Do George Orwell’s essay, ‘Politics and the English language’ and his novel
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, which features Newspeak, inform present day concerns
over the quality of political communication?
‘Now…the next steps’, ‘We belong’, ‘Country first’, ‘real plans for real people’. These
are all campaign slogans that have been used by various parties in Ireland and the
United States. In three of those cases, the party using the slogan was successful – but
what do any of them really mean? In his essay, Politics and the English Language,
George Orwell laments the decline of the English language and what this means for
politics and political communication. His concerns found a fictional realisation in his
classic tale of a dystopian future, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the totalitarian state
employed the language of Newspeak – a bastardized version of English which strictly
limits the capacity to express thoughts beyond those of party dogma. This essay will
examine whether Orwell’s concerns in these two works are pertinent today in the
debates over the quality over political communication. In ‘Politics and the English
Language’, the thrust of Orwell’s argument is that the use of clichéd phrasing and
hackneyed political terms has become so automatic that have lost their meaning,
stemming from and reinforcing shoddy thinking, and it is this loss of meaning that
allows manipulative political communication to disguise lies - as Orwell states:
“political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell
demonstrates what can happen when the debasement of language is atone with the
cynical promotion of the totalitarian state. The English language has been sheared of
words which may express ideas contrary to those of ‘the Party’, and is therefore a
method of thought control. I will examine modern political communication with regard
to these concerns. Orwell’s fear, seen in both Politics and the English Language and
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Nineteen Eighty-Four, was that certain terms would lose all meaning only to become
pejoratively positive or negative. I will examine this fear in terms of modern political
communication, firstly by looking at campaign slogans and electioneering; secondly, by
looking at more general political prose – how, as Orwell states, political speech is often
the defence of the indefensible. Finally, I will look at this issue with regard to the
perspective of the media, and decide whether dominant trends in political
communication stem from politicians and their culture, or whether the media has had a
defining role, be it active or passive.
Orwell’s fear that political language was becoming vague, generalised positivity (or
negativity) pandering to an anticipated but inchoate emotional response is well
exemplified in political slogans. The four campaign slogans I introduced at the
beginning of this essay are prime examples of political communication at it’s most
vacuous. They range from the absurd – “real plans for real people” (from George W.
Bush’s 2000 Presidential campaign) – to trite “country first”. (from John McCain’s
2008 run). Taken as a whole, there is strange mixture of the vague haziness which
Orwell bemoaned, but also of the strangling specificity of Newspeak. Orwell identifies
Newspeak as a vocabulary “constructed as to give exact and often very subtle
expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while
excluding all other meanings…This was done partly by the invention of new words, but
chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by striping such words as remained of
unorthodox meanings”. It is this mixture that gives rise to a class of slogans which
mean nothing, but a very specific nothing. While these campaigns slogans mean almost
nothing in and of themselves (how many candidates resolve not to put “country first”?),
the language used is aiming to appeal to a specific portion of the electorate for whom a
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nod and a wink coming from the candidate with the right credentials (i.e. conservative,
liberal etc.) is enough.
A good example of this is George W. Bush. He rooted much of his political
image in the notion of a ‘real America’ – removed from big-city intellectual snobbery
and leftism; someone understood traditional family values. “Real plans for real people”
is supposed to demonstrate that Bush’s plans are designed with this real American in
mind reflecting his or her values and supporting his or her interests, and that they were
aimed at the ordinary, everyday American – the real American. This captures George
W. Bush’s basic ideology in five words, which is the purpose of a political slogan, but
the slogan itself is an absurdity. While one may stretch an argument about ‘real plans’
as opposed to those invented for the campaign, the notion of ‘real people’ is extremely
difficult to define. Ultimately those who would constitute ‘real people’ are people who
share George W. Bush political beliefs. The phrasing and choice of words is an attempt
to reach out to fundamental beliefs – Richard Nixon may have begun the notion of a
‘silent majority’ but Ronald Reagan perfected it with his market research into the
‘values’ of voters. As one Reagan media advisor stated, the research “provides imagemakers with the best possibly guide to the effective presentation of policy, by creating a
clear understanding of how voters make their choice of party. It also supplied them with
a rich and subtle vocabulary of persuasive language and motivating symbols” (McNair,
2003 p105). George W. Bush’s “real plans for real people” was an attempt to attract
people by applying this “rich and subtle” vocabulary and “persuasive language” phrases that technically mean very little, but whose underlying significance ‘felt’
defines a candidate and draws in voters.
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Political slogans have been around for centuries, and it could be argued that, by their
nature, they are all more or less inane. But Orwell points to a broader infection of
politics. Orwell’s concerns inform political communication more generally – the
language of government and policy communication. There is much discussion about
how politics has been changed by the media – this will be addressed with reference to
Orwell later in the essay – but there is also the notion of politics being the “defence of
the indefensible” (Street, 2005). It was with this disturbing development that Orwell
was most concerned. Politics and the English Language was written in the immediate
aftermath of the Second World War, a time when language was used in a propaganda
battle waged by all sides. David Runciman has written about Orwell, with regard to
political hypocrisy, that he believed “obscurantist language is most dangerous when it
attempts to conceal the truth about political power” (Runciman, 2008, 175). Orwell
himself notes that “many political words are similarly abused. The word fascism has
now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”. “The words
democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several
different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another”. These words are used
liberally by politicians. George W. Bush, in his 2005 inaugural address used the word
“freedom” twenty seven times, and the word “justice” six times. This included the
phrase “there is no justice without freedom”. (For the purposes of comparison, the most
frequently used word in Barack Obama’s inaugural speech was ‘nation’, appearing
seventeen times). The use of such words by George W. Bush is particularly important
because he was a president justifying two wars, and it was under such circumstances
that Orwell expected vague phrases and ill-defined words to be used by politicians. To
this end, phrases such as ‘Islamo-fascism’ and ‘war on terror’ are particularly pertinent,
because the purpose of this language is to subsume all authority, and appropriate an
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unquestionable moral right, thereby enabling oneself to dispense approval or
disapproval on persons or states, with implied or actual consequence.
But the poor quality of political communication is not limited to the dramatics
of George W. Bush’s war or terror. Nor are the perpetrators necessarily aware or
deliberately manipulative. George Orwell lists five ‘tricks’ by “which the work of prose
construction is habitually dodged”: dying metaphors, operators or verbal false limbs,
pretentious diction, and meaningless words. With these in mind, consider the following
sentence from Brian Cowen’s 2007 Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis speech: “We are a small and
agile nation. We can use our size to our advantage, but we must adapt quickly and
radically. And if we stick with the right strategy, and stay on the right path, we can be
ahead of the pack when the tide turns”. If there were any doubt as to whether Orwell’s
concerns about the poor quality of communication has informed present day concerns,
this sentence might confirm them. Cowen not only uses three ‘dying metaphors’, but
mixes them so that we are simultaneously on a path, ahead of a pack, waiting for the
tide to turn. Among the ‘meaningless words’ Orwell identifies is ‘values’. There is a
section of Mr. Cowen’s speech entitled ‘The values that make us unique”, in which the
Irish people are implored to hold onto those values that make them uniquely Irish. It
can be fairly assumed that, such usages in speeches like these are not there to mislead or
deceive. Rather, they are there because of what Orwell describes as “making the results
presentable by sheer humbug”. He goes on to describe “some tired hack on the platform
mechanically repeating the familiar phrases” who gives the impression that “one is not
watching a live human being, but some kind of dummy”. While the former variety of
deliberately disingenuous, cynically manipulative communication is potentially
damaging to democracy, it is the lazy repetition of political phrases that is perhaps more
widespread, and more damaging to politics itself.
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The final way of interpreting whether Politics and the English Language and Nineteen
Eighty-Four inform present day concerns over the quality of political communication is
to examine the media itself. The media play a central role in political communication,
though there is much debate over what that role is and what it should be. John Street
identifies one of the peculiarities of modern political communication in relation to the
Iraq war dossier by the British government, which journalist Andrew Gilligan alleged
had been ‘sexed up’. As Street notes, “Lord Hutton [in his inquiry into the death of
David Kelly, who leaked details of the said document] gave quite specific attention to
the phrase’s precise political significance. What [Lord Hutton] did not question was the
assumption that a dossier could be more or less ‘sexy’, that it could be made to seduce
those who read it; and that its ‘sexiness’ was directly measurable in the headlines and
column inches it produced” (Street, 2005, 17). Similar to this is the assertion by Lord
Young, whilst Minister for Trade and Industry in the UK, that “policies are like corn
flakes: if they are not marketed they will not sell” (Franklin, 1994, p5). It is the impact
of media on the language used in the political process which I now wish to discuss.
Government policy must be digestible to the public. In the post mortem on the
rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in June 2008 it was later found that 45% of those voting
‘No’ did so due to a lack of understanding or knowledge of the treaty (Irish Times,
September 11th, 2008). This is an example of the extent to which the onus falls upon
politicians, political parties and governments to ensure that the requisite knowledge is
imparted on the public. But this is not a simple task, especially when the issues are
complex. Political language is increasingly mimicking product marketing and popular
culture in order to attract attention. The result of this is the degradation of language in a
different manner, perhaps most evident in British politics, a manner which Orwell
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surely could not have foreseen. One suggested campaign slogan for the British Labour
Party and Gordon Brown was “not flash, just Gordon”, a strange mix of exalted
normality and the iconography of popular culture. This type of political advertising
feeds into the popular sense of what constitutes political language, and vice versa. Nick
Davies has written that the nature of media in a commercial environment encourages
journalists to play safe by avoiding troublesome or time-consuming stories (Davies
2008, p152). Thus the emphasis, in terms of political communication, falls on sound
bites which are replete with loose terminology and inaccurate phrasing. Newspeak is
the gradual elimination of words, as Syme, Nineteen Eighty-Four’s lexicographer
states: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of
thought…Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a
little smaller” (Orwell, 1989, 55). While not exactly the Orwellian nightmare of
totalitarianism, the rise of the sound bite does reflect the debased discourse Orwell
feared would be to the detriment of politics. Tying in with this, the objective and other
result of Newspeak is the elimination of ambiguity, particularly with regard to ideology.
“What justification is there for a word if it is simply the opposite of another word?”
asks Syme (Orwell, 1989, 54). As purveyors of entertainment (as well as news), the
media must ultimately make current affairs interesting and easy for the audience.
Ambiguity and confusion are not conducive to this, and, as such, it is in the interests of
the media to present events in the simplest terms. Such a practice is not conducive to
detailed exploration of policy or geopolitics. However, it is too simplistic to blame the
media alone - as Orwell states in Politics and the English Language: “an effect can
become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an
intensified form, and so on indefinitely”. So the audience, in particular television
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audience, has come to be characterised as having a short attention span and needing to
be fed on whizzing headlines.
What Orwell conveys in Politics and the English Language and Nineteen Eighty-Four
is a sense of how dangerous language can be, not when it’s used forcefully and well,
but rather when it is used lazily. His fear is for words to become little more than
signifiers of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and, in regards to Newspeak, the elimination of moral
questions through the manipulation of words. Over the course of this essay, I have
applied these concerns to those over the quality of modern day political communication.
Firstly, I examined political slogans and how, through use of subtle, pejorative
language, they can mean very little, but reach out to certain underlying premises or
prejudices. Secondly, I looked at political speeches. Orwell feared that certain words
have no fixed meaning, and as such, are used in the defence of the indefensible. In
relation to George W. Bush, it seems Orwell’s concerns were farsighted, as we can see
from his 2005 inauguration speech, and the loose phrases he used such as “war on
terror”, “axis of evil” and “Islamo-fascism”. Yet Orwell’s work is prophetic in another
way, and this was examined in relation to the mental laziness behind some modern
political speeches, as exemplified by Brian Cowen’s 2007 Fianna Faíl Ard Fheis
speech. Finally, I looked at the media’s role in dictating the quality of political
communication. It is in this regard that the notion of Newspeak is most pertinent. What
this essay examined is the idea that political language is becoming smaller to bridge the
gap to entertainment, to the determent not only of political communication, but also of
policy and political process.
Politics and the English Language and Nineteen Eighty-Four were written more
than sixty years ago, yet their views on the state of political communication are
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remarkably current. As this essay has shown, the use of language by politicians not only
confirms Orwell’s own misgivings about the degradation of the English language for
political means, but the manner in which mass media have also fed into this
degradation. Orwell’s work is an important warning: political evils will not always be
obvious; they may well come wrapped in the comfort of familiar language. To quote
Orwell: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between
one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and
exhausted idioms, like cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as
‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of
lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad,
language must suffer”.
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