Notes on political vocabulary

Most political disagreements are conducted in words that have already decided the question. This isn't usually deliberate. Terms accumulate freight over decades of use, and by the time they reach an argument they carry conclusions that nobody in the room has agreed to.

What follows is a short list of the ones I find most load-bearing. The exercise in each case is the same: replace the term with what it's actually asserting, and see whether the argument still works.

"Natural"

Almost always doing evaluative work while claiming to be descriptive. A natural arrangement is one that arose without deliberate design — which tells you about its history and nothing whatever about whether it's good. Feudalism was natural in this sense. So was cholera.

The word survives because it borrows the authority of inevitable and the warmth of healthy while committing to neither. When someone says an arrangement is natural, the useful question is: natural as opposed to what, and why does that difference matter? Usually the answer is that the alternative would require someone to decide something, and the speaker prefers that no one does.

"Common sense"

A claim about the speaker's confidence, presented as a claim about the proposition. It asserts that a position needs no defence, which is convenient, since offering none is exactly what the phrase permits.

What makes it slippery is that sometimes it's right — some things really don't need arguing. But the phrase is used most heavily precisely where a position is contested, which is where it's least warranted. The tell is that "common sense" almost never appears in front of something everyone agrees with. Nobody says it's common sense that fraud should be illegal.

"Freedom"

The classic case, and Isaiah Berlin's distinction remains the most useful tool for it: freedom from interference versus freedom to actually do the thing. These frequently conflict, and almost every substantive dispute about liberty is a dispute about which sense is at stake.

What the single word conceals is that both readings are always available, so both sides can claim the term without either noticing they've stopped talking about the same thing. The repair is mechanical and it works: free from what, and free to do what? Every argument I've seen improve did so within a sentence of someone asking.

"The people"

Does an enormous amount of work with almost no content. It can mean the electoral majority, the total population, the subset the speaker identifies with, or a normative construct — what the population would want if properly informed — which is unfalsifiable by design.

The rhetorical value comes from sliding between these. A policy supported by 51% is "what the people want." Opposition to it is not the people disagreeing; it's a faction, or an elite, or a special interest. The category is defined so that it cannot contain dissent, which means it has stopped describing anyone.

"Extreme"

Purely relational, and pretends not to be. Extreme means far from the centre, and the centre is wherever the current distribution of opinion happens to sit — which is a fact about a population at a time, not about the merits of a position.

This matters because the word is used as though it were an argument. It isn't one. Abolition was extreme. So was universal suffrage. The distance of a view from the median tells you about its political prospects and precisely nothing about whether it's correct.

The honest version is usually available and usually stronger: this position is held by few people, or this position would require changes we're not prepared for, or this position is wrong, and here is why. Each of those can be argued with. "Extreme" cannot, which is the point of using it.

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The common thread is that all five are conclusion-bearing. They don't describe a position; they deliver a verdict on it, in a form that looks like description and so escapes having to be defended.

I want to be careful about what this does and doesn't establish. It's not a claim that people deploy these terms in bad faith — mostly they don't, and the freight comes with the word rather than being loaded by the speaker. Nor is it a claim that a suitably neutral vocabulary is available. It isn't. Every political term worth using is contested, and demanding definitions before every conversation is its own kind of obstruction.

The claim is narrower: when an argument turns on one of these words, that's the place to look. Substitute the literal content and one of two things happens. Either the argument survives — in which case you've clarified it, and the word was harmless shorthand — or it doesn't, in which case the word was carrying the whole thing.

That test is cheap, and it works about as well on your own writing as on anyone else's. Which is the uncomfortable part, and also the reason to run it.