“False collectives — what Americans call ‘weasel words’ — poison the language we use to talk about public affairs by cobbling together spurious majorities”, writes Roger Kerr in Policy, the quarterly review from New Zealand’s The Centre for Independent Studies. I have never heard of the phrase ‘weasel word’, which Kerr attributes to anti-collectivist social philosopher Friedrich Hayek (The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism), who wrote:
. . . it has in fact become the most harmful instance of what, after Shakespeare’s ‘I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs’ (As You Like It, II, 5), some Americans call a ‘weasel word’. As a weasel is alleged to be able to empty an egg without leaving a visible sign, so can these words deprive of content any term to which they are prefixed while seemingly leaving them untouched. A weasel word is used to draw the teeth from a concept one is obliged to employ, but from which one wishes to eliminate all implications that challenge one’s ideological premises.
While I was drawn to this article because I share its apparent bias against the tyranny of the majority and am interested in an analysis of how our language contributes to that tyranny, this is really a stalking horse for a tirade against big government. His biases are clearly Republican. For example, I was struck by this passage:
A good example comes from the United States in the mid-1990s. In 1994, a new Republican-dominated Congress thought it had a clear mandate to move towards a balanced budget. It duly put up proposals to reduce the growth rate of some welfare entitlement programmes. But no sooner had the proposals been passed than President Clinton vetoed them, invoking the support of a new majority opposing them. Which did US citizens want? A balanced budget or guaranteed entitlement levels? They wanted both. The ‘will of the people’ may be systematically ambiguous on the decisions that governments make on a daily basis.
He does not note that the dilemma he poses was only a dilemma within Republican ideology, and that Clinton’s administration did in fact balance the budget without gutting entitlements as drastically as Republicans called for (although Clinton was by no stretch of the imagination a friend of the welfare state, and his welfare ‘reform’ platform was designed to appeal to the Right).
In warning against the ‘we’ word, as Kerr concludes, because “despite its apparently communitarian connotations, it so often portends a weakening rather than a strengthening of social cohesion”, he is a bellwether of the increasingly fractious state of modern political discourse in the neo-con-dominated late-20th century US. One of the ongoing tactics of neo-con agit-prop is to accuse their opponents of disenfranchising them and threatening social cohesion. Essentially, the concept of a ‘spurious majority’ only makes sense if you do not accept the notion of an implicit ‘social contract’. However, Kerr, who is the executive director of the New Zealand Business Roundtable, may in fact be accurate if we take his argument to imply that the notion of the social contract is outmoded in a world in which corporations have more rights than individuals and governments exist mostly to protect their interests.
Related (maybe): A review of Death Sentence — the Decay of Public Speech by historian Don Watson: “A terrible thing is happening to the language, he believes, and at the end of the day, in a globalised world, it is not a positive communications outcome. In other words, there is a pox upon our public speech. ” —The Age
