I know a guy -- a family friend -- who won't take his Social Security checks. Flat out refuses. That would make him a taker, he says. It would make him just like them, he says.
Now a few words about language.
Language is all powerful: it can make one believe what can be disproven in an instant, it can make a person call for the annihilation of another, it can turn people against their self interest, and it can be limited so how one thinks of something is confined to the narrowest of parameters.
And it's the language of politics that determines how we talk and think about vital public policies. Whoever controls an issue's messaging controls the politics of that issue. They dictate the terms of political thought. How we think and talk about an issue determines how that issue is treated in public discourse. This, of course, requires a zooming out from the politics of the day, and all the intense emotions that cloud how we perceive a political issue.
"Rise and argue that George Orwell's darkest musings have come to pass, realize that pernicious things aren't easily labeled and grind," I wrote in 96 Ways to Rise and Grind.
The most brutally effective form of political speech is the kind that "renders dialogue impossible," which is "the desired goal for those who want to exercise absolute power," wrote David Rowan, archbishop of Canterbury, in an analysis of Orwell's breakdowns of political language. It's not actively evil manipulation. It's banal. It's boring. And it works.
We see this in every sphere of modern politics, from war to health care to tax policy to reproductive and LGBTQ rights. But it's the language of those against the existence of public assistance that strikes me as particularly successful. Perhaps nowhere in political culture has language triumphed like it has in demonizing and attacking the welfare state.
The right wing's victory in welfare discourse is total: everyone in the political mainstream discusses public assistance in the same words -- words designed to stigmatize those who receive those benefits, and to shame anyone who requires government funds to pay the bills. The right's insidious anti-welfare propaganda systematically turns neighbor against neighbor, sister against brother, worker against worker. Genius turns of phrase like "welfare dependency" and "welfare queens" -- which cropped up in Reagan's American and leaked across the pond to Thatcher's UK -- started the frontal assault on the once-celebrated welfare state.
"Welfare" is practically a curse word today. It's a slur deployed to besmirch someone's work ethic. But it's another word that has served as a nuclear bomb dropped on the very concept of economic security for everyone: entitlement. To be entitled is to be lazy, spoiled, a sinner against the religion of work. No one wants to be called entitled.
It wasn't always this way. Politicians in the decades before Reagan brought far-right economics to the White House used the term "earned entitlements." Even Reagan, before his right-wing wonks transformed the way Americans think about the welfare state, "referred to government programs for the old, the sick, and the poor as the 'Social Security net,'" The New Yorker reports. That changed once anti-welfare forces discovered how effective their focus group-tested language could be. We can make poor folks hate welfare? Let's do it.
The federal government's turn against public assistance programs -- which enjoy widespread support in public polling -- prompted a stark change in the way media outlets discussed welfare. The Washington Post, for example, mentioned "entitlement" and "Social Security" a meager five times in 1979. That number skyrocketed to 118 by 1982. By the 90s, those words appeared in the same article more than 800 times. Those terms now appear in the Post 1,700 times every year.
Language is everything.
Back to that family friend who is semi-retired, in his mid-60s, and tells my dad that he won't accept Social Security payments -- the ultimate earned entitlement. The federal government is broke because undocumented immigrants and lazy free riders have sucked its coffers dry, he argues. He doesn't want to be part of that "culture." He insists that he doesn't need help from anyone, not like them. He's always worked, always provided for himself, and he'll be damned if he's going to take that dirty government cash now.
Propaganda is a hell of a drug: it's inserted the political aims of the wealthy into a middle-class guy who has worked every day since he was 16. Language -- the way we talk about public assistance programs -- has done such a number on this old man that he now denies himself the money he's earned over almost five decades of toiling for others.
Is there an antidote to this dominant anti-welfare discourse? Certainly there's not a single magic solution that will force the news media to discuss welfare as a massive public benefit, but we can start small.
I'm careful about the ways in which I talk about public assistance. I try not to use "welfare" in discussions with family and friends because it's such a thoroughly stigmatized word. I make sure to talk up the unquestioned economic stimulative power of food stamps. I try to stamp out the false notion that widespread abuse plagues the public assistance system. I point out that people who receive these benefits don't often stay out of work for years and years; in fact, nine in ten recipients are employed within a year of getting food stamps. Public assistance has tremendous health benefits for children living in poverty. All of this is verifiable. But maybe that doesn't matter in today's discourse.
If you feel like I do -- that people who need and deserve these temporary benefits shouldn't be shamed by the the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps truthers -- then don't get mad when someone talks about welfare recipients in demeaning ways. Try your best to explain that everything they know about public assistance is wrong. They've been indoctrinated by rich, ruthless folks who want nothing more than to unwind the social safety net. This rhetorical strategy won't work on many everyday working people -- some are too far gone -- but I believe it's worth a shot.
Many have never heard public assistance discussed in positive terms because the political language has been so strangled -- so limited -- over the past 40 years. Do your part. Rise and chip away at the toxic discourse and grind.