Almost 75 years after it was published, George Orwell’s novel 1984 has nothing on today’s Republican Party when it comes to language. The novel features such ideological practices as “newspeak” and “doublethink” that
conform language to the needs of a society’s authoritarian leadership to maintain control of its population. Newspeak is a minimalist language designed to make the utterance of heretical thoughts–those that challenge central authority–impossible.  Doublethink refers to the ability to believe and say that black is white, in contradiction of plain facts, in order to uphold the regime.
Does any of this sound familiar today? Since the rise of “Trumpism” in the Republican Party, we have seen the explosion not only of blatant lies, but also the creation of “alternative” facts to support law-free rule. We have seen “Don’t say gay” restrictions for the early grades of schools in Florida, and the deletion of critical race theory from curriculums ranging up to college level. Lately we’ve seen an apparently new development in the distortion of language in the service of ideological manipulation: the notion that one can speak of things without mentioning what they are about.
This rang a bell for me, one that rings back half a century in my work life and that I have always since associated with the most destructive elements of conservative politics in the U.S. Perhaps it is no small coincidence that Orwell’s book was published on my mother’s birthday in the year that I was born. Continue reading “GOP Speak: You can talk about it, just don’t mention it”
come. In the meanwhile, the indictment by the New York City grand jury and prosecutor has already created feverish media reactions and the expected bombast from the former U.S. president. What to make of it all? These thoughts come to mind.
commonly trained that legal reasoning is a learned skill much like that in scientific work. It is based on principles of deduction, according to which judges make decisions about laws by logically figuring out how the principles established in earlier court decisions–precedents–apply to the current dispute before them. In this perspective, judicial decision-making–especially in the higher courts with the best trained lawyers–is a matter of technique.  It produces the correct legal answers based on facts and reason, free of bias and personal belief. Competent practitioners, therefore, should reach the same, right, answers.
consequential–even somewhat anodyne–meaning is that American racists are attracted to the Republican Party because it has long favored tough-on-crime policies and low taxes/small government policies, which have always translated into harsh punishments of and weak federal support for poor people, among whom minority populations figure disproportionately. This view can seem to insulate the Party itself from charges of racism and racial animus.
 More so than the President’s campaign’s efforts to coordinate with the Russians to favor his election. Even more so than the behavior in the impeachment’s own charges against the president: that for his personal political benefit he used the power of his presidency to withhold funds mandated by Congress for Ukraine’s military defense against Russian aggression, in order to extort that country to announce an investigation of a political rival (Joe Biden), and that in unprecedented fashion he obstructed the Congress’s investigation of those events. As such, it will either portend the end of our democracy or so diminish it that it will take generations to repair. 
