Posts published in “Political Words”

Most commonly, we're calling this bug that's hit the world - and is spreading around the United States - the coronavirus. The more technically spoken among us have taken to referring to it as COVID-19.

But there are other names. And there's some history here.

The coronavirus is something like the flu - not exactly the same, and the differences are significant - so it's worth revisiting some of the names given various strains of flu over the years.

Maybe the most deadly form ever appeared around the end of World War I in 1918, a worldwide pandemic involving the H1N1 virus that may have infected 500 million people around the globe and killed 50 million (One of whom was a grandfather of Donald Trump). They key efforts to combat it were "isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings, which were applied unevenly." (Sound familiar?)

It was dubbed the Spanish flu, though Spain doesn't seem to have had any special role in connection with it (the virus apparently came from birds).

That was the worst, but there have been others, from the Asian flu of 1957 to the Russian flu of 1977 to the swine flu of 2009 (which actually was linked to pigs). Except for the wine flu, most of them seem to be named - with the naming effort mostly centered in the United States - for places from far away, whether they had much to do with the illness outbreak or not.

This week, President Trump referred to a "foreign virus" (do virii have citizenship?) as the culprit behind the current illness. A number of Washington figures have taken to calling it the "Chinese flu" or the "Wuhan flu," which at least is a connection to where the illness first erupted, but may be an indicator of an intended marker: Who to blame for this. (Never mind, of course, that China is one of the nations hardest hit by the pandemic.)

It seems the naming of flus tends to relate more to what we think about ourselves and who we don't much like, than about the actual origins of a strain of flu. For which, after all, no one really wants to take credit.
 

You know what it is when you talk about it, right?

But, well, who and what are part of the Swamp?

The “drain the swamp” formulation was one of the more clever linguistic developments of the 2016 election. It had been used before, such as by both Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi in 2006, but not as commonly. And it has some uses. Donald Trump used it often in his campaign that year, and the #DrainTheSwamp Twitter hashtag is highly popular. (It’s a busy Twitter handle as well.)

It caught fire and a lot of people adopted it because it had resonance. The idea of the political and economic centers of the country (even in the states) as a dank, sunken, corrupt place that does in the unwary and is full of “swamp things” is easy to get and even appreciate. And if you drain it, you get rid of disease-carrying insects and other unwanted pests. The metaphor is clear.

A John Kelley article in Slate points out that the phrase goes back much further, and was long used by the anti-capitalist left: “In a 1903 letter to the Daily Northwestern, Winfield R. Gaylord, state organizer of the Social Democratic Party, precursor to Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party of America, wrote: “Socialists are not satisfied with killing a few of the mosquitoes which come from the capittalist [sic] swamp; they want to drain the swamp.” So it has referred to the swamp of capitalism.

In 1983, Ronald Reagan spoke of “draining the swamp” that is the federal bureaucracy.

There is even some loose truth to it.

But be wary of this one. “The Swamp” sounds wonderfully specific and concrete, but it is neither. It evaporates the closer you look at it.

So what exactly is The Swamp?

While Washington, D.C., was built on lowlands by the Potomac River, and the area around the State Department long has been famously called Foggy Bottom, the fact is that the district (or at least nearly all of it) never has been, in its time of human habitation at least, swampland. Humid and mosquito-ridden, yes; swamp, no. So that direct link doesn’t work.

An Illinois group called American Transparency in 2017 issued a report called “Mapping the Swamp,” but that was simply an attention-getter: Its content consisted of budget reports (and employee compensation statistics) about federal administrative agencies. Is the swamp, then, federal administrative agencies, or does it cover much else?

Kelly’s stab at a definition, at least one for the 2010s: “Trump’s swamp isn’t just home to political cronies and crooks, whom the expression typically targets: The media, polling, leaders of his own political party, the abstract Establishment, and just about anything that challenges his view of the world, and himself, gets sucked into his vortex.”

Writers Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles suggested in an October 2017 New York Times article, “Donald Trump’s pledges to 'drain the swamp' of corruption in Washington attest to his genius for unintentional irony. Nepotism, egregious conflicts of interest, flights on the public dime to see Wimbledon and the eclipse — the Beltway wetlands are now wilder and murkier than ever.”

In the end, the swamp is a test: It is whatever you don’t like.
 

In a political sense - the focus here - a politician's base is one's core support, the people who are with you whatever may come ... or at least to a further point than most people.

It is not an entirely new term, even in this context, and the larger sense of it has some generally obvious meanings. A military base is the place where troops are stationed, armaments and other secure supplies and materials are located and to which - in a combat area - forces can retreat or collect in comparative security. In a loose sense, its a localized home territory, a refuge.

Some of that carries over into politics: One's political base is a political refuge of sorts.

The term got its biggest push in that context in 2004, when the George W. Bush campaign, seeking re-election, calculated it was more likely to get the votes needed to win (in the right places) by pushing hardest for turnout within the core support - the base - rather than by trying to reach across to pull in broader support.

Bush's campaign strategist, Matthew Dowd, recalled in an interview figuring how many persuadable independents were out there as opposed to how many already-sympathetic non-voters: "nobody had ever approached an election that I've looked at over the last 50 years, where base motivation was important as swing, which is how we approached it. We didn't say, "Base motivation is what we're going to do, and that's all we're doing." We said, "Both are important, but we shouldn't be putting 80 percent of our resources into persuasion and 20 percent into base motivation," which is basically what had been happening up until that point -- look at this graph, look at the history, look what's happened in this country. And obviously that decision influenced everything that we did."

That decision was significant in the management of presidential campaigns; it was the first explicitly to focus as much or toward toward maximizing the hard-core support as opposed to broadening support. That has had significant effects on both sides of fence, chiefly by deepening the political canyon between them. Many people in whatever remains of the middle are left stranded, and many on either side see the opposition in ever darker terms. During the Donald Trump presidency, notably, the effort please the base has specifically meant displeasing or even damaging everyone else.

Are we far from the point where being considered a part of a "base" becomes less a badge of honor with a small group than a criticism - a perjorative - with the large remaining majority? Maybe not far. And why not?
 

Not so long ago, communicating with large numbers of people meant broadcasting - sending one message out to lots of people. That still happens, but alongside it we see micro-casting: Using technology to send different messages out to specific people, or groups of people.

The technology has been adopted in the 2010s to remarkable degrees as mega-databases have accumulated immense amounts of information about, well, each of us. And the the resulting capability in microtargeting has become increasingly important in American politics.

It also has led to a whole new language of its own.

A January 29, 2020 column by Thomas Edsall remarked on some of this, noting the degree to which the Trump presidential campaign has been bearing down on this (more than the Democrats have).

He noted that "The explosion of digital technology has created the opportunity for political operatives to run what amount to dark campaigns, conducted below the radar of both voter awareness and government oversight. In some cases, the technology is very simple: the anonymous transmission of negative images of candidates by individuals to Facebook groups. This activity is neither reported to the Federal Election Commission nor linked to official campaigns."

A new language has developed out of it, too. He cited some of the terms associated with it: "geofencing, mass personalization, dark patterns, identity resolution technologies, dynamic prospecting, geotargeting strategies, location analytics, geo-behavioural segment, political data cloud, automatic content recognition, dynamic creative optimization."

The growth term, and the one with maybe the largest application - commercial and otherwise as well as political - is geofencing.

A marketing application for it is described this way: "Geofencing is the practice of using global positioning (GPS) or radio frequency identification (RFID) to define a geographic boundary. Then, once this 'virtual barrier' is established, the administrator can set up triggers that send a text message, email alert, or app notification when a mobile device enters (or exits) the specified area. So, businesses can section off a geographic area and communicate with devices within that space." The information often comes via smartphones through all those apps that you allow to share location and other information.

Businesses can use it as a device for communicating with people who have interacted with or visited their businesses.

Politically, it can be used in other ways. A National Public Radio report said that "CatholicVote has already identified some 200,000 Catholics in Wisconsin, which of course is a key state heading into 2020. They're able to discover that half of those Mass-goers are not registered to vote." That would be valuable political information.

Of course, there is the potential for blowback, as a reporter for the National Catholic Reporter noted: "it's not illegal, but the idea of mining data of people while they're at worship in a church was causing outrage to some of our readers. And the fact then that that data is going to be used for political purposes added to their problems with this."

Watch for more of these deep data terms to stick their heads up as the campaign year progresses.
 

What does it mean to say or claim that something is, in fact, a human right? How do we know or how do we determine whether that claim that this or that is a human right, is it true, and therefore, ought it to be honored? How can there be human rights, rights we possess not as privileges we are granted or even earn but simply by virtue of our humanity, belong to us? Is it, in fact, true, as our Declaration of Independence asserts, that as human beings, we – all of us, every member of our human family – are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights?
► Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, July 8, 2019

As an article in the New Yorker suggested,1 Pompeo’s answer to the question may be found in the members appointed to a new Commission on Unalienable Rights, whose chair, Mary Ann Glendon, is best known for opposition to same-sex marriage. Among other members, “Peter Berkowitz, of the Hoover Institution, has argued that human rights are, in essence, religious rights – indeed, that the source of all human rights is Christianity. ...

Christopher Tollefsen, a professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, has written that embryos are human beings and has argued that the Pope went too far when he suggested that the use of contraceptives may be permissible to prevent transmission of the Zika virus to newborns.”

The rights in question seem to put those of religion – certain religious ideas, obviously not all – at the top of the heap. Beyond that, the article said, “In effect, the new commission will contemplate who is and isn’t human, and who, therefore, possesses inalienable rights. Most of the commissioners appear to believe that embryos are human. Many of them also appear to subscribe to the Trump Administration’s general position that trans people do not exist.”

Some of this is a response to an expanding list of human rights over the last – well, three or four hundred years. But what’s being looked at in cases like this is a regression to almost no rights at all, unless your religious beliefs comport with those of the politically powerful.
 

When it comes to guns, we often seem not to want to talk in definitive language, unless we're taking a shot (as it were) at the other side.

There is, for example, the classic old quote (a pre-meme meme) by gun backers: "Gun control means using both hands," sometimes expressed as, "I'm all for gun control: I use both hands."

That tactic is still out there but it doesn't get so much usage these days. It's not hard to figure out why. Once a term used often by gun-regulation advocates (maybe we can call them that here for present purposes), "gun control" has since been adopted more by anti-regulation forces, such as many National Rifle Association members.

In early 2019, the Washington state legislature, like several others, was considering new gun regulation legislation. Advocates of those measures didn't refer to them as "gun control." Instead, they referred to them as "gun safety" measures.

To which one Republican (and anti-regulatory) legislator replied, "It's not gun safety it's gun control."

That more or less unveiled the situation. To the Democratic bill proponents, the bill was a safety measure. (How effective it might be as a safety measure could of course be a matter of debate.) But it also meant to control some aspect of gun ownership or use; loosely at least, you reasonably could call it gun control. Depending, of course, on what you mean by control. Both terms could apply.

The shifts in emphasis represent more awareness of PR than of anything else: Both sides have seized on to what is the most appealing aspect of their side of the argument: "safety for the pro-regulators" as against "control" for the anti-regulators. Both sides have reached a public relations rationality.

that also means, unfortunately, that both sides now likely are destined to start talking past each other, neither side hearing or understanding what the other says.

For a clear real-world demonstration of this in another context, see: abortion, "pro-life" v. "pro-choice."

(image/Guardian Safe and Vault)