May 13 at 10:06 AM ·
THE VOCABULARY OF PARTISAN DIVISION
by Alan Post
The polling data shows that the Democrats are responsible for the partisan divide. It happened due to changes in grammar.
Peter Boghossian published an article last year on American Mind, Culture War 2.0, articulating the conflict as rotating around three axes: 1) the new rules of engagement, 2) the correspondence theory of truth, and 3) the role intersectionality ought to play in everyone’s worldview. Let’s examine each of these features to see how Culture War 2.0 has made allies out of former ideological enemies. Call this The Great Realignment.
Truth Correspondence
truth consists in a relation to reality, i.e., that truth is a relational property involving a characteristic relation (to be specified) to some portion of reality (to be specified).
Intersectionality
the complex, cumulative manner in which the effects of different forms of discrimination combine, overlap, or intersect
— https://iwda.org.au/what-does-intersectional-feminism-actu…/
Rules of Engagement
Those people who accept the correspondence theory of truth (even though they may not know it by name) agree on the traditional rules of engagement (discourse, debate, dialogue) and do not view intersectionality as a necessary model for getting to the truth.
[Those people who view intersectionality as a necessary model for understanding the world] believe speech should be shut down if it’s hurtful or potentially harmful, and think intersectional, transformative approaches are necessary to refashion systems.
(via https://americanmind.org/essays/welcome-to-culture-war-2-0/)
The author, Peter Boghossian, doesn’t offer any resolution to the so-identified conflict. He closes with the term “cognitive liberty,” but I think the issue is use of language (grammar, vocabulary).
What the article calls Culture War 2.0 they distinguish from Culture Wars 1.0 by the Supreme Court affirming same-sex marriage:
That is the war that drifted to a whimpering end as recently as 2013, when the Supreme Court handed down culturally significant rulings bolstering the case for same-sex marriage
— https://www.nytimes.com/…/p…/supreme-court-gay-marriage.html
The observation that the nature of disagreement changed is broadly supported in polling data, even if the demarcation identified in the article is a contrivance.
Pew did a poll in 2017 showing the “growing partisan gaps on government, race, immigration,” accelerated in 2011, largely from the Democratic party and presumptively as consequence of the 2012 elections (which eventually saw Obama elected to his second term.)
from the article:
Across 10 political values Pew Research Center has tracked since 1994, there is now an average 36-percentage-point gap between Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and Democrats and Democratic leaners. In 1994, it was only 15 points. The partisan gap is much larger than the differences between the opinions of blacks and whites, men and women and other groups in society.
— https://www.pewresearch.org/…/takeaways-on-americans-growi…/
and the full survey here:
https://www.people-press.org/…/the-partisan-divide-on-poli…/
With the following graphs showing a marked change in sentiment since 2011:
“Government should do more to help the needy” (54% – 71%)
“Racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days” (~29%-64%)
“Immigrants strengthen the country with their hard work and talents” (~54%-84%)
The change in 2011 was articulated, post-facto, by Thomas B. Edsall in his regular opinion column at the New York Times:
For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.
— https://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/…/the-future-of-t…/…
— http://www.discriminations.us/…/now-its-official-democrats…/
The change in vocabulary following the 2012 election on can be seen in cherry-picked word frequency charts of New York Times articles from 1970 – 2018, with the following words introduced in to the lexicon on or after 2011 (terms with a recently, steeply rising tail with no prior activity):
mansplaining
toxic masculinity
male privilege
systemic racism
white privilege
white nationalism
transphobia
non binary
slut shaming
fat shaming
implicit bias
cultural appropriation
micro aggressions
intersectionality
safe space
— https://twitter.com/DavidRozado/status/1134041329292460032
— https://media-analytics.op-bit.nz/
Any of these words could have begun being used only incidentally to the 2012 election, but this set serves as confirmatory of the phenomena at a vocabulary level.
The conflict can be seen in the grammar and the polling data shows whose opinion was changed by it.