Talking Right | Geoffrey Nunberg | Talks at Google

Thank you. I'm Karen Wickre and I work in corporate communications. I'm very happy to welcome Jeff Nunberg this afternoon. I've been pulling for him for a long time. You may have heard his commentaries on FRESH AIR. Over the years. You may have run across his commentaries on language usage and perhaps incidentally, his frequent mentions of Google as an indicator of the changing ways in which we use words. Jeff is a linguist who teaches at the School of Information at Berkeley. He's the chair of the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary. His commentaries on language have been on fresh air since 1987 and appear in the Sunday New York Times and elsewhere. He's written other books, as you may know, and I consider him a natural language processor. Please welcome Jeff Nunberg.

Are we on? Do we have. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. So it's great to be here, coming to Google. It's not really a very alien place for me, partly because there's so many people here whom I knew in my days at Xerox Parc. We were counting. We stopped at 10 or 12, but I don't know. And then other people who are former students at the school, what's now the School of Information at Berkeley where I teach. And in fact, John Lamping and Mike Dixon have both come to lecture to my classes there. So I feel very good about being here. But what I'll be talking about today is not the sorts of things I did in park days or do at the School of Information now, but rather my new book or new as of July talking. Right. Where's this with a rather long subtitle, how Conservatives Turn Liberalism into a Tax raising, Latte drinking, sushi eating, Volvo driving, New York Times reading, body piercing, Hollywood loving, left wing freak show. I'll tell you in a moment a little bit later where that title came from. The subject of the book is the language of politics, and particularly the kind of concern that Democrats and liberals have had about what seemed to them to be their linguistic failures over recent decades. When you looked in particular at the things that people were saying after the 2004 elections, there seemed to be a general sense that Democrats had simply lost the linguistic or had been linguistically routed. Ellen Goodman these are two quotes typical of the hundreds you could find. Ellen Goodman, the columnist the entire moral vocabulary is now a wholly owned language of the Religious right. The DNC chair Terry McAuliffe at the time DNC chair We've got to start talking to these people in red states with a language that resonates with them and so on and so forth, everybody pointing to the language. Why? Because it seemed to Democrats as if they had been advocating for years policies that were to the best advantage of large numbers of working Americans, that somehow that appealed to working Americans in the sense that working Americans did agree that the Democrats were better on taxes and the environment and so on. But those people would then systematically vote for Republicans against it seemed to Democrats what were their own best interest. And how could that happen, Democrats asked, unless Republicans were spinning a snappy line of patter that somehow deluded people about where their interest lay. And when people talked about the linguistic problems of the Democrats, they naturally turned to what seemed to be the greater skill of the Republicans in coining slogans and catchphrases. What I think of as the bumper sticker wars. And it's certainly true that if you look at the language of American politics over the last 20 years or so, the right has had all the best lines. Compassionate conservatism, clear skies, healthy forests, no Child Left behind, ownership, society, partial birth, abortion, death, tax, more recently, cut and run. I mean, you just every day I open a paper, go to Google News and there's a new one there. If you write about this stuff, you really don't. You have mixed feelings about the prospect of this administration being replaced because it's a wonderful source of material. Whereas, you know, when you think of what the Democrats come up with, well, Social Security lockbox, single payer health care versus cut and run. They have redeployment. I mean, you know, pick people off a bus on El Camino and ask them what single payer health care makes and, you know, you'll be a long time waiting on that street before you come up with anybody who knows what that phrase means. As Joe Klein, the Time columnist said, a chronic Democratic woe is lousy bumper stickers. And the idea that the Republican's advantage lay in this ability to coin these effective, misleading phrases is a very alluring one in the age of Orwell, or in the age in which high priced naming consultants and branding consultants earn big consulting fees for coming up and offering you a set of syllables that's going to put your IPO over the top or put your product on the shelves, and so on. Arguably, there's never been an age with such a naive faith in the power of language, even though there's also never been an age that's so skeptical of it. But that's another issue nonetheless. Do bumper stickers really matter? Well, it's kind of hard to say if they do or not. Clearly they have some influence on the way people perceive the issues. But the fact is that despite all those phrases like clear skies and healthy forest and so on, no Child Left behind, voters still give the Democrats the advantage over the Republicans on the environment, on education, on taxes, on Social Security and all of those issues. Voters throughout have given Democrats the advantage. Those haven't persuaded voters that the Republicans are better on those issues. They may have taken some of the. They may have taken some of the negative connotations that Republicans had away. They may have softened the image of Republicans is at least as willing to pay lip service. I mean, what's compassionate conservatism, after all, but paying lip service where lip service is do. And Republicans have been very good at that. When you look Take for instance the phrase the death tax in place of the estate tax. Every liberal's favorite example of the duplicitous and deceptive use of language by the Republicans. At the same time, when you look at the national election surveys, which are the big surveys done annually or every two years, and you ask people, do you favor repeal of the death tax or do you favor repeal of the estate tax? Turns out that the choice of one or another of those phrases only moves opinion by one or two points, very small amount. Now it turns out also that a great majority of voters at all income levels do support repeal of the death tax, even though it only applies to a tiny less than 1% of taxpayers. That's another problem, but it's not one that has to do with the choice of one or another bumper sticker to describe the problem. Or finally, consider the choice of private versus personal accounts to describe the administration's proposals for, as they called it, reforming Social Security. Around November of 2004, the Republicans started to say, you know, this phrase privatization and private accounts are misleading. We're not really trying to privatize. We want you to use personal accounts. And the press really played ball. If you look at press citations and broadcast citations for those phrases personal accounts and private accounts to describe the administration's proposals over the six months or so following the Republicans insistence that the phrase personal accounts be used, the percentage of references to personal accounts over private accounts almost doubled. It went up by about 50 or 60%, I think. Nonetheless, in that period, it wasn't as if support for the administration's proposals built on the contrary, the proposal was pretty much dead in the water by the end of 2005. So in all of these cases, it's very hard to make a case that the catchphrases and Slogans very skillfully coined by Republicans have been decisive in moving public opinion. Does that mean that the Republicans don't have or haven't had a linguistic advantage? No, but we may be looking for it in the wrong place. Where you really want to look for this advantage, and that's the burden of my book, is in the use of what I think of as the final vocabulary of American political discourse. Borrowing a phrase from the philosopher Richard Rorty, the words that ordinary people use in their conversations about politics over at the breakfast table, at the bowling alley, around the water cooler and so forth, the basic symbol words, to take Walter Lippmann's phrase that, as Lippmann put it, assemble emotions after they've been attached from their ideas. These are not words that, this isn't to say that these are words you can't think about and, but they're words that people don't think about and analyze, they just use as kind of tokens in a conversational game about politics. And let me just say that when I talk about political language, I'm thinking not only of the language that comes down that we hear over the radio or read over the Internet or in the newspaper, but the language that people actually use and that the media use. And in this connection, I'll give some examples here. I've used various databases, including the web, as indexed by Google and other search engines, to see how people are actually talking about politics. And what you see when you look at the way these words are used, these basic words, is that the words are used consistently in a way that presupposes a right wing point of view. And this is true not just on Fox News and the Washington Times and the conservative National Review, conservative sources where you would expect to see this. It's also true in the so called liberal media, as Eric Alterman calls them, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and so forth. And I'll give examples as we go along. But I mean, just to take an example, if you look at domestic political context, the phrase conservative values anywhere from three to five times as common as liberal values in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, and so on. You don't have to go to Fox News to find now in Fox News it's even higher. But you don't have to go to the conservative media to see this. It's everywhere. This is the way everyone talks about politics. The right has succeeded in actually moving the center of gravity of American political language to the right. Now, liberals of course, are not unaware of this, but I think the problem liberals have had is in assuming that the magic of these words, the power of these words, consisted in the words themselves, that there's something say about the words values that conveys a certain idea, and that what liberals have to do is recapture values that were the V word for themselves. They've been trying to do this for more than 20 years. Geraldine Ferraro, in her vice presidential acceptance speech at the 1984 Democratic convention, says, to those concerned about the strength of American and family values, as I am, I say, we're going to restore those values. I don't know why that hyphen is there. The Carrie Edwards campaign, 20 years later, bills itself as a celebration of American values, and so on. Democrats, in fact, probably use the word values more often than Republicans did during the 2004 campaign. Nonetheless, as I say, when you look at the media, when you look at the way people talk, when you listen to the way people talk about this stuff, value still belongs to the right. And that's because there's no magic in the word values itself. I mean, values in particular. It isn't a word like freedom that's historically been a part of American political discourse. Values was not an important politically important word before the early 1970s. I doubt if it will be an important political word 20 or 30 years from now. If it has a value as a token, if it has a weight as a token, it's because the writers very successfully used this as a kind of file label for a file of clippings. I'll come to this in a moment, but the point is that words like values and elite and liberal and so on don't have meaning in virtue of their dictionary definitions of the frames associated with them, but rather in virtues of the kinds of narratives that they evoke, the stories they trail in their wake. To give an example of how this works, take a word like appeasement. You look this up in the American Heritage Dictionary and it says, the policy of granting concessions to political enemies to maintain peace. Right. That's a good definition. And if you took that word at face, that definition at face value, it's a reasonable description of the policy that both Clinton and Bush have followed, for example, in trying to deal with North Korea. Both policies of appeasement in the dictionary sense of the term. Nobody would ever use the word appeasement to describe either of those policies, because the fact is that appeasement means more than that. When you say the word, you evoke this historical narrative of Hitler and film clips of Hitler saluting of Neville Chamberlain with his droopy mustache, of Churchill glaring balefully over his defiantly over his cigar, of German troops moving into the Sudetenland, and so on. All of that story is implicit in that word, and that's where the action is. Well, similarly, with a word like value values in the plural, the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the principles or standards of a person or society in that sense of the word. The Democrats have them, the Republicans have them, you have them, I have them, everybody has some values or other. But when that word is used in American political discourse, it too evokes a whole set of images. The Ten Commandments monument in Alabama, flag burning, the Pledge of Allegiance, the war on Christmas, and the kids in Texas, Plano, Texas, who were forbidden from wearing red and green to school at Christmas time. And one story that was widely circulated, gay marriage, the woman in England who married a dolphin, which is what will happen if we allow gay marriage to be. And all of these stories, which are routine fare on the cable networks and talk radio and so forth in the press, standing in for this larger arch narrative about an America divided into two nations. The good simple folks of the heartland, the middle Americans of red America, whose personal standards of personal morality and patriotism and religious faith are being ridiculed and traduced by these self important, pretentious, upper middle class, effete Eastern and West coast liberals and so on. This narrative that has dominated the rhetoric of the right in one form or another really since the Nixon Agnew years when the Southern Strategy was first implemented, and that in one way or another, when you listen to the Republican and right wing rhetoric on any issue, from torture to prisoner interrogation to taxes to gay marriage, whatever the issue is, you're going to hear one or another version of this narrative. It's an all purpose narrative that has shaped the way the language that's associated with it. How has the right gotten managed to succeed with this? Well, it's a long story and I won't have that much to say about it today, although there's more in the book. It has a lot to do, and I'll argue this in a moment with the Democrats linguistic and political factlessness. I mean, it isn't as if the right did this without any help from the Democrats. The Democrats have been singularly inept in dealing with political rhetoric. It also has to do with the discipline and coordination of the right. The connections between the right wing think tanks, the Republican Party, the right wing broadcasters, the ability of the right through those connections and through a kind of collective discipline to stay on message. One example I mention in the book, and I can't help repeating here, but repeat here, I took, when I was at Xerox Parc, I took all of the speeches of the first two days of the Republican convention in 1996 and put them in one big file and ran an extraction summarizer that. Julia, I don't know if Julian Kupiak is here. He's at Google now that Julian Kupiak had written on them. Just playing around with the summarizer and so on. And it came up with a speech that could stand in for every Republican speech that's been given over the last 30 years. I mean, it was the perfect Republican speech. It just pulled out because it's looking at frequency. I mean, you all know how those work. It's looking at frequency and so on. We are the Republican Party, a big, broad, diverse and inclusive party. Thank you for being part of this quest and working with us to restore the and so on. When I ran the same thing. I don't have the example here. When I ran the same thing on a file that consisted of all the. Of the Democratic convention, the first day came up with word salad. Why is that? Well, there were just no statistical regularities. The Democrats were here, there, and everywhere, but there were no words that brought certain sentences to the fore as being paradigmatic of the Democratic approach. So the right has been able to stay on message, but the right has also been very successful in instituting a campaign of what you could think of as negative branding of the left and of liberals that's at the heart of this ability to shift. Well, not just to shift the center of gravity of the language, but to change the nature of what political discourse is about in ways that I'll come to in a moment. And because the right has been so successful with this narrative, this faux populist, bogus populist narrative, they've been able to. They've been successful even when the speakers who are delivering that story are not particularly effective. Okay, Ronald Reagan was born to tell this story about the heartland Americans and the effete liberals and so on and so forth. But what's interesting is that this story is effective even when you hear it from characters like John Kyle or Mitch McConnell or Bill Frist, people, speakers who not only don't have much charisma, but have arguably negative charisma, but yet they're very effective in telling this story. And it is, as I say, the song, not the singer, that really puts the right over the top here. Let me give one example of this, which I spent a bunch of time on in the book How Is the Right Trashed the Liberal Label. There was a time when liberalism and the liberal label reigned supreme in American politics. In 1961, the philosopher Charles Frankl wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine in which he said, anyone who today identifies himself as an unmitigated opponent of liberalism cannot inspire to influence on the national political scene, pointing out that even southern Democrats railed about northern liberals, but not liberalism in general. Even McCarthy talked about phony liberals, but left open the possibility that he had nothing against a sincere liberal if ever he he met one. Accompanying that article was this cartoon. I don't know if you can see it, but there are these politicians labeled left wing liberal, right wing liberal, liberal, liberal, middle wing Democrat, and so on, all preparing to go on television and putting makeup on. And the makeup kits bear names like New Liberal Liberal number seven, Liberal, Eyeshadow, and so on. Well, if that cartoon were run 20 years later, those jars would all be full of vanishing creatures. Within 20 years, the Liberal label. At the same time, at the same time this is going on, the word conservative is in complete disrepute. 1949 and for the next 15 years, the Wall Street Journal in 1949 writes an editorial saying, if a banker is described as conservative, most people are more inclined to trust their money to his care. But if a man is described as a conservative in politics, then he's likely to be suspected of wanting to cheat widows and orphans and generally be a bad fellow and so on. In short, conservatism in as much disrepute at that time as liberal came to be within a short period of time. By the 1980s, the word liberal had acquired such negative connotations. It was, as Jonathan reader wrote in 1985, associated with profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility, and sanctimonious such negative implications that Democratic politicians were abandoning the word in droves. Timothy Noah writes in the New York Times in 1986, given the aversion this word inspires in Democratic candidates, future civilizations sifting through the rubble may well conclude that liberal was a euphemism for pederast or serial killer. And by 1988, in his speech to the Republican convention, Ronald Reagan can start saying, it's time, time. It's time to say the dreaded L word. And sticks that label the L word on liberalism, from which it's never entirely recovered. When you Ask liberals nowadays, or you ask politicians nowadays, Democratic politicians, about their affiliation. They'll either sometimes, if they're in a friendly audience, call themselves progressives, or they'll say, oh, I don't believe in labels. Whereas Howard Dean puts, well, if believing in a balanced budget makes you a liberal, then I'm a liberal. They'll pussyfoot around that question. But very. There aren't five people in the Senate who will willingly own up to being liberals nowadays. This is also shown in polls. In polls, around 30 to 35% of Americans describe themselves as conservative. 15 to 20% describe themselves as liberals. The rest is middle of the road or moderate or something like that. This result has been remarkably stable over the last 25 years. People so. And people often take that result to say, well, liberals are only half as common as conservatives in America. Now that's not quite true because when you actually look at positions that voters take on the issues, you see that the skewing is not that two to one skewing that comes to the labels. For example, just to take one example, only 11% of Americans in 2003 believe that the Bush tax cuts would create new jobs, which is after all, a first principle of conservative economic thinking. And in fact, I'll come back to this. But on most issues, most voters take a sort of somewhat left of center position, and large numbers of them take the positions that we associate with liberalism. They just don't own up to the label. One way you can see this, in fact, is if you look at the word liberalism itself in proportion to conservatism. People continue to talk about liberals and conservatives in about the same proportions, but they use the word liberalism much less than they did, apart from that one spike in the Dukakis campaign when this all came to a head. The use of the word liberalism has been declining for the last 20 years because people tend to think of liberalism less and less as a political philosophy. They think rather of liberals as a lifestyle style or personality type, and so on, according to the negative branding campaign that the right and the Republicans have pursued. In fact, what the right have done is to brand. The branding you can think of from a linguistic point of view is just turning the connotations of a word into its denotation, the associations into part of the meaning of the word, so to speak. And this is historically something that often happens with political labels. You think of words like Bolshevik or Tory or fascist or populist and so on. They once denoted a political philosophy or political group. Now they're mostly a matter of Connotations, and this has certainly been true of the Democratic left as well. Words like pinko and bleeding heart and egghead have long histories as attempts to discredit the Democratic left. But this took a new form when the Republicans began to do it in the early 19. The early 1970s, really, when, when the Nixon's Southern Strategy began in earnest, mid-1970s, it had something. Let me skip this. It correlated with an interesting shift in the way Americans thought about their social identities and the language they used to talk about their social identities. As these consumerist terms came to take the place of older terms that denoted social classes and categories, I looked at the. I was interested in the rise of the word lifestyle, which happened quite suddenly at the beginning of the 1970s. In 1967, there were just seven instances of the word lifestyle in the Chicago Tribune. By 1973, there were over 3,000. Right. Boom. This word came out of nowhere, thanks in part to Charles Reich. It was the moment at which words like trendy and yuppie and Gen X, all these sort of marketing categories came into ordinary usage. As a way of describing American categories, the word preppy was redefined. The qualifications for being a preppy were relaxed. From four years at Choate to an afternoon at Abercrombie and Fitch. Blue collar came to be used for, you know, any restaurant with bare brick walls was a blue collar restaurant. And in general, this kind of consumerist categories came to stand in for old categories of class, and the Republicans took advantage of that. This is in characterizing this new distinction between middle Americans and the rest of the country, a distinction that was introduced by Joseph Kraft in 1967. By 1970, Time magazine made Mr. And Mrs. Middle America their persons of the year. And they characterized these groups in terms of their consumer habits. Baton twirling, not Hermann Hesse. They went to Radio City Music hall and not, oh, Calcutta and so forth. And with this as background, the right began to characterize liberals using these consumer categories. The phrase Volvo liberals came in around the late 1970s, a replacement for limousine liberals. The two seem close, but actually they're significantly different. Limousine liberals implies upper class people with a lot of money. Volvo at the time cost about what an Oldsmobile did. It didn't imply a greater income than someone else, but a particular choice. It is, after all, a car from an ugly car from socialist Sweden that people buy just because they think it's safe and. And whose name has a serendipitous gynecological resonance, which explains why Volvo and not Saab probably was given that Line products like white wine and brie and cheese and later cafe latte. Always the light comestibles, the light fluffy ones. So port and Stilton might also be upper middle class taste, but they're too dark and strong to stand in for the image you want to convey of liberals. And it's so developed, this stereotype from which I took the title of my book. This is drawn from a. I tried to get the video to work but I couldn't. So it's drawn from a 30 second ad that the Club for Growth, which is an arch conservative growth that tries to keep conservative, hold conservative feet to the fire, ran during the 2004 Iowa caucuses. You see this couple coming out of a store. The announcer says, what do you think of Howard Dean's plan to raise taxes on families by $1,900 a year? The husband says, what do I think? Well, I think Howard Dean should take his tax hiking, government expanding, latte drinking, sushi eating, Volvo driving, New York Times reading. She says, body piercing, Hollywood loving, left wing freak show back to Vermont where it belongs. Now, if you thought about this, it's demographically a little odd. You have this picture of like Marilyn Manson sitting on his porch in Brattleboro reading the New York Times and laughing so hard at Maureen Dowd's column that he chokes on his unagi cone. It just doesn't, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Nonetheless, it's a very effective way of pulling together that whole nosegay of social, geographical, sexual stereotypes with which the right has successfully branded American liberals. Now it turns out, as I say, it's not even true. It turns out, for instance, that the majority of Brie buyers in America. American Demographics magazine has an article on this. Just so you know that there are footnotes in it. American Demographics magazine points out that the majority of Brie buyers in America are Republicans. Right? Not surprising. I mean, you know, look at the locations, you know, look at the stores where you find Brie and look what's parked outside and there are a lot more Mercedes there and so on. It's not something you find in inner city corner markets and so on. Nonetheless, whoever buys this stuff, it stands in perfectly for this stereotype that the right wants to convey of liberals. I mean, it's soft, it's pale, it's runny, it's French, right? What better, what better product to stand in for the stereotype that the right is trying to. And the right has been very successful with this here. These are just raw numbers which make the case Pretty well look in the press, and this is major papers, but this works for the. So if you just look at the New York Times, Washington Post, wherever you look, look at the press for the phrase working class liberal doesn't exist statistically, it just doesn't exist. You've got plenty of references to middle class liberals. You've got references to working class conservatives, actually more than you have to working class Republicans. But if you're working class and you vote for the Democratic Party, you're a Democrat, not a liberal. You could support. You could oppose the war in Iraq, you could support maintaining Social Security in its present form. You could support extending government health care. You could support raising the minimum wage up and down the line of the positions that we think of as defining liberal positions. But if you can't afford the countertops that go with it, you can't be a liberal. The right has been successful. And this is something, again, the press just does. I don't even think they think about it. It's just when you think of liberal, you think of people in the Berkeley hills or San Francisco or the Peninsula or the west side of Manhattan or how you don't think of people, working people in America as being liberals. They may be Democrats, they're not liberals. That's a kind of stereotyping that's a result of the right successful stereotyping of the label. The same thing holds, by the way, I won't go into it for racial categories. There are no black liberals, there are no Latino liberals. There are no Hispanic liberals in America, though there are plenty of black and African American conservatives to listen to the press. Right. Again, you can be black, you can vote for Democrats, and then you're a Democrat, you're not a liberal. All of this has contributed to this picture that the right has been trying to put together for really since, as I keep saying, the Nixon years of these two nations. That's taken on a new and more intense form in the last six years as it's been characterized in terms of red and blue. It's always interesting when political divisions are put in terms of these basic colors because there's a sense of something basic and uncompromising. The reds and whites of the Russian Revolution, the reds and whites of the English Civil War, the whites and blues of the French Revolution. Always a sense of this absolute distinction. And so you have these people, Matthew Dowd, a very influential political Republican operative, I guess you'd call him, who had a lot to do with this, saying you got 80 to 90% of the country that look at each other as if they were on separate planets. John White, a political scientist who wrote a book about not since the Civil War has the country been so divided. But if you search on not since the Civil War, you'll find a lot of hits for that, for that very quote. People are saying this all the time. And Americans do, in fact, in polls say, yeah, the country's a lot more polarized than it was. I think it's interesting also because, you know, red states keep left, right, you keep right. I don't know if that was a mistake or what somebody was thinking, but Americans do, in fact, believe that the country is more polarized and more basically polarized, certainly, than it was a generation ago and probably a lot of Americans. Yeah. Than since the Civil War. And it's in virtue of the rights campaign to brand liberals and to redraw what were distinctions of class or political ideology as these cultural distinctions according to what we eat and what we drive and so on. Now, in fact, if you ask people, as I say, whether the country's more polarized than it was a generation ago, they say yes. If you then ask them about their attitudes about particular issues, whether it's abortion or taxes or the role of corporations or race or women in American life and so on, they're more together than they have been at any point in the last 25 years. And this is something you see in research that's carried out by people both on the left and the right. Alan Wolfe, a liberal sociologist at Brandeis, writes a book called One Nation, after all, says the majority of Americans long for a sensible center and distrust ideological thinking, and shows that on the basis of extensive interviews in a number of parts of the country, that Americans are on the same page. Mo Fiorina, a Stanford political scientist who's also at the Hoover Institution on the right, writes a book called the Culture War, the Myth of Divided America, in which he says, the simple truth is that there is no culture war in the United States. No battle for the soul of America rages and documents that, with extensive references to polls and so on and so forth, which show that the majority of Americans are in the center, actually a little to the left of center on most of these issues, and small numbers are on the far left and far right. Now, that's not something you see if you look at Congress or at the media or at what Fiorina calls the political class, the people who are actively engaged in politics. They tend to be much more polarized in their attitudes, but they represent only a tiny proportion of the electorate and the whole idea of a culture war. In fact, the second you start redrawing those electoral maps with a little more subtle graphics, the red blue distinction becomes much more evanescent. But the whole idea of a culture war really isn't true. In fact, the idea that these basic demographic distinctions, consumer distinctions, divide America into two nations simply isn't true. The differences that people talk about are fairly slight and superficial. I mean, the idea that we're more divided since any time, since the Civil War, because I like to listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd in my Chevy Avalanche and you're listening to Radiohead and your Prius, you know, that isn't the kind of division that kept us apart in the Civil War. You can go up to Sonoma county to Infineon Raceway and see nascar. And people do, and they're rooting. I went up there with my daughter and we were holding glasses of Chardonnay as we look for Richard Petty come out of the pit area. And so are a lot of other people. If there hadn't been a Navy flyover, you would have thought you were at a Kerry rally. The Leading I've got a lot of examples in the book. The Leading the number one radio AM radio station in Nashville is an AOR adult oriented rock. That's Billy Joel, right? The first country station's actually only third. Will and Grace is the number one show among Republican women, which led, although it's a show with a gay theme, which led the Republicans to buy time on this show because Karl Rove is no fool. And so on. The idea that there is this deep cultural divide, like the idea that there's deep political divide, just as a creation of the right. Though lately you begin to see, and I could talk about this in the question period, lately you begin to see Democrats as well and liberals as well buying into this, saying, oh well, yeah, liberal and conservative reflect these two basic deep models of the family. For example, it all comes, as I say, as a part of this effort to rewrite these basic distinctions of class and ideology as these superficial cultural distinctions. David Brooks, conservative commentator from the New York Times, writes, americans don't see society as a layer cake with the rich on top of the middle class beneath them and the working class and underclass at the bottom. They see society as a high school cafeteria with their community at one table and other communities at other tables. All of this adds up to a terrain incredibly inhospitable to class based politics. Well, that's not the truth of it, but it's certainly the picture that the right has been working for a long time to put over and in the course of things. And this is another story I tell a couple of chapters of the book. They've redefined the basic vocabulary of American political life. Elitism, for example. Elite used to be a word that most often occurred in the neighborhood of words like corporate, financial, business and so on. That's how it was in American newspapers 25 years ago. It's how it still is in British newspapers, left, right and center, even Rupert Murdoch's times. The phrases like commercial elite and corporate elite financially far more common than media elite. For instance in British newspapers in the US and even in again the so called liberal media. That's not true. Media elite, academic elite, Hollywood elite, more common now than business elite, sometimes by a factor of two or three to one. Business elite, corporate elite and so on. A shift in the meaning of that word. So that the elites are people like people like us who live on the coasts and drive whatever we drive and eat whatever we eat and so on. Not the people say who own Walmart. They just don't figure in this picture at all. Populist in the same way has been redefined. Looking through the press recently, I've seen the word applied to now. There was a time when populist in America meant people who took the side of working people against what were then the elites in the traditional sense of the term nowadays. In recent years I've seen the term applied to Steven Spielberg, that's Oscar de la Renta, the middle of the top, who came out with a mid price fashion line. Donald Trump, of course, a well known populist. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill O'Reilly and of course George Bush, who Peggy Noonan explains is the triumph of the seemingly average American man. There's nothing lemonade on the porch overlooking the links at the country club about Mr. Bush. He isn't Mr. Bush, he isn't smooth. He actually has some of the roughness and resentments of the self made man. You're not going to see Bush and self made man in the same sentence an awful lot, even in the Wall Street Journal. But. But nonetheless, this picture of Bush as an ordinary guy whom people could talk to in their barbershop, who campaigns as a populist because he uses buses is a very easy one to make precisely because this word has been drained of its class content and turned into simply a cultural term that implies a certain down home style. All of this contributes to a view of political identities as no longer a difference in philosophy about economics or politics, but rather differences in lifestyle, differences in personality. You begin to see you track that phrase, the liberal or conservative mindset. It begins to take off in the early 90s and become much more, much more common or even political genders. You listen to these talk shows and you often have the feeling of listening to kind of classical arguments between men and women, you libs, you liberals, in the way in which people used to say, you gals. And I actually did a Google group search on that, and I could talk a bit about how you can and can't use Google numbers on these, but you libs and you liberals is three to four times as common as you conservatives or uconns, suggesting an interesting difference in attitudes. What should liberals do? And just a few remarks at the end to suggest some of the things that some of the points that I think are important. First of all, in understanding that it's not about words, you have to understand. It's not about either trying simply to assume words like values and the assumption you can neutralize them, or bailing out on words that have acquired negative connotations, like liberal. When I listen to the way liberals talk about being liberal, saying, there's nothing wrong with the progressive label, it's a fine label. But when you bail out on the liberal label or disown it, I think liberals think of themselves in something like the way Ford did when in 1960, they introduced the Edsel line. Not many people here remember that, but it was a new car. Looked like a Chrysler sucking a lemon, someone said, and it was a complete disaster. And Ford bailed out on the Edsel and kept making the same car, but as a Ford Galaxy, right? Just selling it as a Galaxy. And it did fine for another five years before they changed the body style. And I sometimes think liberals are doing the same thing when they adopt the word progressive. You know, we'll just change the name and nobody will notice it's the same car. That has allowed conservatives to define the L word and move it increasingly to the left in some of the ways I've talked about. In fact, one of the striking things you see is that liberal has now outflanked leftist in some context. You'll see a reference. I saw a reference one South Carolina legislator talking about another legislature legislator as one of the most liberal leftists we have in the house of. In the legislature. Now, 25 years ago, that would have sounded dyslexic because you could be one of the most leftist liberals, but not vice versa. But in a lot of contexts liberal is actually outflanked leftists. So I think liberals have to own up to the L word. It's etched in the split screens of the American media and they have to own up with it even if they want to call themselves progressives as well. Second of all, liberals have to rediscover the populist, the true populist narratives that brought Democrats to the ball in the first place. Bill Clinton was very successful with this in 1992. Certainly I'm tired of seeing people who work hard and play by the rules get the shaft. Could be a miniature movie summary, capsule summary from the TV page. Stands in for a whole movie. You know what that movie's about. And it worked very well for Clinton. It worked well for Gore in 2000 after the convention when he started talking about the people versus the powerful. Until a couple of months later he got caught up in a whole bunch of other problems. Abandoned that way of talking. But his numbers went way up when he started talking about the people versus the powerful. It worked for John Edwards in 2004, who went from being an obscure first term Southern Senator to coming damn close to getting the Democratic nomination. Might very well have gotten it had the Democrats not felt that they required somebody with medals in his lapel to go up against Bush national security. But again, with this traditional populist narrative, that isn't to say that it's going to take the same form as the narratives that Harry Truman and Roosevelt told the middle class is a much more important constituency for the Democratic Party. The issues are different now. But you can also say that whether you're looking at the fear, fears about health care, about pension security, about rising housing prices, so on up and down the line, the middle class and the working class have more in common now than at any time in the last 25 or 30 years. Robert Reich has made that observation. I think it's a good one. Finally, well, what's the importance of this? The importance is to restore the identity of the Democratic Party itself. As I say, the Democrats do very well on individual issues. People give them the advantage on issue after issue after issue. Right now they're even giving them the advantage, or at least they've neutralized the Republicans advantage on national security because the Republicans have been such a bunch of bozos. Nonetheless, the party itself doesn't have the kind of clear image that the Republicans do. Recent polls, if you ask the X's, have a clear set of policies for the country. Republicans out poll Democrats. The X's know what they stand for. The Republicans mightily out poll Democrats. People do not have a sense that the Democrats know what they stand for, and the Democrats up to now haven't done much by way of addressing that problem. I think they're hoping that they can make the 2006 election simply a referendum on the Republicans and on Bush. They may very well succeed with that, at least at the extent of taking control of the House by a narrow margin. But it isn't going to address this more deep problem of political identity. There's another point that makes I don't even I won't make this a cute point, but I'll skip it. Finally, let me make it clear that when I talk about language and the importance of these narratives, I'm not suggesting that the Democrats problems are essentially linguistic or that any essentially linguistic strategy will be sufficient to restore the parties to political parity in this country. Again, an automobile example. You think about General Motors attempts to restore, to redeem the Oldsmobile line in the 1990s as sales were going down, and so on, and they kept coming up with new names for these Oldsmobiles, the Alera, the Allegra, the Aurora, the Sierra, the Achieva, and so on and so forth. They kept coming up with ads that said, this is not your father's Oldsmobile, and so on. And you know, people listened to the names, they looked at the car and they said, you know what? That's my father's Oldsmobile. So it's clear whether you look at commerce or politics, that names and slogans and wordsmithing, however clever, isn't going to do the job if there isn't a product. On the other hand, we all know examples of products that were gangbusters products, but because they couldn't tell a coherent or persuasive story about themselves, weren't able to put themselves over in the marketplace. So I don't think of this as I think the idea of language or policies is a false choice. I think the Democrats need both. So let me stop with that, and thank you.