Changing the Spectrum

The use of rhetoric is intentional to alter what is considered acceptable answers.

Not long after the conclusion of the 1912 presidential election academic conversation started to turn to whether or not this was a watershed moment. Woodrow Wilson was set to become the new chief executive and represented something of a major break from the past. Much is made of Wilson's view that the US Constitution was out of date and needed drastic reform. He was not a friend of separation of powers to put it mildly, believing that every part of the government should work in unison.

Behind the scenes a different conversation was also going on. This one suggested that the political spectrum was fundamentally shifting. If you would sit in a high-end cafe or a faculty lounge just before the election most generally agreed liberals and conservatives complemented each other and for the most part the political orientation stayed static. What was considered the political centre remained more or less in the same spot. Neither side gained much advantage except for very short-term moments.

What was believed to be changing was that what had been called radicalism, what we would now see is the emergence of a progressive left, was not just now a viable political force but changing how that spectrum's orientation worked. There was a firm belief that society would naturally continue to shift farther and further left. 19th century terms like the right side of history suggested that there was a natural evolution to human society. Managerial government would become the new wave of the future and Woodrow Wilson would be one of the first to bring it into vogue.

Of course 8 years later some of this had been questioned. For the most part a number of Wilson's most notable attempts at change had failed. For the most part the US remained as it had been before he arrived. But the general conversation hadn't shifted. There was still a belief that the idea that the political centre stayed put was a passe notion that needed to be alleviated.

Within the intellectual left there was a simple hypothesis that became sacrosanct. Conservatives were no longer in a position to win elections on their merits. Any conservative advantage came out of progressives' mistakes or because conservative simply duped people into thinking ways they shouldn't. This was when the Marxist politician Gyorgy Lukacs began using the phrase false consciousness to describe how most voters didn't know what they were doing.

But in the practical world what emerged was a concerted effort from most Social Democratic parties to increasingly try and change the terms of debate within the political realm. By the end of the second world war this had become an increasingly pressing point of using language to make conservative positions sound increasingly untenable. In the US this generally engaged with calling any Republican that became popular a Nazi.

The general purpose of this was fairly simple: the more you could make opposing viewpoints uncomfortable for the average citizen because they felt that it was outside of reasonable conversation the more the political spectrum would shift left. The core point was not arguing policy on its merits but using rhetoric to change what people conceived as being a normal government line of thinking.

The key point though was that this strategy was never intended to be static. That is a position that might be considered reasonable right now would be made to be unreasonable in the not too distant future to make sure that increasingly most people started this leftward shift. Every time any position becomes unacceptable with the general public because it's been sufficiently smeared as being outside of civilised discourse one had to push themselves farther left and repeat the process. It was the core idea that the political Spectrum would continue shifting even with any apparent victories.

At least part of this strategy relied on one key point. Most voters are not particularly engaged in deep political or philosophical conversations. In a manner of speaking they tried to make the false consciousness projection self-fulfilling. This was important because it meant that calling a position illegitimate by using extreme language on it would only work if people hadn't really thought of it.

By the 1970s a number of Social Democratic activist groups had gotten so far as anything that revolved around capitalism was considered a gateway to fascism. In short, government management of more and more of the economy became the only reasonable choice. That sort of rhetoric only works if the population isn't particularly engaged in the conversation to begin with.

It needs to be seen that the most important part of this thinking is that power is the primary objective. More than actually trying to find accurate solutions to problems or understanding what factual evidence might point to as a solution everything revolves around making sure that the political solution is the correct one. even if that means everything else falls apart.

Part of the story of the political left of the 20th century thus becomes one that has become more interested in memes over almost all else. It was a classic case of trying to control the conversation and ended up overwhelming other considerations. This is where one ends up in the position we are now that you call something names until it becomes untenable. Whether or not they actually believe everything is racist is an open question. But it's good at forcing a large chunk of the population to abandon the position in fear of being ostracised.

The net objective for much of the political dialogue that's become mainstreamed with progressives primary purpose is to achieve what they had wished back in the 1910s. Ensuring that the political Spectrum remains much farther to the left than it had been naturally. It was a conscious effort done through changing the terms of discourse in order to favour their own preferred outcome.

It has been somewhat interesting to see some of the pushback that's occurred recently. a number of terms such as calling somebody a fascist or Nazi don't tend to have the same effect that they did. At least part of this is the natural response that if you start calling everybody something it loses much of its unique effect.

It's probably fair to say however that you're likely to see a continuation of the same practices unless they see a string of election defeats force them to rethink their strategy. That's still probably a little ways away so it's worth remembering much of the rhetoric probably has this motive to it.