https://spectator.org/kbj-hearings-typify-our-debased-political-discourse/
Since Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was chosen by President Biden to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, we’ve been encouraged by the White House, congressional Democrats, and the corporate media to celebrate her as the “first Black woman” nominated to serve on the Court. Yet, when asked during her confirmation hearing to define the term “woman,” she responded, “I can’t … I’m not a biologist.”
The problem with this answer isn’t just that it was unworthy of a serious SCOTUS nominee. It is symptomatic of a debilitating disease that has infected our political discourse, rendering substantive policy debate all but impossible and endangering the republic.
It is a virulent new strain of an old malady that George Orwell famously wrote about in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” a rebuke of politicians, journalists, and academics who use deceptive language to conceal their ideological objectives: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” This is how the hopelessly disorganized Jan. 6 Capitol riot became an “insurrection.” It is how differing outcomes between identity groups became “systemic racism.” Orwell also discusses political words that have been rendered meaningless by dishonest usage:
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.… 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.… Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
