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How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show
PublicAffairs
July 2006
304 pages
ISBN: 1586483862
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Non-Fiction Political
A captivating and outraged account of "The Great Relabeling"
of American language and thought, by the well-known "Fresh
Air" commentator and author of Going Nucular Geoffrey Nunberg breaks new ground with this fierce and
funny narrative of how the political right has ushered in a
new world order, aided unwittingly by the liberal media. Democrats are well known for their "lousy bumper stickers,"
as Joe Klein puts it. As liberals wade through the semantics
of "social security lockbox," "single payer," and other
wonky locutions, the right has become harder, meaner and
better at getting out the message: the estate tax became the
more menacing "death tax" and a contentious education
initiative was wrapped in the comforting (and memorable)
blanket of "No Child Left Behind." But Nunberg shows that the real story is more subtle than
just a bumper sticker war. Conservatives' main goal wasn't
to win voters over to their positions on healthcare,
education, or the environment. They had a much more dramatic
ambition. By changing the meaning of words like "values,"
"government," "liberal"; "faith," and "freedom,"
conservatives have shifted the political center of gravity
of the language itself to the right. "Whatever our
politics," Nunberg observes, "when we talk about politics
nowadays, we can't help using language that embodies a
conservative world-view."
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