I’ve been meaning to link to this story from The Liberal for some time now, and today seems as good a day as any. Ostensibly a review of Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under my Bed!, the article makes the obvious but very important point that politics is actually a battle over semantics: that the left-right battle over the past few decades has been an attempt to assert a particular meaning to words such as freedom, democracy, individualism etc. I think the clearest example of this is the pro-choice/pro-life debate – the terms themselves are attempts to ‘pre-define’ choice and life as mutually exclusive ideas, when the reality is far more complicated.
It also makes the arguments that: a) despite a recent history of American anti-intellectualism, Sarah Palin’s odd, stream-of-consciousness ramblings pushed things too far, and; b) the slow march right seen across all the Western world is partly a result of the Right wresting control of the meaning of contested words from the Left.
In her attempts to outline why, however, I think Sarah Churchwell becomes unintentionally parodic, as her prose gets a little out of hand at times. Still, it’s a good read and a much smarter take than all the ‘leftist’ schadenfreude floating around today.
#1 by Nav on July 3, 2009 - 9:58 pm
Oh, also, I should throw in that the “Derrida winning the culture wars” line isn’t mine – it’s from the article and, rather than actually expressing anything, just uses Derrida’s name to refer to post-structuralism in general.