Why Liberal Rhetoric Loses

We’ve been receiving a lot of emails about our last blog post, many of them asking why we don’t do a list of liberal labels. Well, we responded, liberals don’t do labels.

Oh, yeah? Figarists responded. How about “Tea Baggers?” How about “Nazis” and “fascists” ?

Those aren’t labels. They’re name-calling. Name-calling isn’t labeling. It makes liberals seem childish and stupid—an excellent way to make right-wing extremists seem almost reasonable. Liberals! If you want to win an argument, stop trying to make your mates giggle. “Tea Baggers” gets you nowhere. (“The Glenn Beck Party”—that label could stick.)

Take an issue, any issue, and you’ll see conservatives carefully crafting tropes that help them. Bush tax cuts, for instance: Do you hear a lot of conservatives hurling names at those who want to end the cuts? No, they talk instead about “crippling the job creators.”

Or take climate change. Liberals’ first instinct is to call the climate deniers “earth haters” or “ignoramuses.” What if they looked for a trope instead of a silly name, attacking the issue instead of opponents? Call climate change “carbon poisoning,” and you might get somewhere.

Want Figaro to suggest more labels? Name the issues you want labeled, and we’ll do our best.

Right-Wing Labels Translated

It’s Label Monday again!  Today we have a special installment for you. Figaro is a political independent with a strong dislike of the Democratic Party. But he also loves an underdog, and rhetorically speaking, the Democrats are tail-dragging, drooling underdogs. So every now and then we attempt to even things up. Today we translate Republican labels.  Let the flaming begin!

Political correctness: When a liberal gets offended.

Treason: When a conservative gets offended.

Constitution: The Second Amendment.

The little guy: Business.

Small business: Big business.

Big government: Government.

Freedom: Doing what I want.

Security: Keeping you from doing what you want.

Reform: Government programs I like.

Socialism: Government programs I don’t like.

Tax reform: Tax cuts.

Job creators:  Rich people.

Gay agenda: Being gay.

Competition: When I win.

Corruption: When I lose.

Pro-life: Pro-embryo.

Soft on crime: Pro-innocent.

Tax increase: Expiration of “temporary” tax cuts passed under President George W. Bush.

Birthers: People who refuse to believe that President Obama was born.

War fighters: Soldiers.

War on Christmas: Saying “happy holidays.”

Democrat Party: Democratic Party.

Illegals: Undocumented workers.

Family values: The  Gospel according to Ozzie and Harriet.

So-called science: Science.

Unions: Teachers, police, and firefighters.

Main Street: Local strip mall.

Scripture: The parts of the Bible I like.

God: The deity who founded America and who happens to agree with me on everything.

Jesus: Me, when I don’t want to talk about myself.

America: High-income Caucasians who live in the former Confederacy or wish they did.

From www.Figarospeech.com: Figures Served Fresh 

Uh, Not THAT America

Far-right former senator Rick Santorum says he had “nothing to do with” his own campaign slogan—a quote from black, gay, Communist poet Langston Hughes. We like the line nonetheless: an effective Repeat Changer. 

Fighting to make
America America again. 

Repeat Changer  (Technical term: antistasis—an-TIS-ta-sis, meaning “opposite stance.”) This figure can make you look remarkably witty for very little effort; just listen for the opportunity to repeat your interlocutor’s words in a different context. Because of its boomerang effect—its ability to throw an opponent’s words back—the figure makes an excellent weapon in argument.

You’ll often hear it in politics, contrasting an ideal past with the current evil present. Hughes’ italicized America had to do with the founders’ notions of liberty and justice for all. Santorum’s, apparently, doesn’t.

Just the Factuals, Ma'am

Hearty thanks to Senator Jon Kyl and his mouthpiece for confirming a point we make in our next book:  euphemisms are best reserved for irony.

You may have heard that Kyl made up a completely false statistic about Planned Parenthood on the Senate floor last week, claiming that “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does” is provide abortions. Three percent of the organization’s budget goes for abortions. Kyl’s spokeswoman later told CNN that Kyl’s remark “was not intended to be a factual statement, but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, a organization that receives millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, does subsidize abortions.”

A gleeful Stephen Colbert had a factualfest and issued a series of hilarious afactual Tweets, while Democrats grabbed tweaky Twitter hashtags. Kyl finally blamed the whole thing on his flack, saying he merely “misspoke.” Wow, sure beats solving the nation’s deficit!

“Not intended to be factual” is a euphemism; the term comes from the Greek, meaning to “speak good.” In this case, it means, “He was just lying.” The problem with a euphemism is that people see it as a euphemism. Not only is it easy to translate, but the speaker looks slimy to boot.

If you’re going to use euphemisms, make sure they’re clichés like “misspoke.” That also means lying, but people are used to it. It’s lying, backed by years of congressional tradition.

Actuary Strong

One of the best examples of a synecdoche—a Belonging Trope—that we’ve seen in a long time.

The federal government has become an insurance company with an army.

Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein

Synecdoche (sin-EK-doe-kee), Greek for “swap.” One of the two Belonging Tropes, the other being the metonymy.

A synecdoche takes a member or part of something and makes it stand for the whole, or vice versa. We’ve been spending a lot of time on this nifty tool because it has become the most powerful, most frequently used political trope. 

While politicians focus on sushi budgeting—cutting tiny thin slices out of the federal hide—nearly all the budget goes to Medicare, Medicaid, the Pentagon, and interest on the debt. Klein turns that grim fact into a memorable sentence that’s been quoted across the blogosphere. Why’s it so memorable? Because it summarizes a complex issue into an absurdity. Like what Congress does, only cheaper.

We Prefer Virgin Sacrifices

The president made a nifty Root Repeater, a.k.a. polyptoton, in this afternoon’s deficit speech. The device upends the audience’s expectations while making you sound very wise. If only the rest the speech had lived up to this great figure.

We will all need to make sacrifices. But we do not have to sacrifice the America we believe in. 

Figure of Speech: Polyptoton (po-LIP-toe-ton), Greek for “multiple grammatical cases.” It repeats the root of a word while changing its ending — sacrifices and sacrifice in this instance.  Robert Frost used the figure when he said,  “Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.” 

The rest of the speech earns a “meh” from Figaro. The stuff about all of us being connected is straight out of the squishy liberal The World Is a Community prayerbook. We wish he had used a strong trope to sell his argument for ending tax cuts for the wealthy. If we were Obama’s speechwriter, we would have written something like this:

Obama: We’re lucky to be Americans. And those who, like me, are especially lucky need to pay our dues. 

What we’d really like to say to the richest Americans is, “Can you please stop WHINING?” But that wouldn’t be politic.