Rufo On Language

 

Christopher F.  Rufo sends out a weekly video that I subscribe to, and he had one sent out on 3/23/23, entitled Winning The Language War, a video that I will respond to. He is complaining that conservatives did not use language well, and the public political and cultural narrative has been dominated by the Left, and they have been winning. Perhaps not much longer: “ . . . I realized that there is an opportunity for a significant shift in rhetoric for the political Right.

 

For decades, conservatives made their arguments primarily through a statistical frame, using the language of finance, economics, and performance metrics. Think ‘running a government like a business.’ But in recent years, the rise of left-wing racialist ideology—BLM, CRT, DEI—has created an opportunity, even the necessity, for conservatives to make their arguments through a moral frame, speaking to the conflict of values that underlies the division between Left and Right.”

 

My response: If I may interpret Rufo, he is chiding the Right for having tried to win over the public with dry, rational, statistically framed arguments, while the public responded much better to more moral, emotional arguments effectively deployed by the Left. Rufo argues that we need to use mora arguments too, and I agree but am concerned that abandoning a rational/statistical frame of arguing may be watering down our message. We should use both the statistical framework and the moral framework to argue our case to the public, but we also want citizens to self-upgrade themselves, over time to live and be political as an individuators-anarchist supercitizen. Those rational citizens would grasp all arguments, no matter how framed.

 

Rufo continues: The linguistic shift is already happening—and paying dividends. . . . Yes, we should improve test scores and balance the budget. But the deeper purpose of government is to secure the rights of the people and to establish a principle of justice. Conservatives must speak to the ends, not simply the means. And, in our advanced managerial society, this will require a new moral language that appeals to the interests and emotions of the common citizen, who wants to be protected from the institutions and ideologies that have arrayed themselves against him.”

 

My response: Rufo is right to worry about this. In life we are either gaining ground or losing ground. The Right needs to gain ground by taking back America and making it great again, and if  a more interesting moral language helps, fine, but dry analytics must not be sacrificed.

 

Rufo continues: “one of the problems that we’ve had as conservatives is that we’ve ceded the moral language to the Left, to the point that you have even conservative political candidates using identity politics as their framework and as their pitch to voters, because it’s really the most available moral lens. For example, you have someone like Nikki Haley—an ambassador, a governor, a successful administrator—who is pitching her candidacy as: “I am the minority female. Hear me roar.’ What she doesn’t seem to understand, however, is that when you operate in your opponent’s frame, you’re guaranteed to lose.

A conservative will never win in a battle of identity politics against the political Left, because they are setting all the rules and terms of debate . . . the anti-woke movement has reawakened the possibility of a conservative moral vocabulary . . . the new frame for the most successful people in this movement is through the language of values. To say: This is what we believe. This is who we are fighting for. This is what we want to see at the end of the day . . . this new approach that foregrounds values and moral expressions is much more persuasive, because it taps into human emotions and it lends itself to human narratives.”

 

My response: It is hard to argue with success. I have long asserted that we need to use our own words and define who we are, what we stand for and where we are headed—to provide the voters with a conservative metanarrative that out inspires the stagnant, jaded Left, winning the voters over..

 

Rufo continues: “And so the ultimate style of communication, the ultimate approach to these issues is to combine both the economic or rational argument and the values—or principles-based argument.

 

My response: Well said.