“What we've got here, is failure to communicate.”
Cool Hand Luke, 1967
Stuart Chase (1888-1985), author of The Tyranny of Words (Harcourt Brace, 1938) was an American economist and social theorist who wrote over thirty books, many of which were exposés of deceptions, misinformation, and outright lies which he observed in politics, advertising, and mass media (then newspapers and radio). His critique of dishonesty in advertising (Your Money’s Worth, 1928) became a best-seller, inspiring Chase to found a consumer advocacy organization (Consumer Research Bureau) whose publication Consumer Reports is still active to this day.
If there is a common theme throughout Chase’s long career as an observer and commentator on public life, it is his focus on language and human communication (“the most important of all human attributes”) in either solving or acerbating the psychological and sociological problems of mankind in general and America in particular.
As famously spoken by Strother Martin in the movie Cool Hand Luke, it is our “failure to communicate,” our inability to agree on the meaning of the very words that define us as citizens, that lies at the heart of so many problems. “Poor humanity,” Chase writes, “is not indulging so much in moral failure as in bad language.” For this reviewer the most compelling aspect of The Tyranny of Words is that, although written 85 years ago, it still speaks directly to the deceptions, misinformation, and lies that beat at the heart of our current political and social divisions.
Chase examines a long list of words that were then (and are still) widely used in political discourse, but which often reflect “chasms” of disagreement as to their meaning. Are people thinking about the same thing, Chase asks, when they use words like “democracy,” “liberty,” “capitalism,” “socialism,” and “freedom”? Or has our failure to agree on the meaning of these words allowed them to become “weapons” for politicians to further divide the nation in pursuit of their own political goals? Do these words short-circuit thinking and undermine communication? Here are some of the words, analyzed by Chase, whose usage is common but whose meanings lack widespread agreement:
The People. All politicians claim to represent “the people,” but Chase asks which people exactly are they referring to? All the people? Or just those who voted for them and agree with their policies? When one party appropriates the term “We The People,” says Chase, they are essentially dismissing everyone who disagrees with them as not the people.
Equality. Is there true “equality” in American society, Chase asks, or is this merely an aspirational concept, or worse, a systemic deception perpetrated by those who were “more equal” based on their wealth and status? Chase most certainly would have been critical of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling which identified money as “free speech,” further tilting political power toward wealthy donors and corporations; those with more money now legally have more free speech and influence than those without.
Equal justice for all. Chase questions whether “equal justice” can be rendered “fairly and objectively” in light of “judges’ prejudices, passions, and weaknesses,” especially when some defendants have an inordinately greater access to resources than others. His concerns are as relevant today as they were then.
Balanced budget. Chase (an economist and accountant by profession) notes that a “balanced budget” is an abstract term that rarely exists in the real world. While the phrase has become a fundamental plank of “conservatism,” most accountants and economists recognize it as a statistical pea-and-shell game designed to obfuscate financial statements.
Law and order. Crime and “law and order” were high on voters’ minds in the recent mid-term elections, and Republican candidates seized on that concern as if it was their issue, even though Republican candidates had encouraged or participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection, or were in open denial of certified election results, or were themselves the subject of legal challenges. And then there’s the former self-proclaimed “Law and Order President” brazenly bragging that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. How can citizens make reasonable decisions, Chase asks, when there is no agreement on the meaning or use of fundamental terms like “law” and “order?”
Elites. Today there is much resentment against “elites,” but the politicians who promulgate this resentment are themselves predominantly members of that very class of society in terms of their wealth, status, power and influence. Donald Trump claims to be a multi-billionaire and proudly conducts interviews in golden-walled ballrooms, but has no shame in railing against “elites” who (he claims) are ripping off the “average American.” And whereas a “Harvard education” was once a badge of academic honor, today the very name “Harvard” is used derogatorily (and hypocritically) in political attacks, as for example by Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis who is himself a Harvard Law School graduate.
Freedom. If ever there was a highly-charged word in politics, it is surely “freedom.” No matter what their ideological position, any party seeking political power claims to stand for “freedom,” as if no other party stood for this cherished value. But is there any agreement on what the word means, or who truly represents it? In American politics the so-called Freedom Caucus wing of the Republican Party claims by their name alone to stand for “freedom,” but according to former House speaker John Boehner "They can't tell you what they're for. They can only tell you everything they're against.” They claim to want “freedom from tyranny” but can’t define “tyranny” beyond associating the word with “Democrats” or “Socialists” or “Dictators” (namely, to them, Presidents Obama and Biden). All meaningless words, wrapped in the flag, shouted under the banner of “freedom.”
In Canada, a “Freedom Convoy” of discontented truckers and their followers literally occupied the Capital city of Ottawa for almost a month in early 2022, honking their truck horns day and night, defying police, terrifying residents, ignoring city by-laws, and endlessly chanting “Freedom, Freedom, Freedom.” And, of course, wrapping themselves in (or hiding behind) thousands of Canadian flags as if they (and they alone) were the true Canadian patriots defending the nation’s freedoms. Apparently, though, they had no concern at all for the “freedoms" of Ottawa residents who had to endure their constant horn honking, who could not patronize hundreds of businesses that were forced to shut their doors, who could not walk the streets of their own city without taunts, harassment, and intimidation from thuggish members of the so-called “freedom convoy.” (Also, it should be noted that American and “Trump” flags were well-represented throughout that very un-Canadian ordeal.)
Truth. Chase’s book shows how the misuse of language, and our failure to agree on the meaning of even fundamental words like “truth,” inevitably leads to a breakdown of communication, sometimes with “catastrophic judgements [based on] the fantastic nature of many political arguments.” Probably the most “fantastic” misuse of language in this manner is the ex-President’s glaring attempt to undermine “truth” (as well as “law and order”) in his endlessly-repeated claim that he won the 2020 election, a demonstrably false lie promulgated by his enablers and apologists to the point where thousands of “law-abiding citizens” violently attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 in a misguided attempt to “stop the steal.” And considering the enormity of Trump’s volume of lies, his spokesperson Kellyanne Conway will forever be tainted by her bizarre assertion that Donald Trump’s lies were not actually lies; they were, in her infamous phrase, “alternative facts.”
They. Perhaps the single most misused (and dangerous) word in the political arena was (and still is) the simple pronoun “they.” Early in his career Adolph Hitler stirred up crowds with the claim that “they stabbed us in the back.” When asked who exactly were “they,” he said it didn’t matter; people could project any enemy onto that word. The basic key was this: “they” are not us. Today, at a time when many Americans feel left behind, left out and betrayed, demagogic leaders can skillfully leverage that frustration and anger, always pointing a finger at scapegoats like Muslims, immigrants, socialists, globalists, or “liberals” with their “radical agenda.” Trump and his sycophantic acolytes have been constantly telling their base of discontented followers that some unspecified “they” are to blame for your discontent, “they” are taking over your country, “they” are replacing you. Unfortunately, in such a climate of linguistic malfeasance, it is not surprising to witness tiki-torch-carrying angry young men parading through the University of Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.” In the politics of anger and resentment, “they” are always the enemy.
Fascism. In 1938, as the winds of war were stirring a storm of political rhetoric, Chase conducted a “semantic experiment.” Focusing on the single word “fascism,” he asked one hundred people (of widely varying backgrounds) what they believed the word meant. Did they all agree on the word’s meaning? Were they all thinking about the same “referent” when they heard the word “fascism?” Here are some of the responses to the question: “What doe the word Fascism mean to you?
Hitler and Mussolini
Coercive capitalist state
A government where you can live comfortably if you never disagree with it
Quackery
Same thing as communism
Exaggerated nationalism
Creation of artificial hatreds
The state against women and workers
Government in the interest of the majority for the purpose of accomplishing things democracy cannot do
All businesses not making money taken over by the state
An all-powerful police force to hold up a decaying society
Dictatorship. President Roosevelt is a dictator.
A group that does not believe in government interference and will overthrow the government if necessary
A left-wing group prepared to use force.
A Florida rattlesnake in summer.
While the majority of respondents attributed a negative, ominous, or dangerous meaning to the word, the experiment supported Chase’s central premise that we seldom agree on the meaning of the words we use. “Multiply the sample by ten million,” he says, “and picture if you can the aggregate mental chaos. Yet this is the word which is soberly treated as a definite thing by newspapers, authors, orators, statesmen, and talkers the world around.” [The reader is invited to provide his or her own definition of “fascism” in the Comments below.]
So prevalent is this linguistic confusion that a phenomenon has arisen for which historian Timothy Snyder has coined the term “schizo-fascism: where people who are unambiguously fascist refer to others as fascist.” Recently, Donald Trump Jr., in a glassy-eyed Twitter rant, accused President Joe Biden of “using Gestopoesque Mussolini fascist tactics.”
“Dishonesty,” Stuart Chase wrote in 1938, is “the mightiest weapon in the arsenal of despots and demagogues … arousing public opinion to violent action when the facts warrant no such action.” Could Chase’s comment be any more relevant or descriptive of the current political environment of deception, misinformation, and outright lies? Are his words not a prophecy of the Jan. 6 insurrection as a function of one demagogue’s dishonesty? And of “the gullible voters he exploits?”
Throughout The Tyranny of Words Chase warns against “the fakers [who] throw their verbal smoke… [and] work sorceries with words.” He relates, for example, this comment by Warren Harding, a presidential candidate in 1920, who was advised by a highly regarded Senator to run on a platform of Americanism: “When I asked him what Americanism meant, he said that he did not know, but that it was a damned good word with which to carry an election.” And it was; Harding won handily.
Even a century later I doubt there would be much agreement on what exactly the word “Americanism” means. Similarly, words like “patriot” and “traitor” have long littered the political landscape, creating far more divisiveness than agreement. “Unscrupulous men can make off with the family silver,” says Chase, who castigates politicians of all stripes who “use the Constitution as a kind of sacred war club [and] burst into rhetoric about freedom, liberty, the Constitution, hallowed rights and imperishable traditions. Such talk does not get things done.” As further example, Chase notes the speech of an unnamed politician bloviating on the Senate floor, but doing little to solve any real problems faced by the nation: “The American people will never tolerate socialism; will never tolerate fascism; will never surrender their liberties; will never deny their Constitution.” Conspiracist Marjorie Taylor Greene’s election platform of “Save America, Stop Socialism” is a contemporary example of a politician exploiting what Chase called “the fear of words rather than of actual things.”
“We cannot live on lies, fantasies, and propaganda,” wrote Chase, yet the “collective trance” about which he warned is still prevalent in American politics, and elsewhere in the world. People are “listening in a kind of trance to words inside their heads, [locked] behind the bars of a verbal prison [where] minds cannot meet, agreement cannot be reached, communication is checked as effectively as when one snaps off the radio.” Is that statement written in 1938 not an accurate description of the “fantastic” mental state of election-deniers and conspiracists today? “The trouble is,” Chase continued, “that after adoption, people begin to regard [lies and misinformation] as eternal, good for any situation, anywhere, at any time.” Coining a prescient term -“short cut tag” - Chase described how the unquestioning acceptance of a word’s meaning (fascism, liberty, freedom, liberal, patriot) literally short-circuits thinking, leading ultimately to the parrot-like recitation of words without thought or understanding.
Awash in this barrage of deceitful rhetoric, people become unable “to perceive the meaning of what they read and hear,” and, Chase warns, “Demagogues thrive on this illiteracy.” “I love the uneducated,” Donald Trump once said, and Chase would not have been surprised when Trump told a Veteran’s Day audience (eerily echoing Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984), “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” Stop thinking, says the Demagogue, listen to me, “I am your voice.”
The problem, as elucidated by Chase in The Tyranny of Words, is the ability of highly-charged words (like freedom, liberty, socialism, law and order, family values, patriotism) to become “short cut tags” that short-circuit thinking and prevent clear communication and meaningful dialogue. “Confusions persist and increase,” wrote Chase in 1938, because “we cannot talk to one another.” In today’s explosion of communication technologies, this underlying “failure to communicate” is expanding exponentially to the point where we need “protection from chasms made from words.” “Civilized living is impossible,” writes Chase, “without machinery to settle disputes [and to] help us talk sensibly with one another.”
Chase’s book is a plea for the sane use of language that “checks us from acting as if fantasies were real events worth fighting and dying for. It checks us from a kind of dangerous hypnotism [and] mental states approaching insanity,” as witnessed in real time on Jan. 6.
The goal of Chase’s book is clearly to focus attention on the need to use words to clarify and communicate in pursuit of solutions, rather than to divide and incite to violence in pursuit of political power. He ends The Tyranny of Words with this statement: “Good language will help us to communicate with one another about the realities of our environment, where now we speak darkly, in alien tongues.”
EPILOGUE:
While there is no way of knowing whether George Orwell read Chases’s Tyranny of Words, he nevertheless reinforced the identical message in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” written during his research for 1984.
“The present political chaos is connected with the decay of language,” wrote Orwell. Political language had become a “catalogue of swindles and perversions, [an instrument] for concealing or preventing thought … and to make lies sound truthful.” Constant repetition “can drill lies so deep that they seem like unquestionable truths [and] anaesthetize a portion of one’s brain to save people the trouble” of thinking for themselves. “In our time,” Orwell wrote, “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” Orwell’s short essay was, like Chase’s book, a warning against politicians who exploit language to sabotage communication and to short-circuit thinking. “To think clearly,” Orwell concluded, “is the necessary first step towards political regeneration.”
In our current time of hyper-vitriolic and mind-numbing dishonesty, the words of Chase and Orwell still ring true across the decades, describing both the dangers and the solutions needed to retain rational thought and enable sane communication while inescapably living under The Tyranny of Words.
I'm coming to this string very late--I came across a link today from Brad DeLong's blog to John Ganz's blog, to this one, and I've read a few of the items on Neo-Fascism: A Warning (and I've subscribed, so this isn't meant to be a negative comment). When I came to this item I saw the invitation to define "fascism" in the comment section, and I thought I'd follow up on that, with the thought that perhaps AW would be monitoring new comments on old strings.
Before retiring years ago I used to teach a course that covered the rise of fascism in East Asia, most obviously in Japan, and I needed to develop a definition that I could convey to students who were not necessarily educated in political theory. I settled on four major components, which, I think, reflect what fascism was as a self-defining political movement in the 1920s and 1930s, rather than the cultural features that came to define it popularly in the Post-War and later eras. They were, as I recall:
1) Nationalism, particularly in the sense of the ethnic nation-state: an in-group with shared identity (implicitly genetic).
2) Militarism, viewing military power as an essential tool to defend the nation-state and exert its will internationally.
3) Corporatism, in the sense that the fascist society should channel its will through formal organizations that are coordinated by the state, most importantly business and industry consortia, but also including schools, health professions, local social groups, etc.
4) Anti-Communism, which was essential both tactically, in creating a threatening enemy ideology, and intrinsically, because the anti-individualistic core of fascism had to be configured as a negation of the anti-individualistic core of Communism.
Using these criteria allows "fascism" to be applied to the major Axis powers, including Japan (and Spain, about which, however, I know not much), and also to account for why fascism in the two decades after World War I seemed a viable alternative to political groups in places that we don't usually connect with its toxic cultural features (I'm thinking now of Ireland, and the flirtation with fascism of cultural exemplars like W.B. Yeats). If, instead, one focuses on the style of the Mussolini/Hitler dictator, the mass rallies, the terrorism of black- or brownshirts, the genocidal program of the German Nazi Party, etc., you reduce fascism to a confluence of traits that show up in many forms of populist politics (including some that have been based on forms of communist ideology) authoritarian regime, military dictatorship, racketeer government, and so forth.
Because fascism lacked the theoretical coherence of the communist canon, I think there will always be a certain vagueness in identifying it in practice, especially since the pejorative use of the term after World War II prevented governments from identifying as fascist and expanding our understanding of how the basic features can be adapted by design. An example of a Post-War government that I think was a clearly fascist would be Park Chung-Hee's in South Korea. Yet because the ROK was an American ally, we rarely (if ever) discussed it as fascist, although many opposed it as a dictatorship. Park's repressive approach laid great emphasis on the corporatist elements of state organization, and its state-orchestrated leadership of business conglomerates (something adapted from the Japanese model) not only paved the way for the ROK's astonishing economic development, but had enormous influence on other Asian states, including the PRC in the interval between Mao and Xi.
Of course, we now use "fascist" as a general term of opprobium. Since we don't like populist strongmen, we refer to them as fascist--but Mao was a populist strongman. We condemn fascism as a manipulation and deflection of peoples' resentments--but the Dixiecrat New Dealers pursued that, as did a host of Middle Eastern leaders and others. Nationalism alone has been pursued by all sorts of leaders--progressive Woodrow Wilson was a global icon for championing it, modernist Atatürk used it to create and transform Turkey, and Stalin turned Soviet communism from universalist to nationalist in a way that Putin inherited. And (to reveal that I'm cribbing from the "four faces of neo-fascism" post) fascism attacks democratic institutions in much the way that communism does, as well any type of authoritarian regime: Sukarno's, the Shah's, the Taliban, Maduro's, Putin's . . . you name it.
Basically, I think "fascist" has come to denote "Nazi-like," drawing on cultural memory of Hitler, perhaps with Mussolini's swagger added, but we can't say "Nazi," because the denotative essence of that term is now tied up with genocide of a kind that can't be casually invoked to taunt opponents.
Anyway, thanks for the invitation to spout off!
If you haven't read them yet, I highly recommend reading "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and "The Reactionary Mind 2nd Edition." The way these two books break down our current political moment is uncanny.