http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374060/print
As Orwell put it, using “language as an instrument for concealing or preventing thought.”
George Orwell gave us some invaluable words: Newspeak, doublethink, thoughtcrime. Given the generosity of his gift to us, it is probably ungrateful to desire that he had given us a little more, but we could use a term for what he described as the use of “language as an instrument for concealing or preventing thought.” For lack of a genuine Orwellian coinage, I’ll use the word “antithought,” by which I mean a phrase or expression that is intended to prevent understanding rather than to enable it. Antithought includes elements of the linguistic meme, question-begging, and attempts to change the subject.
The great example of our time is the phrase “voting against their own interests,” popularized by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas? Those words, or nearly identical ones, turn up everywhere: the beef-witted columns of Robert Reich, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, the Daily Kos, the Bangor Daily News, Alternet, the BBC, The New York Review of Books. Robert Schenkkan even put the phrase into the mouth of Bryan Cranston’s Lyndon Baines Johnson in his new play, All the Way.
As a phrase, “voting against their own interests” clearly has taken on a contagious life of its own, a genuine linguistic meme. But what is its function? Its ostensible function is to communicate the idea that conservative people of modest means, particularly in relatively poor Republican-leaning states, vote for candidates who are in fact hostile to their economic interests, having been beguiled into voting thus by the so-called social issues, by religion, by racism, by Fox News, or by whatever attendant boogeyman will do to swell progressivism, start a tweet or two. But its ostensible function is not its authentic function, nor can it be, because the antithought is engineered to foreclose discussion of the facts that it assumes, those being: (1) that conservative economic policies ill serve lower-income people, notably those in rural and agrarian areas; (2) that economic concerns should, as a matter of self-evident rationality, supersede non-economic concerns; and (3) that people in “Kansas” — that greater Kansas whose borders are not contiguous with those of the 34th state — would concede No. 1 and No. 2 if not for the nefarious operations of certain wicked social and political forces.
Here, antithought is essential to the hopes of the so-called progressive movement (another perversion of language: the idea that a political tendency that seeks to impose 1930s-style central-planning policies, which have their intellectual roots in the government of Bismarck, is in anno Domini 2014 “progressive”). There are a few centuries’ worth of very good economic data suggesting that economic policies oriented toward the security of property, free trade, free enterprise, regulation that is both light and consistent, and a relatively small political footprint upon the economy produce economic growth and widespread prosperity, and that this dynamic functions in both relative and absolute terms — which is why, for example, Chinese people are poor in China while Chinese people are rich in Hong Kong, and why India is richer than Pakistan. Kansas may very well be making a rational and historically literate judgment that Republican economic policies, defective as they often are, remain more oriented toward growth and more hostile to central planning than do Democratic policies, and that this is likely to leave the country as a whole, and thus Kansas, better off. In fact, the general prosperity of the United States, even after the punishing economic episodes of the past decade and more, is a scandal to the Left, as are the market-oriented and fiscally conservative reformist movements that have achieved so much in places such as Sweden and Canada. The horrifying thought of general prosperity under capitalism is therefore to be met with another antithought: “the 1 percent.”
