Watch Your Language

Much as Jill Stein of the Greens was blamed for Hillary Clinton's defeat in the 2016 US Presidential election, Black Lives Matter protestors are now being blamed for the Democrats' failure to win the Senate and increase their hold on the House of Representatives. Jonathan Freedland, who has carved out a new niche at the Guardian as the Democrat establishment's British flack, explains this as the tactical folly of using the slogan "Defund the police", which supposedly alienated conservatives who were otherwise minded to vote for the Democrat ticket in November. Naturally he fails to explain the American context, where police funding is actually a salient political issue in a way that it isn't in the UK, and where many politicians run campaigns for elected office on the promise to further increase resources. Nor does he explain that the focus on funding is the other side of the coin to the charge of "militarization" - i.e. the common demand is for the police to be subject to democratic control, an argument that actually garners support among many conservatives concerned by Federal over-reach.

The chief witness for the prosecution of BLM is, inevitably, Barack Obama: "The former president said he too wanted to reform the criminal justice system, ridding it of racial bias, but he feared that using that “snappy slogan” meant “you lost a big audience the minute you say it”. The very change activists wanted moved further out of reach." At no point does Freedland stop to ask why Obama didn't progress police reform during his 8 years in the White House. Indeed, far from ridding the criminal justice system of bias, the liberals' favourite President was reluctant to engage with the issue for most of his tenure and his eventual interventions were largely tinkering (on this occasion, the blame is conveniently laid at the door of a hostile Republican Congress, ignoring the President's ability to effect change through executive orders). What marked Obama's presidency was a surfeit of carefully-crafted words that urged change while the executive arm of government largely sat on its hands. This was most stark in the case of gun control, where he provided the nation with emotional release through his empathetic speeches following mass shootings, such as at Sandy Hook, while continuing to tolerate the status quo.

Freedland's wider point is that words matter, but his explanation of why this is so, or why intent and effect can become divorced in political rhetoric is shallow. He explains the problem with the BLM slogan as one of mishearing - "But what too many voters heard was “abolish the police”, by starving them of funds" - rather than misinterpretation or misunderstanding. This allows him to avoid considering the possibility of misrepresentation: the role of the media in insisting that defund was synonymous with abolish. The importance of media opinion underpins Freedland's analysis. When he says that "It’s because change is urgent and necessary that Democrats need to argue for it in a way that wins, rather than loses, support", he isn't advocating patient explanation of policy substance ("When the policy was expressed the way Obama put it, 70% of them backed it" - yeah, right) but insisting on the media's role in supervising political rhetoric. This seems particularly cloth-eared in the aftermath of the BBC's Political Editor, Laura Kuenssberg, being criticised by economists for using the misleading metaphor of a "maxed-out credit card" to describe government debt.

The chief purpose of Freedland's article is not to further burnish the reputation of Obama, or exonerate the Democrat establishment for a cautious election campaign that came near to failure. Rather it is to punch left in the context of the Labour party. This goes beyond the old Blairite insistence that "equality" should be replaced by "fairness" in the party's messaging to the broader demand that the left should simply shut up: "In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher ran against the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the women of Greenham Common, the miners, the universities and often obscure local councillors, as much as she did against Neil Kinnock. Even if he could control his own message, he couldn’t control theirs." In short, he is supporting Starmer and Evans in their strategy of expelling the left and distancing the Labour party from any social movements that might prove challenging. Given that the left isn't going to shut up, and given the ructions over CLPs wishing to debate Jeremy Corbyn's suspension, this suggests that the current tactic of making certain topics impermissible may be extended to a ban on certain words and phrases. It also suggests that the Guardian will be fully supportive of this particular restraint on free speech.

At this point I'm going to leave the embarrassment of the Guardian behind and take a look at the broader history of sloganeering. Freedland gave a few examples of how the political right in the US successfully steered political debate by clever labelling, but he didn't stop to ask why the right has generally been more successful than the centre-left at this. One reason has been a willingness to rhetorically address substance, a winning strategy since the Bolsheviks' "Bread, Peace, Land" in 1917. This doesn't have to be honest or even credible. A relatively recent American example was the use of "death panels" to criticise the administration of proposed healthcare reform. Democrats have not always preferred to go high rather than low (consider Hillary Clintons use of "superpredators"), but they have tended to employ aspirational but empty rhetoric, that floated over the heads of the electorate, more than their Republican opponents. This is not simply a predilection for the high-falutin but a fear of making substantive promises to which they are then held (some of which will conflict with the interests of their donors). In contrast, the GOP believes it can survive failing to deliver to its base so long as it delivers to its backers (cut taxes, fail to build wall, rinse, repeat). In part this is because what the economically-comfortable portion of the conservative base wants is often just rhetoric, a point that should be obvious to Britons after four years of the Brexit farce.

In the UK, substance has tended to do better than the pious when it comes to slogans, particularly in general elections. The Conservatives' "Get Brexit Done" had a clear advantage over Labour's "Time for Real Change" last year. Even if it was largely meaningless, it was more tangible for electors. In contrast, Labour's "For the Many, not the Few" was more effective in 2017 than the Tories' forgettable "Forward, Together". It also arguably disproves Freedland's claim that equality is a repellent concept, as did the "We are the 99%" slogan of the Occupy movement. Perhaps the most compelling recent British example was the 2016 EU referendum where "Let's Take Back Control" remains memorable while "Stronger, Safer and Better Off" doesn't. One notable feature of British election slogans is the willingness of the Tories to directly address Labour, most famously in 1979's "Labour Isn't Working" but also in 1992's "Labour's Tax Bombshell". This doesn't always work (see 1997's "New Labour, New Danger"), but it's a contrast to the Labour party's reluctance to engage in open confrontation. Together with its discomfort at the mention of class, unless evoked in terms of nostalgia, this has meant that the people's party has generally struggled to speak convincingly to the people. 

That aversion to condemning the Tories is part of the liberal legacy of propriety and aspiration that came to dominate Labour after the leadership of Hugh Gaitskell and the intellectual revisionism of Anthony Crosland and Roy Jenkins. Though the old tunes lived on in the rhetoric of politicians such as Michael Foot and Peter Shore, and most vigorously among the more militant trade union leaders, by the time of Neil Kinnock the language of condemnation had been reduced to cliché and was as likely to be deployed in attacks on the left. Tony Blair, with no threat on his left flank, could focus his attacks on a Conservative administration that had already become a byword for incompetence and sleaze, but the Labour leader's moralising was merely a garnish on a glossy sales pitch that emphasised the combination of youth and aspiration as a panacea for structural problems. Jeremy Corbyn represented a return to the tradition of condemnatory rhetoric, albeit often mild in manner, so it was unsuprising that Starmer should seek to emphasise the change of management by lurching in the other direction to a constructive criticism and forensic manner that has quickly bored even his media champions.

An effective political slogan does two things: it crystallises a feeling and its proposes an action. Both can be implicit, rather than explicit - for example, the Tories' 2005 slogan, "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" made a virtue of its implication - but the explicit tends to be more effective. 1979's "Labour Isn't Working" was blunt in its observation, which crystallised a common dissatisfaction, and that allowed the call to action (vote Conservative) to then be implicit. The more granular a campaign, the more explicit the slogan is likely to be and the more emphasis there will be on the call to action. In this regard, "Defund the Police" is exemplary in that it manages to both crystallise the idea of the police as an accountable public service and highlight that different choices can be made, by the people, on how to spend public money in or around the criminal justice system. The alternative proposed by Obama - a series of specific, non-threatening managerial changes carried out by the political establishment under cover of bland language - would almost certainly produce little more than further tinkering. 

Just as with the posthumous reinvention of Martin Luther King Jr. as a euphonious liberal, rather than an angry radical who matured into a democratic socialist, so the criticism of "Defund the Police" originates in a belief that what is amiss is the fundamental premise, not the choice of language. Despite the irrefutable evidence that the funding of American police has been excessive and counter-productive, there is a lack of political will to address the issue. This is partly discretion - the idea that defunding is a vote-loser - but it also reflects the reality that police abuse isn't a pressing issue for the political class nor (a few assaulted journalists and photographers aside) the media. A broader objection to the slogan for many liberals is simply that it isn't a message they are in control of, and it's one that they fear could develop a momentum of its own. It's not quite "All Power to the Soviets", but it has the same risk of mutability. If the police are not beyond democratic control, what other functions of the state could be up for debate? For liberal commentators like Jonathan Freedland, this is twin threat: to the political establishment that they serve and to the media's role in managing the language of politics.