduced to the House of Representatives in 1979, and C-SPAN2
joined to film the Senate in 1986. “This plausibly increased the return
to carefully crafted language, both by widening the reach of successful
sound bites, and by dialing up the cost of careless mistakes,” the
researchers write. In <em>The C-SPAN Revolution</em>, Stephen Frantzich
and John Sullivan quote Newt Gingrich as saying he would have never been
the Republican leader without C-SPAN. Fox News launched in 1996, and
its success covering the conservative movement encouraged MSNBC to shift
more and more leftward over the next decade, until finally there were
two clear channels for partisan messaging.</p><p>There is little
inherently dangerous about the popularization of synonymous terms.
Millions of Americans say they drink “pop,” millions of Americans prefer
the term “coke,” and they are all wrong because the proper terminology
is “soda.” These differences hurt no one, even if their out-of-state
usage might occasionally confuse a drug-store clerk.</p><p>But the
Cambrian explosion of partisan neologisms is not as anodyne as the
soda/pop divide. First, it’s not good that Republicans and Democrats see
political expedience in accentuating their separateness down to the way
they describe a reduction in taxes on households earning more than a
million dollars. It is, rather, a sign that both parties are
predominantly interested, not in converting the other side, but rather
in speaking to the converted flock.</p><p>Second, devoting all this
energy to building separate lexicons creates the impression that words
are as important as policies. They are most certainly not. Coming up
with a catchy name for the Iraq War doesn’t change a single substantive
fact about its outcome. Despite what you’ve heard, harping on the words
“radical,” “Islamic,” and “terrorism” is not a foreign policy. It is the
reduction of a complex international crisis into a diction contest.</p><p>When
politics devolves into a war over word choice, it is probably a sign
that all hope for a more substantive debate has already been lost.</p><p><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/why-democrats-and-republicans-literally-speak-different-languages/492539/">http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/why-democrats-and-republicans-literally-speak-different-languages/492539/</a><br></p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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