This is a really interesting (if depressing) paper about politically motivated manipulation of language. Here's the abstract:
This article takes off from Wittgenstein’s observation that “When language games change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change” (Wittgenstein 1969, §65), and Murdoch’s related observation that “We cannot over-estimate the importance of the concept-forming words we utter to ourselves and to others. This background of our thinking and feeling is always vulnerable” (Murdoch 2003, 260). I want to show that these two sentences contain an accurate observation about how our uses of words, and more importantly, how shifts in our uses of words, partake in transforming the moral landscape itself. Taking these two lessons to heart enables us to see more clearly that political and moral changes in public opinion are not simply rooted in people changing their opinions but must be traced back to conceptual changes that a community has “accepted”, as it were, unwarily. I discuss two examples of how the undercurrent of language has been altered with rather massive effects on the more familiar and visible level of “moral discourse”: the alt-right movement in Sweden, and political election strategies in Sweden.
Interestingly enough, I had an aversive reaction to this paper much like yours to Hamilton's book review. That is because I know too much about 1) Swedish political history, and 2) empirical research in political science and social psychology on the causal chains leading to voting decisions, not to feel that the paper sweeps under the carpet more than one consideration that is extremely relevant. I will limit myself to a couple of examples.
ReplyDelete"During most of the post-war era, Sweden was governed by the Social Democrats. The exceptional elections of right-wing governments (in 1976 and 1991) both took place during major international crises."
First, I'm unaware of there having been any major international crisis in 1976.
Second, psephological research has shown pretty much unequivocally that the 1976 Swedish election was clinched primarily by nuclear power having become a source of political cleavage, with a significant tranche of voters deserting the Social Democrats due to their pro-nuclear stance, and secondly by a succession of several incidents that did serious reputational damage to the Social Democrats. (One of those was a group of Finnish Social Democrats being arrested in Sweden for smuggling money which they had received secretly from a German trade union through the treasurer of the Swedish party; another was a trade union leader holidaying in fascist Spain, which the trade union movement had declared a boycott of; a third one was a beloved children's author publishing a satirical story about high marginal tax rates.)
Third, the major crisis there was in Sweden in 1991 was not international, but national: a financial crisis. But that had been caused indirectly by the outgoing Social Democrat government's having carried out a poorly handled deregulation of the mortgage market, with results much like the 2007 subprime crisis in the US.
The first example I want to draw attention to concerns certain political strategies developed by the largest conservative party in Sweden, Moderaterna (The Moderates), ahead of the 2006 general election. [...] Clearly, the will of the people and the will of the right-wing parties were on a collision course. Of course, the right-wing alliance won the election. How? Well, by intentionally transforming the conceptual landscape [...].
ReplyDeleteThis completely omits any discussion of alternative explanations. For one, it refuses to acknowledge that voters may vote for a party whose platform they're perfectly aware of, and central planks of which they disagree with, because something else takes precedence in their personal order of priorities (their welfare function, as economists would call it).
Judging by survey data, the Social Democrats lost the 2006 election basically because they went into the election at an angle that did not manage to tell a vivid enough causal story about how the economic good times were due to the left's being in power. What collapsed was not the voters' ability to tell the platforms of the left and the right apart (as the paper confidently claims, without giving a single data point in support), but the voters' willingness to see, first, that the economy was in such satisfactory shape as it looked to be on paper, and second, inasmuch it was, then what it was about the left that had enabled this. During the campaign, media airtime was in fact very heavily dominated by a single issue the paper is completely silent about: the right's claim that unemployment was significantly higher than the official statistics showed. That was a straightforward empirical claim, not one "transforming the conceptual landscape", and the right's defence of it was simply convincing to more voters than the left's attempted rebuttals of it.
For Sweden, fortunately, we have a time series of voters' responses at election time to requests to place the various parties on a left-right scale from 1 (extreme left) to 10 (extreme right). In 2006, the Moderates' average rating was 8.4, while it had been 8.8 at the time of the previous election in 2002. So they actually did manage to shift the perception of themselves to the left, as the paper claims, but only by 4 percentage points. That is simply not enough to clinch the election, considering that there was still a humongous gap between the Moderates' 8.4 and the Social Democrats' 3.6 (unchanged from the previous election).
The paper reflects a worldview in which Sweden is somehow leftist by default, and when it fails to do so on occasion, this can only be through some sort of oversight. But of the three election defeats for the left, 1976 had little to do with any left/right cleavage at all: there was at least one pro-nuclear and at least one anti-nuclear party to choose from on both the left and the right. 1991 was a rejection of the left for having carried out, very much in public, the same kind of failed policies which the paper ironically describes the right of only having managed to shove down the throats of Swedes on the sly. And 2006 was the result of a campaigning failure by the left, but due mainly to factors other than the one the tunnel vision of the paper focuses on.
The second half of the paper, on the strategies of the alt-right in Sweden, is much better, by the way. But what frustrates me is precisely the way in which it goes to waste by being coupled with the first half, which is as propagandistic at its worst as the politics it purports to diagnose is at its worst.
It's the second half that I thought was particualrly interesting. But I didn't know all this about Swedish politics, and I'm glad I do now.
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