“Populist”: An Epithet of Modern Propaganda

For an update on naming “black” Americans more precisely than by presumed continent of origin, click here.

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What’s a good litmus test for telling whether a print reporter is in the oligarchs’ pockets? (Except for PBS and Rachel Maddow, most video reporters are already irredeemably in the oligarchs’ pockets, so we need no litmus test for them.)

Just count the number of times a reporter uses the term “populist” or its cognates. Then count how many times he or she uses term to describe followers of Trump versus followers of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. The larger the first number, and the more equal the latter two, the deeper in the oligarchs’ pockets the reporter dwells.

Why is this so? The answer is simple. As used today, the word “populist” means everything and nothing. When reporters use it to describe both Trump and his most committed opponents, that fact is clear. But “populist” also has a decidedly negative connotation: it’s the next best thing to labeling a pol and/or his followers parts of an unruly mob.

Oligarchs can’t tar Elizabeth Warren as “socialist” anymore because she has forthrightly declared herself a “capitalist.” They can and do tar Bernie Sanders with that epithet. Most of his followers either don’t care, or they long for the mild democratic socialism of Scandinavia. But the oligarchs can discourage more people from joining Sanders’ crusade by comparing a hypothetical, future democratic-socialist-leaning America with Maduro’s Venezuela. The comparison is absurd, but it’s effective propaganda nevertheless.

In its etymology, the term “populist” is much, much simpler than this. All it means is “of or pertaining to the people, or working and advocating in their interest.”

The word derives from the Latin word “populus,” meaning simply “people.” The ancient Romans often used it in the phrase “Senatus Populusque Romanus” (“the Senate and the People of Rome”) or its abbreviation “SPQR.” That was the legend they used to stamp their public documents and proclamations. (In Latin, the suffix “que” at the end of a word was the same as the conjunction et or “and” before it.)

What could be more democratic (with a small “d”) than stressing the authority of the people and their elected representatives? Yet the oligarchs want you, when you read or hear the term “populist” today, to think “lock and load, the Trumpian mob or the Commies are coming, and they’re pretty much the same thing.”

Using the term “populist” for both Trumpets and followers of Sanders and Warren is just factually wrong. There is no rational basis for comparing the goals, plans and programs of the two camps. Trumpism is not about the people and never was. It has been, is, and will be all about Trump himself. Sanders’ and Warren’s campaigns, in contrast, are nothing about themselves and all about the people. Specifically, they worry about the great mass of middle-class Americans that comprises the backbone of this nation but has been hammered into submission and stagnation for two generations while our law, policy and culture made the oligarchs super-rich.

In a way, the “flexibility” of the word “populist” recalls the word “democracy” and its cognates as used on the international stage. Kim Jong Un calls his absolute tyranny “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” The word doesn’t appear in our nation’s title, but we all claim it as a descriptive.

If people use the same word to describe North Korea and our own imperfect democracy, can it have any real meaning? What about using “populist” to describe the governance of people as diametrically opposed in goals, methods, means, restraint and culture as Trumpets and supporters of Warren or Sanders?

If the word “populist” came from something like a small-d “democrat,” then there’s no question which camp, Trump’s or Sanders’/Warren’s, best fits its meaning. No one in the latter camp shouts “Lock Her Up!”, wants to rip immigrant kids from their parents in order to discourage immigration, habitually bashes and disrespects racial and ethnic minorities, or applauds giving $1.5 trillion in tax breaks mostly to the rich and big corporations, rather than using it to rebuild our dilapidated infrastructure and provide good, non-outsourceable jobs for our middle class.

In fact, the myriad deep and grave distinctions between the two camps is precisely what the 2020 election is all about. It’s also a motivation for the impeachment process, which seeks to remove a supreme leader who has worked assiduously (assuming he’s worked consistently at anything) to rip power from Congress, our superb expert bureaucracy, and the people and put it all in his own unstable hands as president.

So when a print medium or a reporter calls both Trumpets and the followers of Sanders or Warren “populists,” let alone in the same story or paragraph, his or her goal is clear. It’s to get you to see the two camps as equivalent, dangerous mobs.

The goal is to scare you and get you to vote for someone too old (like Biden) or too anodyne (like Klobuchar), who will likely leave the oligarchs alone on their economic thrones, from which they can control us, rule us and propagandize us some more. The oligarchs and their lackeys are subtle and clever, and words are weapons in their hands.

Endnote: Turning Good Words into Epithets

As I’ve noted in several posts, including this one and this one, right-wing propagandists in America have mastered the art of turning once-good, descriptive words into political epithets. I call their skill the art of “applied philology,” i.e., applying the science of words and their meanings to pre-determined ends.

Applied philology is to propaganda and reality distortion as physics is to engineering. It’s the underlying science that allows grave falsehoods to become implanted as “reality” in the minds of people unaccustomed to thinking abstractly, i.e., most of us. It’s the primary method by which the GOP and the right wing have transformed the US, in a mere two generations (since Reagan), from a generous, cohesive, cooperative and egalitarian society into the oligarchs’ playground.

Propaganda organs like Fox, and subtler ones in our mainstream media, use applied philology to influence and distort our politics and culture in ways that Caesar, Hitler, Stalin and Mao never imagined. And our modern Internet, especially social media, allows them to recruit useful idiots to their cause by the millions, often unwittingly.

Unfortunately, applied philology mostly goes over the heads of liberal intellectuals, who are accustomed to thinking in terms of abstractions rather than labels. But as applied to ordinary voters who decide elections, it might be the most powerful force in politics since Caesar invented “bread and circuses.”

That’s why everyone who loves democracy must stay on constant guard against this sort of word theft. That’s why I, a writer’s son with faith in brevity, try to use “African-American” instead of “black.” At seven syllables, the longer phrase loses the brevity race badly. But the word “black” is false in so many ways it’s hard to enumerate them.

All “African-Americans” are not black in color. Many are as white as I, or nearly so, and “pass” for white in everyday life. Just like the rest of us and America as a whole, they’re a true “rainbow.”

But the word “black” in this context is not just chromatically wrong. It’s genetically wrong, lumping millions of people from highly diverse racial, ethnic, cultural and geographic backgrounds into a single class. Worse yet, it recalls the oppressive “one-drop rule” of the racist South, which subjected anyone with “one drop” of black “blood” to a lifetime of slavery or Jim-Crow discrimination and oppression.

From a simple scientific-genetic point of view, let alone the perspective of racial justice, nothing could be more absurd. So I try to swallow my lust for brevity and use the longer term, only occasionally putting “black” in quotes where brevity seems essential.

Is this “political correctness” or bending over backwards? I don’t think so. It’s simple accuracy and faith in reality. Not all “blacks” are black, and assuming they are recalls the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow, their all-too-recent legal foundation, and the dark shadow of four centuries of counterfactual racial oppression that still chills us all.

The moral of this story is that words matter. Those of us who oppose the oligarchs’ shadow rule and want a thriving, generous, egalitarian society have to monitor carefully how the oligarchs’ stooges steal words and subvert them to the oligarchs’ ends. (We did that well by substituting the word “progressive” for the word “liberal,” which right wing propagandists had distorted in their hall of mirrors. Who can oppose progress?)

Now we have to work on distinguishing the egalitarian utopia of Sanders and Warren from the corrupt, top-down, Caligula-like empire that Trump’s America is becoming. If both are “populist,” then good and evil are the same.

As for our still-bleeding racial divide, we must swallow a seven-syllable neutral substitute for a one-syllable word that reeks of historical injustice and factual inaccuracy. At least we must do so until the people so long and unfortunately labeled themselves come up with a better one-syllable description, which emphasizes our common humanity and avoids inadvertently validating our nation’s dismal racial history.

Footnote: The term “African-American” itself can be inaccurate. There are many Africans (mostly Muslims in North Africa) who are as white as I. Yet their descendants in America don’t fit the term “African-American” as used today.

Today the term has come to mean an American of non-white African descent. It has the advantages of avoiding the gross chromatic and genetic inaccuracy of “black,” not to mention its historical baggage. It also recognizes that—but for four centuries of near-continuous legal and cultural oppression—African-Americans are in the same class as other hyphenated Americans, like “Italian-Americans” and “Jewish-Americans.” Some day, we can hope, all these distinctions will fade into history, and we can all call ourselves simply “people,” if not “populists” in the original Roman sense.

Update (11/15/19): “Blacks” as Real Hyphenated Americans

How might we perceive African-Americans if we hyphenated them as we do whites, by their country and culture of heritage, rather than a whole continent? Wouldn’t that tell us more about each of them individually? Does the bare fact that one’s forebears evolved biologically in a sunny, equatorial climate requiring better protection against sunburn and skin cancer really tell us much about his or her culture or character as a person?

Let’s take a look at a few real individuals and see how a more nuanced approach might work. Colin Powell contributed mightily to our nation as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of State. He avoided the folly of invading Baghdad in Gulf I, and he defused a serious diplomatic crisis with China while at State. In a different America not so hog-tied by racial stereotypes, he might have been our first “black” president. He’s a Jamaican-American on both sides.

Kamala Harris is young enough yet (and talented enough) to become our second (or maybe first) female president. She’s a Jamaican-(East)-Indian American. Could it be that Jamaica’s culture of strong families, which Powell describes in his autobiography My American Journey, is partly responsible for both his and Harris’ success?

Then there’s family origins. Barack Obama is descended from an African tribal leader. His grandfather on his father’s side was “a respected chieftain [of the Kenyan Luo tribe], known as one of the first in his Lake Victoria village to befriend British colonialists, learn English and adopt their style of dress.” Could it be that our best president since JFK, maybe since FDR, was born to rule, just like FDR and our other wealthy aristocrats?

One of the many tragedies of our naming convention for “black” people is that it’s willfully blind to their individual heritage, both national and familial. For descendants of American slaves, that’s an inevitable consequence of our original sin of slavery, which forbade nearly all slaves from learning to read and write.

How can you maintain a family history if you can’t read or write? if the ruling culture treated your ancestors as property and didn’t much care where it stole them from? As talented and rich a person as Oprah Winfrey couldn’t have discovered her own ancestry in West Africa until the advent of DNA sequencing.

We can’t replay the past and correct four centuries of white evil retroactively. But maybe we can start treating “blacks” in the United States today better by labeling them, as we do whites, with their heritage as people, including nation or region, culture and class. Isn’t lumping them all together by continent of presumed origin just another dismal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow?

Thus does the study of words—applied philology—lead us to yet another (of many) good reasons to pay reparations to descendants of American slaves. The very act of enslaving their ancestors, coupled with forbidding them to speak their native tongues or learn to read and write ours, deprived the slaves’ descendants of an ethnic or cultural history and any knowledge of or pride in it. Surely that deprivation, which rolled down the generations to the present day, is as worthy of just compensation as the theft of their ancestors’ labor and personhood for up to two and a half centuries of slavery and another century of Jim Crow.

Yes, only today’s diehard racists and white supremacists are personally guilty of these crimes against humanity, but our culture and our nation committed them and benefitted from them. The longstanding debts due to theft of labor, personhood, and family history will fester until paid, as will the many pathologies of a society that refuses to come to grips with its historical responsibilities honestly.

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