I cited this 20 year-old book by Roderick Hart and his coauthors in my Chapter 4 as an example of how the keyword analytic approach made famous by cultural theorist Raymond Williams is being used in various fields, but I didn’t go into detail about the book itself or the political keywords analyzed there. I thought, however, that this might be a good moment to return to Political Keywords, given the impending presidential election here in the United States.
Hart in particular is well-known for his analysis of political discourse, though this book hasn’t been cited nearly as often as I would have expected. His most recent book is Trump and Us: What He Says and Why We Listen, a rhetorical analysis of Trump’s speeches, which I haven’t read because I fear that it would be all too reminiscent of my grandmother reading communication theorist Harold Lasswell’s analysis of Hitler’s speeches during the Second World War II. (That’s to say, insights into a demagogue‘s “appeal” to an audience are much more frightening when it’s contemporary rather than historical reading.)
The 2004 book, however, deals with political keywords in general. It applies the theories of Lasswell, Williams, and Kenneth Burke (another well-known rhetorician who possessed a keen interest in language and social action) as well as quantitative techniques to a selected set of eight functionally descriptive keywords that don’t appear to carry the immediate divisive, emotive impact of keywords such as “immigration” (or “Lebensraum,” for that matter) or the hidden implications of so-called “dog whistle” keywords (such as “family values” or “school choice”): politics, government, media, people, president, party, promise, and consultant. Hart and his co-authors argue that the eight keywords chosen for study are critical, however, because they deal with “unresolved, perhaps unresolvable, issues” of “identity, legitimacy, hierarchy, transparency, destiny, and continuity” faced by American society over time (p. 251). They state further that all these keywords possess a network of associations, whether infused in childhood, inculcated in school, indoctrinated in work settings, or introduced through other means, both implicit and explicit, so all of them resonate well beyond their dictionary definitions. Among their eight examples, “consultant” perhaps no longer carries the same onus in popular usage that “lobbyist” does today, but certainly “government” still does, in both negative and positive ways.
Most striking to me is their conclusion specific to “political” keywords:
“Our general argument is that keywords are juxtaposed at the crossroads of change and stability. Keywords are used to create momentum and to adjust to emerging political realities. But they are also used as ballast for the ship of state, keeping its sails trim and its direction true. We have found keywords to be energizing and boring, surprising and expectable…. a rhetoric of change located within a rhetoric of stability…[and] we sense that this dialectic is sharper in the United States than in other nations (p. 252).”
They also note that “to identify a society’s keywords is to identify its trouble spots… Because keywords are so intimately tied to what a society values and detests, what it inspires and what it fears, we might ask how they will affect the national conversation in the future. Certain ontological challenges, for example, could confound political communication… Societies become soft when words mean everything and nothing at the same time. In a hyperkinetic age when so many symbols are hurled at us with so much speed, it is easy to get sloppy with language….When that happens, a society makes it easy for people to talk past one another rather than to one another. A semantically lazy society cannot speak well, and it cannot think well either (pp. 257-258).”
A society that relies on AI for its political communication is a pretty clear example of what a “semantically lazy” society might look like. So Hart and co-authors may or may not have foreseen this development back in 2004, but George Orwell perhaps gave us a preview of what could be an eventual outcome for a semantically lazy society in “The Principles of Newspeak” appendix to his book, 1984, 75 years ago (though some linguistic scholars have questioned Orwell’s understanding of natural language principles.) The only bright spot, as far as I can see, is that there is a growing realization that keywords matter.
Keywords In and Out of Context 