When Words Lose Their Meaning
A 24-year-old won the Republican primary last month in North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District defeating the more experienced candidate endorsed by both the President and the previous Congressman who resigned to become chief of staff to the President.
What interested me was not that a novice had defeated the President’s candidate in a Republican primary, but what he had to say about why he is running and how the Republican Party might appeal to young voters, a majority of whom, polls show, support Democrats.
In an interview with the New York Times, Madison Cawthorn who ran on a conservative, pro-Trump platform, “but cast himself as a fresh face not beholden to Washington insiders,” said the “generational time bomb going off in the Republican Party” was what motivated him.
“For so long, we’ve just kind of been the party of ‘no’ without offering a lot of really good answers.” Asked how his perspective might differ from older Republicans, he responded, “I believe I can carry the message of conservatism in a way that doesn’t seem so abrasive — that has better packaging, I would say, better messaging.”
He added that the way border security was messaged came across as “xenophobic”. “If it had been messaged properly, we would have said this is because of national security” – protecting our southern border against the drug cartels that have “shown they can defeat the Mexican military anytime they want … (and) are able to effectively get people across our border at any point they choose, I think that’s a major security threat. I think if we had conveyed that that is the reason we want more security, it would have gone over much better.”
Words well put together persuade. Words resonate. Words illuminate. Words create understanding.
The pursuit of getting the words right, however, puts us on a slippery slope. As we work on the packaging there is always the temptation to make the packaging better than the contents, to hide the flaws and make claims that disappear when the wrapping comes off. Messaging can quickly morph from finding better words to describe the content, to words designed to sell the message by appealing to fears, desires, emotions and prejudices.
As a consultant in one campaign told me, “People don’t think about politics that much, and so we use poll tested lines that we know they already have some belief in and parrot them back to them. And they become truth in their minds.”
We slide easily from better words, to better messaging, to propaganda, to lies. Words that manipulate, deflect, obscure and deceive end in loss of credibility, loss of influence, and loss of authority.
Back when I was young in the 1950s and 1960s, the Pew Foundation began asking people about their confidence in government. Some 75 percent agreed government usually did the right thing. That percentage started heading down in the mid-60s during the Johnson administration and the Vietnam war and now hovers at 17 percent. The publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 starkly demonstrated for everyone that the messaging about the war by the President, the Pentagon and the rest of the administration did not reflect what they knew about action on the ground. The war was not winnable and American soldiers were dying in a lost cause.
We have now come to the place where we assume that every message has a disconnect.
Authenticity matters. Truth resonates. Today with the coronavirus, the governors who are telling the bad news and asking sacrifices have gained approval. Forty percent more Americans trust Dr. Fauci when he talks about the virus than trust the President when he talks.
The reaction to propaganda worldwide is the same. When words lose their meaning, the leaders, the government, the regime, lose credibility.
The recent reaction in Iran to the government’s explanation of a huge night time explosion was this tweet, “Gas explosion near a military base? Do you think we are stupid?”
Vaclav Havel, a playwright who lived under the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, described what happens when the false story takes power.
“System, ideology and apparat have deprived … rulers as well as the ruled … of their conscience, their common sense and natural speech … States grow ever more machine like … politics is quantifiable success. Power is a priori innocent because it does not grow from a world in which words like guilt and innocence retain their meaning.”
Well-chosen words are a delight. They hold their power to persuade, however, only as long as they reflect experience. The packaging may dazzle and the product fly off the shelf for a time, but in the long run the quality of the product itself determines its acceptance. A verity that Madison Cawthorn and all of us who play the political game do well to remember when we begin to believe that changing the packaging improves the product.
Douglas Kane is the author of "Our Politics: Reflections on Political Life" published in 2019 by Southern Illinois University Press
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