Our phrase of the week – “enemies of the people” – starts out, in the singular, as the ironic description of a hero in Henrik Ibsen’s play, battling corruption in a public health scandal and prepared to endure vilification for his efforts.
This was not quite the sentiment behind the headline, used last week in the Daily Mail to describe the high court judges, after they ruled that parliament must be consulted on Brexit. From my days in the East German archives reading about documents about the Volksfeind (applied in the 1950s to pretty much anyone who disagreed with the dimwitted Stalinist leader Walter Ulbricht), it’s awfully familiar.
Germans already knew it from the Nazi lexicon. It was popularised by a Karl Astel, a National Socialist university rector who declared tobacco an “enemy of the people”, when not otherwise busy on the racialist eugenics programme and trying to set up an SS university. You cannot keep a good bad phrase down.
In a democratic culture, the way we communicate our political battles is heated when contentious subjects are in play. Yet language, in such circumstances, is not just the funnel of arguments. It has its own momentum and impact, deepening divides and replacing the instinct of moderation and compromise with the assumption that anyone who disagrees with the speaker must be an idiot or traitor.
I say all this not as a Brexit wound-licker, hoping the lofty men in wigs will magically unravel the result of a referendum. Legal language often hides its own self-importance behind big words. Brexit, the ruling claims, is “justiciable”, which is a fancy way of judges deciding that it is fine for them to rule on the triggering of a policy decision taken by the prime minister about the exit mechanism from the EU.
Increasingly, from press freedom to the PM’s day job, there is little judges don’t feel is their duty to rule on. That presents a serious risk of the balance of power tipping too much to the courts, which do not, as their backers in this case claim, just “uphold” law, but re-interpret it with a view to challenge or changing a political decision.
Many progressives support this, in the high court’s recent example, because the change happens to suit their own wishes. But when a democratic vote has taken place with high participation, there is a question mark over using the courts to throw sands in the wheels of what follows.
So we should expect this to be hard fought on both sides. And that is exactly the time at which language needs to be tempered, namely, when we feel least like being temperate. Alas, a particularly fractious zeitgeist is our backdrop. Exhibit A, as we contemplate the US election, is Donald Trump’s crass demagoguery and hokey claim to an “authentic” people-speak, concealing a nihilistic prospectus for power.
It is, however, glib to fault only the rhetoric of those we dislike. Look, too, to the kind of language used by those who would proudly disparage Trump and the Brexiters – and accord a too comfortable moral equivalence. It’s so easy to arrive at a point where a set menu of phrases shows that we have stopped thinking about the alternative position at all. So as soon as someone starts a sneery conversation featuring air quotes around the “£350m for the NHS” claim in the referendum campaign, and around “experts” and “control”, I know that they have probably not given much thought as to what drove the Brexit vote and why these arguments prevailed over their own.
Just as surely, we know that the words “migrants” and “breaking point” were intentioned to alarm voters and quell arguments about the balancing benefits of immigration.
Whingeing or listening back to an echo chamber of the like-minded will not address this. Liberals have not done a good job. On both sides of the Atlantic, they slip into a reactive language of being “terrified” or declaring political events “catastrophic”, when they mean that they are troublesome, difficult or just not to their taste. (It leaves us wondering what words might be left in which to describe events in, say, Aleppo.)
We have lost a political language of the moderate against the extremes, in the tradition of Orwell championed by this newspaper’s great ex-editor David Astor: one that conveys the benefits of the open against the closed and the pluralist against the autocratic, the flexible against the obdurate.
On the far left, Corbynism has opened the floodgates of that dreary old terminology of class hatreds. You only need to see the tweets about “Tory scum” to hear the ripples of hatreds and petty resentments. Left and right miserably collude in the weakening of tolerant discourse, because seeing the other person’s point of view might occlude their own certainties.
In his book Enough Said, Mark Thompson, the ex-BBC boss, now head of the New York Times, argues that the result is “just a fight to the political death, a fight in which every linguistic weapon is fair game”. A fair point. But the question of where to draw the line – and how to do so will decide whether we make things worse or better. Overdo it and liberals come across as pearl-clutching hysterics loath to be challenged. Without doubt, that was one of the traits and tonal inadequacies that let down the Remain camp’s arguments. Do we go down the road suggested by Alastair Campbell, formerly New Labour bruiser, last week suggesting that the Mail’s editor be arraigned for incitement to hatred? Old feuds, new battles.
Yet more windy threats are unlikely to clear poison from the air and a lot more likely to stoke the next round of hostilities. We could easily run around for the next few years, trading aggressions and caging every unwelcome thought as an “incitement” to something or other. My right to speak out is your micro-aggression. Down the plughole, meanwhile, goes the culture of debate, a British asset better valued in the rest of the world than at home right now. So on Brexit and beyond, let’s speak plainly but courteously across the lines. And if it sounds like a hand-me-down from Hitler or Stalin, just leave it to their monstrous memories.
Anne McElvoy is a senior editor at the Economist.
