This post originally appeared at Chronicle.com.  

James Fallows, former speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter and a longtime national correspondent for The Atlantic, is generally known as a liberal-leaning but hardly flame-throwing commentator on politics. In June, Fallows, who had been writing for some time about Republican efforts to create a 60-vote "supermajority" in the U.S. Senate, posted a blog entry called "5 Signs the United States Is Undergoing a Coup." That headline lasted about three hours. On further reflection, Fallows said in a corrective message, using the word "coup" in his headline gave the wrong impression. He changed the title to "5 Signs of a Radical Change in U.S. Politics."

His concern was not just with the filibuster. Fallows also asked whether we can call a society democratic if unelected judges determine a presidential election, after which the newly installed president appoints similarly minded judges, who then use their position to change the rules to favor their party.

Fallows's alteration raises two fascinating questions: At what point should we start describing our liberal-democratic heritage as under threat? And what should our appropriate language be for discussing it?

Was Fallows right to use the word "coup"? Before we can answer that question, we must first consider another. Fallows had taken the word from a slightly earlier post he had written, titled "Scotus Update: La Loi, C'est Moi." Readers asked, Why the French words? Fallows did not really answer, except to say something about The Atlantic's policies involving capitalization. Let me try.

Perhaps because the United States was created during a liberal era, as the late 18th century truly was, our language lacks words that convey the full force of reactionary politics. From time to time, we required terms to describe the old order, such as when we denounced King George as a tyrant (itself a word derived from Old French). But our demagogues, rhetorically, have generally confined themselves to the English language.

Father Charles E. Coughlin, the controversial right-wing priest who had a popular radio program in the 1930s, called Franklin D. Roosevelt "the great betrayer and liar" and Jews "Christ killers" and "usurers." Robert W. Welch Jr., co-founder of the John Birch Society, called Dwight D. Eisenhower a "conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy." While alliteration provides emphasis, labeling someone conscious and dedicated is not among the worst of insults. None of this is to deny the viciousness of anti-Semites or racists. But even Senator Theodore G. Bilbo, Democrat of Mississippi, perhaps the most hateful politician ever elected to high office in the United States—he called his opponent's supporters "shooters of widows and orphans," "spitters on our heroic veterans," and "skunks who steal Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms"—relied on language that every backwoods white person in his home state could understand. We have had more than our share of extremism, but most of it has been homegrown.

In more recent times, by contrast, when we want to leave the discourse of liberal democracy behind, we seem to leave English behind as well. Consider the title of Fallows's first post on these issues, borrowed from Louis XIV's famous declaration, L'état, c'est moi. The first word puts us on the turf of American exceptionalism: We have no equivalent term in English to l'état, or for that matter, the German der Staat. Americans call the official apparatus of politics and policy "government" rather than "the state," as if to soften the implications of what it actually does.

Lacking a state, we are uncomfortable with raison d'état, or, its German relation, realpolitik. We have had practitioners of such arts, none more adept than Henry Kissinger. But Kissinger spoke with a heavy accent, as if to remind us that the pursuit of power for its own sake, associated with him, came from somewhere else. Americans instinctively (or should I say linguistically?) prefer Wilsonian idealism to Metternichian realism. The world, we insist, is not composed of states engaged in endless conflict as they follow their own interests; it ought to be a "league of nations" or, better yet, a "United Nations." Americans go to war often, but not, we tell ourselves, for our own advantage.

It follows that if you really want to attack your opponents these days, you are best off doing so in another language. When the editors of the religious conservative magazine First Things determined in 1997 that the left-wing activism of the U.S. Supreme Court—oh, those were the days—had made the American government illegitimate, they characterized it as a regime, or, should I say, a régime. In choosing a French word, they suggested that the American experiment in self-government had come to an end. We can talk about a political "system" without raising eyebrows. Régime, by contrast, as in ancien régime, connotes a preliberal, European society characterized not only by arbitrary rule but also by a corrupt aristocracy unworthy of holding on to its unearned privileges.

Of course we have no such aristocracy; if we did, our extreme conservatives would come to its defense. But instead of an inherited ruling class, we have liberal elites (or élites), who, according to the late Richard John Neuhaus and others associated with this point of view, constitute a new class of arrogant planners determined to impose their conception of the good society upon ordinary people, whether they want it or not. While neoconservatives balked when Neuhaus, editor and founder of First Things, called for civil disobedience to the new class, there was no disagreement over the use of "regime."

It was, after all, Leo Strauss, the philosopher so important to the rise of neoconservatism, who had introduced the term. Aristotle's politeia was usually rendered as "the polity" until Strauss translated it as "regime," or "the order, the form, which gives society its character." Any society can have a regime in the sense Strauss meant, and he hoped that the United States could find its way to being a "good regime." But there can be no doubt that his use of term was meant to suggest that, for him and those he influenced, much was wrong with the politics of the liberal democratic West.

Those in the attack mode need not rely just on French and German. Conservatives are not generally known as sympathetic to Russia, but when it comes to denouncing the Obama administration, the Russian language is something they cannot resist. George Will, the conservative columnist, convinced that the Obama administration is on the verge of lawlessness, has on more than one occasion used the word ukase to characterize policies he disfavors.

The Democrats, we are told, conscious of how unpopular those policies are, rely on czars to oversee them: The Obama administration "seems to be captivated by the un-American notion of running the country through Russian-style czars empowered to issue czarist-style ukases," Phyllis Schlafly, the dean of such discourse, opined in 2009. Townhall.com has charged the president with having a "czar fetish."

Given the craze for Russian on the right, small wonder that conservatives accuse Democrats of engaging in agitprop on the question of birth control (Jonah Goldberg), filling their policy positions with apparatchiks (Michelle Malkin), and consigning their enemies to the gulag (Ann Coulter). About the only thing the Obama administration has not done, if you are a conservative, is to promote glasnost...

Read the rest at Chronicle.com.  

Image by shannonpatrick17, licensed under Creative Commons.  

Perhaps fueled by increasing gridlock in Washington, lately there have been a lot of studies published on why people form and keep the political beliefs that they do. While none are particularly encouraging for those who want to see government work, the findings offer some insight on why politicians reaching agreement is tougher than it sounds. A couple of weeks ago, Psychology Today reported that researchers at the University of Nebraska have pointed to a biological basis for ideology. In general, they reported, liberals have a deep psychological propensity to focus more on positive forces and outcomes, while conservative minds are more occupied by what is potentially threatening. These tendencies, the researchers said, may go beyond environmental factors like geography or parenting styles.

Psychologist Jonathon Haidt agrees that deeper forces are at play. Earlier this year, he told Bill Moyers (and Company) that human beings are not well designed for objective or rational analysis. It turns out we’re much better at choosing a side, and finding evidence and arguments to support it. In other words, cognitive dissonance plays a much bigger role in how we understand politics than we may have thought. In a recent book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Haidt outlines his view that conscious reasoning has very little to do with how we form our ideas about the world.    

This would certainly concur with new research from Duke University. There, psychologists found that potential voters consistently prefer candidates with deeper voices. As Futurity reports, participants were asked to choose between a number of voices saying “I urge you to vote for me this November.” The participants consistently preferred the deepest voices, and that was true whether the choices were male or female. Participants also chose the deeper voices when asked to identify voices with traits like strength, competence, or trustworthiness. This was especially true of men, leading researcher Rindy Anderson to speculate on whether women’s higher voice pitch had something to do with the glass ceiling.

Of course, none of this bodes well for actually getting things done, but does help clarify the past several years of partisan bickering. We tend to blame ideology for a lot of political problems, but it’s hard to see how we could escape it.  

But here’s my favorite explanation: a study by Scott Eidelman, a University of Arkansas psychologist, recently found that conservatism may be most people’s first instinct in how they view the world. According to Miller-McCune, when distracted or performing more than one complicated task, participants were more likely to express conservative ideas and beliefs. These included, according to Eidelman, “an emphasis on personal responsibility, an acceptance of hierarchy, and a preference for the status quo.”

In another portion of the study, Eidelman asked participants to drink heavily before completing a survey measuring their politics. Amazingly (read: wonderfully), this experiment produced the same results, as did pressuring participants with time constraints, and distracting them with repetitive tape loops.  

What this exactly means is hard to say. Eidelman argues that the results will satisfy no one: the research implies that conservative ideas are instinctual, but also somewhat knee-jerk. And of course, it’s just as likely that a liberal will hold hasty or unexamined beliefs, whether or not they’re inebriated or their favorite candidate has a deep voice. What these findings may speak to, then, is a growing fascination with ideology at a psychological or biological level—a sense that gridlock in Washington, like say over transportation policy, must have some deeper explanation.   

Sources: Psychology Today, Moyers & Company, Futurity, Miller-McCune (now Pacific Standard).  

Image by Tom Arthur, licensed under Creative Commons.