American Stockholm Syndrome
Or How we Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Oppressor
by KAY ZARE
Orwell once wrote that “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” He also realized that within insincerity lurked a greater ploy where political writing full of pretension was “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” An artful deception, a sort of verbal sleight of hand performed as ritual distraction, giving an air of dignity to the “indefensible.”
In observation of these rituals, those in power employ endless conditional terms to distance oppressors from the oppressed and criminals from their crimes: lives were lost supplants we killed people, monopolists become innovators, and imperialist coups — without irony — are rebranded promoting democracy abroad. “Such phraseology,” he asserted, “is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” Another legendary political satirist, George Carlin, put it this way of politicians: “they speak of course with great caution because they must take care not to actually say anything.”
These methods are not new — their roots reach back to the divine right of kings and the infallibility of religious rulers. Their symbols of power, prestige and honor are meant precisely to intoxicate with a familiar dialect of symbolism and ritual habit. Today, all around one can find the language of power has turned increasingly to obfuscation as a bulwark against informed citizenship — couched in qualifiers, euphemism and vague abstractions where language defies what it describes.
Should the dead bother to return, Orwell could observe his fears made real in the catechisms of modern political diction — adorned with legalese, like a gaudy veil cinched around a modest truth. He might observe that democracy has succumb to the markets — not an invisible hand, but a clenched fist. He might argue, like the other “rebels,” that to guard against war sold as peace, citizens must be more than consumers — that debased language is too convenient, gives way to regularity, regularity to comfort, and comfort to dogma.
For elites, the problem with democracy is the accountability — that political leaders can be stripped of their titles, fined and prosecuted by the public is the ultimate offense to the self-entitled psychology of power. To avoid these traps, the most elegant and devious doublespeak is employed: plausible deniability, the pinnacle achievement in ridding power of accountability and democracy of its meaning. This process helps to shelter war criminals from prosecution, torturers from punishment and corporate racketeers from criminal charges. These are the crucial victories of oppressors.
Should the dead bother to return, Orwell could observe his fears made real in the catechisms of modern political diction — adorned with legalese, like a gaudy veil cinched around a modest truth. He might observe that democracy has succumb to the markets — not an invisible hand, but a clenched fist. He might argue, like the other “rebels,” that to guard against war sold as peace, citizens must be more than consumers — that debased language is too convenient, gives way to regularity, regularity to comfort, and comfort to dogma.
The Language of Power
Perhaps the most direct academic and literal connection to Orwell’s thesis in Politics and the English Language is George Carlin’s Brain Droppings. While Carlin’s tone dances between amusement and sarcasm, his point is perfectly clear: that the impulse to “euphemize,” as he called it — what Orwell referred to as “the ready-made phrases” that “come crowding in” and replace critical thinking with prepackaged ideas — has profound effects on our politics: on both the conceptual and practical aspects of seeking justice. The vague jargon of political discourse accommodates a “reduced state of consciousness,” Orwell argues, “if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.” It is this manufactured emotional identity, the authors argue, that keeps people from identifying truths and solving problems. Carlin’s most potent example is of the changing linguistic constructs for what we now call PTSD — first from shell shock to battle fatigue, then operational exhaustion to post-traumatic stress disorder — and now, just as the acronym ptsd. Each iteration, coined not by the sufferers, but the institution of the military, drifts further from clarity, further from the “mental image” of human suffering. Carlin put it this way in summation: “I bet if we still called it shell shock, some of those veterans would have gotten the help they needed.”
In the drone warfare program under Obama, the President claimed as recently as last summer that civilians casualties were as low as 2.5–4.5%, while nearly 95% of those targets neutralized (murdered, illegally) were enemy combatants. This is an impressive statistic — and the agencies are aware of this — it is the primary metric through which they make the case for the drone program as the legitimate future of American military power, following the fact that US service members are in no real danger. The figures were immediately disputed and perceived as an almost insulting low-ball estimate. These are the kinds of numbers non-democratic states offer as evidence of their success, and it was made possible only through the opacity of political diction — in producing these numbers the Obama Administration defined “any military-age male killed in a drone strike as a militant” regardless of their identity. In other words, if you are killed by the United States in a drone attack and you are a male and could feasibly carry a rifle, that makes you a terrorist. The fact of your targeting and death is evidence enough. The victim’s innocence in this case can only be proven posthumously through extensive documented evidence of identity and personal history, a threshold unnecessary in the process of identifying the target as a militant in the first place. A student of literary history would struggle deciding whether this was more Orwellian or Kafka-esque. The divorcing of events from language has enabled the perception of the Obama administration as peacemakers, despite the deep breaches of international law.
“Democracy” and the End of Meaning
Though the rise of Trump has brought on a torrent of lament about the end of democracy, any sincere assessment of regressing democratic states must confront the realities of power — the wealthy elite have always had representation in the form of one party or another. The difference today is that the supposed party of the people has been populated with technocrats, political elites and agnostic professionals who have little idea how to defend democracy in word or action.
Within the study of democratic states, students quickly learn that democracy is not a binary switch between non-democratic or democratic; rather, it operates on a spectrum — generally articulated in four different categories: illiberal democracy, procedural, liberal, and substantive. The contrast between these iterations of democracy are not necessarily a difference in kind, but in degree. Illiberal democracies may have regular elections and universal suffrage, but lack protections for individual civil liberties expected of democratic states. These might include nations like China and Iran, where regularly scheduled votes are participated in by tens of millions, but no real diversity is available among the options and due process is considered a luxury.
Procedural democracies, on the other hand, fetishize the process, and are overly reliant on rules, dates and events to define democracy. While the logistics of democracy are integral, the reality is that process is simply a method for achieving democracy, not democracy itself. Procedural democracies are a bit trickier to define — but the United States is probably the most notable case. A perfect example of this is the electoral college, which for the second time in 16 years has elected a President who the majority of the nation voted against. But we respect this outcome — why? Because of the process, the history, the glory of the founders and their legally enshrined wisdom. It suddenly becomes secondary that the purpose of voting in a democracy is about counting who has more votes, not whether they live on one side or another of an arbitrary border between rural Iowa and rural Illinois, neither of which truly existed when those founder put quill to parchment. The scholar and diplomat Richard Falk, has written beautifully on the subject of America’s obsession with procedural democracy and the challenges that represents to real, substantive democracy. More recently, Fareed Zakaria has gone one step further in describing the regression of American democracy as illiberal in its very nature.
Liberal and substantive democracies, alternatively, are what we might very reasonably consider real democracies — those that are concerned with the equitable political power of citizens, guaranteeing liberties and rights, and producing governments and legislation representative of the people’s will. The technocratic academic jargon we have just examined does democracy a major disservice here, much to the point of Politics and the English Language.
“In the case of a word like democracy,” Orwell wrote, “not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.”
To label states without protections against government overreach, individual liberties or minority rights democracies of any sort is an exercise is ridding language of its meaning while giving it the emotional veneer of public consent. “It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear” — the very practice Orwell warned vehemently against is the contemporary basis of American political discourse.
Say the Word
In truth, despite the regular election season polemics on the power of the franchise, and government by, of and for the people, the political decisions Americans make seem to have almost nothing to do with policy and ultimately have little effect. A 2015 Princeton study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page set about to answer a fundamental question about American democracy: do the people matter? Do they have actual power in legislative matters? In Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, the authors conclude that “Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all.” Regardless of the familiar and visible procedural repertoire of democracy — regular elections, universal suffrage*, various changes in leadership and party majorities — the policies enacted by elected officials often conflict with the public will — because it is not the public they represent.
Democracy has substance — it is not defined by process, but outcomes. When the public will is thwarted by way of elite interests, procedural rules, political infeasibility, legacy systems, corporate lobbying, public relations, marketing campaigns, or anything else, democracy has been equally thwarted. When these exceptions become the norm, what is left of democracy but the term?
Reflections on political societies have always hinged on the relationship of power between elites and average citizens, from Socrates to the present. What Gilens and Page demonstrate is that the public may achieve token victories, but only when they happen to agree with the elites. When elites and the average citizens’ economic or political self interest are at odds — which, by definition they almost always are — no matter how popular the policy among the public, the elites and their interest groups can stamp out any legislation.
As academics, their language is unusually sharp, but still tethers itself to the fear of stepping too far into normative judgment. They suggest that this evidence implies “America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.” Yes, in fact they are disqualifying. A democracy would not act in such a way. Not because it knows better, but because its sole purpose is to prevent such action. So, concentrated power is not dangerous for democracy; it is absent. Where such concentrated powers exists, we have a word for that: plutocracy.
These truths are not self evident; they must be stated in clear, simple terms. Democracy has substance — it is not defined by process, but outcomes. When the public will is thwarted by way of procedural rules, political infeasibility, vested interests, legacy systems, corporate lobbying, public relations, marketing campaigns, or anything else, democracy has been equally thwarted. When these exceptions become the norm, what is left of democracy but the term? To defend the term, and our sense of power, we first shift the meaning slowly, then all at once.
Socially, we internalize and normalize the world elites have designed for themselves, deferring collective power now for the aspiration of individual power later, while perceptibly shifting our values, aspiring not to knowledge but comfort, not justice but access. These are damaging fantasies, but useful ones to oppressive institutions and the powers they represent. These constructs have long been accepted by and/or imposed on Americans who have, with respects to Orwell’s fears, lost a sense of literary honesty. The leadership has long embraced the language of “swindles and perversions” that give a veneer of appeal to even the most fetid of ideas; that they have worked and been internalized by our own diction, howling fears of shadows, self satisfying deluge of Hitler analogies in every breath, and morbid lack of curiosity with knowable truths depends foremost on the prioritization of language as a means to convey feeling without meaning and find the geography of power to be unknowable, and when known, untouchable.
