On the Media last weekend discussed how euphemisms “can keep conservatives from saying what they might really mean.” Matthew Sitman of Know Your Enemy podcast was once a conservative Protestant. He is now a lefty Catholic. He notes that we need to pay more attention to the language of the right (our own, too, I’ll add) to understand the assumptions baked into the language.
In the way Lee Atwater described using abstractions to conceal the underlying racial discrimination baked into many Republican policies, Sitman suggests the Republicans use language not to clarify, but to muddy the waters, making agreement on a shared reality impossible.
Soundprint‘s Larry Masset once said the same about people he met in the New Age movement. Massett noticed how many New Agers he met began sentences with “for me.” He began to think of it as a “universal prepositional solvent, making conflict impossible, dissolving external reality.”
Dissolving external reality sustains the Trump cult. It enables anyone to reformat reality to fit their expectations. And to make conflict inevitable.
Sitman frequently references the Frank Wilhoit quote at the top about conservatism existing to preserve, not equality, but the presence of in-groups and out-groups. Or as Cory Robin writes in “The Reactionary Mind,” that conservatism, Sitman says, involves “instinctive revulsion against the leveling of hierarchies.” A “pre-rational” recoiling “against the Other” drives it.
I’ll add that one habit of mind on the right is bald, unsubstantiated assertion of non-facts as a way of bullying one’s truth to the top of the pile. Sitman cites Nate Hochman, a writer for National Review, claiming the Black Live Matter protesters were “burning down the country” in 2020. Repeat that enough times to people with no direct experience of the many peaceful protests and they will accept that as reality. Or take Josh Hawley:
SEN. JOSH HAWLEY (R-MO): This is my opportunity to stand up and say something, to stand up and point out that there were irregularities in this election, that there was fraud.
Nobody disputes that, by the way.
Lather, rinse, repeat, and those who want to believe it will.