July 16, 2006
 
In Politics, the Right Words Rule, Linguist Says
 
By Sam McManis
Sacramento Bee
 
San Francisco, CA (HNN) -- Geoffrey Nunberg wants to talk, which is hardly shocking. He is a linguist, after all.
 
And Nunberg, best known as a commentator for National Public Radio's "Fresh Air," has a lot to say about how conservatives --with help from the media -- have dominated debate by twisting political language to their advantage and using cultural caricatures to turn opponents into effete "elites" out of touch with core American "values."
 
It's all neatly summed up in the long and provocative title of his new book, "Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberals Into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show."
 
But before starting, Nunberg must get caffeinated. He steps into the kitchen of his home in the Noe Valley -- a neighborhood so left-leaning that Ralph Nader outpolled George Bush in the last presidential election -- and cranks up his cappuccino machine. In minutes, it gurgles out a frothy elixir into an oversize porcelain cup emblazoned with the logo from Zabar's, New York's trendy epicurean establishment.
 
His interviewer just wants water, but Nunberg doesn't go to the tap. Rather, he brings sparkling Pellegrino, properly chilled.
 
All that's missing from this domestic scene of liberal privilege that would make Bill O'Reilly sneer is a standard- issue Volvo in the driveway.
 
"No Volvo," Nunberg says, laughing. "It's an Audi. That's a Republican car."
 
So, see. This broad-brush depiction of liberals, so effectively wielded by the right, is nothing but a cultural myth. Uh-huh. Sure. The lack of a Volvo proves it.
 
Nunberg, who finds the whole stereotyping issue mildly amusing, certainly fits the classic "liberal elite" label. He's a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who contributes to the New York Times' Week in Review section when not chatting it up with NPR diva Terry Gross. He's even been asked to speak to the Democratic Senate Caucus about the left's language problem.
 
But note, too, that Nunberg is no stranger to red-state entertainment. George Jones CDs dominate his music collection. He and his daughter have attended a NASCAR race. OK, it was in Sonoma County, where fans were sipping Napa Valley chardonnay, but still . . .
 
The point: Don't get lulled into a red-vs.-blue, us-vs.-them cultural clash. Nunberg says it's merely a ploy, albeit an extremely successful one, of conservatives to marginalize liberals and keep the balance of power safely on the right of the political spectrum. They've done it by defining the terms of our national discourse. Whereas once-abstract words such as "elite," "values," "government" and even "liberal" had far less politically charged meanings, the right has turned them all into synonyms for out-of-touch, far-left policies that hurt the country.
 
And they've also done it, he posits, by renaming -- "branding," they call it in advertising-- specific issues to conjure positive or negative images that serve the right's agenda. So the "estate tax" is redubbed the "death tax," Social Security "private accounts" are replaced with "personal accounts" and the civil rights-era term "colorblind" has been co-opted to become a refrain against affirmative action.
 
"When somebody else owns your own name (liberals), you're in trouble," Nunberg says. "And the right defines 'liberal' now. They've made liberal go from a belief in the role of government in the economy and social life to what it is now _ a synonym for a certain lifestyle and set of reflexive attitudes and taste.
 
"As a result, people don't perceive the Democrats as standing for anything. To take back the language, you have to take back the narrative. But the real problem is the ground-level language -- values, elite and liberal --that don't define how people feel about a certain issue but shape the way people think about politics itself."
 
Nunberg comes at political language from a liberal perspective, but even some on the right say he has a point. Conservative columnist William Safire recently wrote in the New York Times that Nunberg "writes about the political language with partisan gusto, bemoaning the failure of the left."
 
This conservative takeover of political discourse didn't happen overnight, Nunberg says. And he claims it would not have happened without the help of the media. Furthermore, liberals themselves have meekly allowed the right to steal the vocabulary and were as oblivious of it happening as lobsters failing to notice that the pot was slowly heating up until it was too late.
 
Nunberg says the right was cunning in saddling the mainstream press with "liberal" baggage. It's had the effect, he says, of diluting the news and making the press bend over backward to appear evenhanded.
 
One example is how many newspapers -- Nunberg routinely conducts exhaustive database searches -- started replacing the term "estate tax" with "death tax" after conservatives (and the Bush administration) started using the new phrase.
 
His research also shows that the press "identifies politicians as 'mainstream Republicans' four times as often as it identifies them as 'mainstream Democrats.' "
 
As for the liberal-bias charge conservatives make against the mainstream media, Nunberg points to data showing that the New York Times and Los Angeles Times use the term "liberal" almost exclusively for middle-class whites. He says the phrase "working-class liberal" is almost never used.
 
"Liberalism is treated less as a political credo than as the outward expression of a particular social identity," he says.
 
Nunberg believes the media have been "cowed" by conservatives and, in an effort to appear impartial, will "shy away from using any language that might appear" nonpartisan.
 
"It's not editorial policy," he says. "That's just how everyone talks."
 
The media are merely an accessory to the right's co-opting of the language, though. Nunberg, in his book, is brutally critical of the ineffectual left. He offers no tricky linguistic solutions, but he hopes that pointing out the shortcomings will awaken the left to the problem. "If the right can (shape the debate) with an ersatz populism," he says, "surely the Democrats can do the same thing with a genuine one."
 
At times, Nunberg comes across as more pundit than academic. In his 20 years in the public eye as an author and "Fresh Air" commentator, he has become increasingly political. Nunberg says he is just tapping into the zeitgeist, which is why he mixes in heaping helpings of Bill O'Reilly and Jon Stewart into his media diet.
 
"Language is rarely important for its own sake," he says. "Yeah, we (linguists) do these studies of curious words, but the real interest is how language gives you a mirror on the political or social attitudes you can't get anywhere else.
 
"And the media are a big part of that. There's been a big transformation of media from information providers to entertainment sources. I mean, calling Ann Coulter a political analyst is like calling Simon Cowell an arts critic."
 
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