Book Review: Political English: Language and the Decay of Politics

‘Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians’ (Hannah Arendt, 1968)

Put broadly and simply, this book by Thomas Docherty, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, deals with ‘the relation of political language to political realities’ (p. 3), but this does no justice to the implications of this equation or to the manner of Docherty’s treatment. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be an exhilarating ride…. His dominant tone is that of a pulpit orator or preacher: ‘Something is rotten in the state of English’ (p. 7), i.e. Anglo-American English; and at times it is hard to agree with him that his book is ‘not simply a jeremiad about the imperilled state of our democracies’ (p. 3). His mentor is really George Orwell, whose 1946 essay on ‘Politics and the English Language’ is at the heart of his argument and rhetoric. As he summarizes it on p. 7, Orwell argued that there was ‘an intimate link between the decline of a language and decay in the political and economic sphere in which the language is spoken’. Most people, Orwell continued, ‘would admit that the English language is in a bad way’; ‘Our civilization is decadent and our language...must inevitably share in the general collapse’. For Orwell, Docherty continues, ‘degeneracy in economic and political actuality produces degenerate language as a new norm’ (my italics).

Although linguists continually engage in critiques of many types of public discourse and the analysis of trends in discursive practices, they have long felt uneasy about any emotively evaluative metaphors for linguistic change that treat language as a living creature under threat of death or moribundity (see Wales, 2008:51). This is not surprising in one sense since it is spoken by human beings, and so the metaphors function metonymically. Docherty’s medical and biological images as italicised above literally relate to a disease process that causes bodily deterioration. But there are many questions arising from this, not all of them answered in this book. When did this ‘degeneration’ start? What was, and is, a ‘healthy’ state of political language? Is there a ‘golden age’ of political rhetoric? Can there be ‘regeneration’? Orwell was writing 75 years ago; but politicians have always had a bad press for sleaze and a reputation for lying from the ancient Greeks onwards, as Docherty himself admits (p. 10). In all of his seven chapters a historical perspective is certainly given, whether on linguistic xenophobia (Chapter 2) truth and lying (Chapter 4), or profanity and free speech (Chapter 6), for instance. And behind many of his arguments and illustrations looms the shadow of the language of the Third Reich, and the work of Klemperer (2000) in this regard.

Much of Docherty’s disapproval, however, is directed towards politicians of the post-Second World War period, and in particular towards Donald Trump, ‘Humpty Dumpty on steroids’ (p. 61). He ‘evacuates words of any semantic content ‘(p. 61), his vocabulary is ‘Calibanesque’ (p. 6) and ‘utterly impoverished and degrading’ (p. 14); it ‘determinedly reduces the range of thought as it infantilizes its vocabulary’ (p. 3). Docherty published this book in 2019, but his description of Trump’s tenure as President is remarkably prophetic of the post-election storming of the Capitol in January 2021: he has established ‘an atmosphere or climate that condones violence’ and his speeches ‘endorse the legitimacy of violence within political argument and debate’ (p. 149). For Docherty, Trump is not alone. He sees contemporary political rhetoric under his influence as being ‘conditioned by boastful egocentricity, insult, diatribe and violence...his linguistic tactics are increasingly deployed by so-called “respectable” politicians’ (p. 3). No examples are given here, but later he refers to the lowering of the levels of political debate by the ‘street language or scurrilous demotic’ used by Putin (p. 59). ‘Profanity, in general’, Docherty argues (p. 183), ‘appears to be routinely normalized in contemporary political discourse’; but if it is, it is surely, in Britain at least, kept behind closed doors. Early in the new millennium, as he discusses at length (pp. 183-188), Armando Ianucci’s TV series The Thick of It foregrounded a ‘walking personification of profanity’ in the figure of the spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker, allegedly based on Alistair Campbell (p. 184). But now that Trump is no longer President, Docherty might need to revise his ideas about the extent of his linguistic influence on American politics under his successor Joe Biden: not so much a trend as a personality disorder.

Somewhat controversially, however, Docherty is keen to link Trump with the gaffe-ridden Boris Johnson, still Prime Minister at the time of writing this review. He ‘evacuates...political rhetoric of any meaning and sense’ (p. 81), and like Trump is a ‘constitutional and inveterate liar’ (p. 118). But are not all or most politicians? And he may have ‘lower[ed] the tone’ of political debate (p. 166), but this is hardly by meaningless drivel, profanity or spontaneous and fragmented social media Twittering. Boris’s register, as he himself describes it, is ‘the language of the wizard wheeze, the jolly jape’ (p. 82); a ‘somewhat chummy and often localized patois’ (p. 79). (Calling Jeremy Corbyn ‘a mutton- headed old mugwump’ in 2017 springs to mind, cited on p. 167.) I think, however, it is a bit far-fetched to compare his ‘buffoonery’ to Goering’s (p.83). Docherty clearly dislikes his ‘faux-common-people approach’ (p. 81) because Boris, Eton-educated, has ‘intrinsic privilege’ (p. 78). But his linguistic uniqueness is that he can combine Billy Bunterisms, classical allusions, cod-Churchill and word-play, dazzling his listeners with his obvious wit and intelligence, and disarming them, whatever their political affiliations (see Walters, 2020). If this illustrates the ‘degradation’ of contemporary political rhetoric, then readers should be told what kind of language and style is preferable or desired. In the days of Labour leader Michael Foot, Docherty argues, ‘authenticity in oratory involved a high degree of culture: acquired knowledge’ (p. 179). But this is certainly true of Boris, unlike his predecessors David Cameron, Theresa May or Gordon Brown, for example. Docherty’s ideal politician appears to be Barack Obama (p. 13-14), whose ‘inspirational’ speeches during his presidential campaign had an ‘oratorical rhythm that was often incantatory, and always literally “charming”, seductive and charismatic”. Since Obama had a speech-writer, perhaps that is the solution to the problem of political rhetoric.

What is remarkable for Docherty’s book as a whole, however, published before the world-wide pandemic, is just how prophetic many of his arguments have proved in respect of the discursive practices and public utterances of British government ministers and advisers. In a wonderful four-page analysis of Theresa May’s ‘Brexit means Brexit’ slogan and campaign from July 2016 onwards (pp. 53-57), he notes how ‘like many policies that are reduced to a slogan… it reduces the scope for dialogue and debate; [and] it hands governance and government over to the control of one individual, who now stands over and in control of ‘the people’ whose voices the slogan silences’ (p.53). Thus political rhetoric ‘can slip from being authoritative into being authoritarian’ and ‘legitimacy also slips into mere legality’ (p. 55). People succumb to slogans with their ‘repetitive and incantatory charm’ (p. 55). In the past year and more politicians have endlessly repeated infantile slogans like ‘Hands, Face, Space’, ‘Stay Home, Save Lives’, ‘Data not Dates’, useful sound-bites based on the discourse of science for the media, at the same time as laws, orders, rules and fines have proscribed social activities and freedoms. There is a chilling echo not only of Orwell’s 1984, but of the language-games of the Nazis (p. 215). Repetition ‘generates easy familiarity’; claims begin to be treated as standard or normative (p. 136). Moreover, a politician ‘who does not alter their conclusions when they have new information can become a dogmatist...or...a fundamentalist’ (p. 98). We have grown to accept, he says, ‘non-controversially, the idea that truth is always harsh, hard to face and resistant to our demand for happiness and pleasure’ (p. 159): a puritanical world-view compounded by lockdowns.

Docherty has a lot to say with contemporary relevance throughout the book about truth: how today ‘there are as many truths as there are interests’ (p. 115); and ‘one gets one’s truth from one’s adherence to a specific linguistic community’ (p. 117). The rise of ‘My Truth’ is certainly to be noted; and indeed, it might be argued that Tony Blair had a lot to answer for in this respect in his handling of the Iraq War: ‘truth ...essentially a matter of belief...a personal and even a private matter’ (p. 101). What is missing from Docherty’s book, however, is any discussion of the rise and the role of the internet and social media in the growth of tribalism, solipsism, trollism and wokeism. Nonetheless, Chapter 5 on ‘Words, Deeds and Democracy’ has pertinent comments on the atmosphere of both ‘infantilism’ and ‘risk management’, especially on university campuses.

The book as a whole is a repository of sparkling comments and insights. The right to bear arms in the USA may depend on the punctuation of the Second Amendment, and one comma (p. 152). Captain Picard of Star Trek retains echoes of Jean-Luc Godard and the sophistication of French avant-garde cinema on the one hand, but also of Picard, the French frozen food retailers (p. 50, fn.33). In James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake the ‘new’ words are portmanteau words ‘that generously and hospitably invite the alien tongue into the heart of the text...calling forth experiences that are themselves new and shareable’ (p. 63). There is a witty extended analysis of Tom Hooper’s film The King’s Speech (2010) (pp. 69-78) in a chapter (3) on the ‘stiff upper lip’ of the English. Lionel Logue, the Australian speech-therapist, has rooms in the basement, literally ‘down-under’. He is in the toilet when George VI’s wife Queen Elizabeth arrives: ‘he enters to the sound of water flushing behind him: he enters, literally, from the scatological and taboo realm of the cloaca with which his language will later identify him’ (p. 74).

In his final chapter (‘Remnants of Dissent’) Docherty broadens his canvas to include once again the public discourse of higher education. Critical Discourse Analysts in the 1990s inspired by Fairclough (1996) had a lot to say about forms of language ‘crossing the border’ into new ones, including marketing and finance permeating university pronouncements. In the context of higher education he considers not only the ‘reduced language of commerce’ (p. 217), but also ‘the language of institutionalized management-speak’, otherwise known as ‘bullshit’ (p. 224). We can all recognise words like ‘dynamic’, ‘excellence’, rigour’ from university ‘mission statements’.

But it is in this final chapter, and in his discussion of universities, that Docherty appears to offer a solution to the state of political language that he has so vividly portrayed throughout his book. He believes it is the responsibility of those within universities, ‘as the critical consciousness of their society, to expand the range of human possibilities and the range of what can be thought’.’ We need not fail; we must not fail’. ‘Like the poets, like the musicians, we academics have a responsibility to [the language] and to the international community who need the language to be open, exploratory, unconstrained. Dissent must speak…’ (p. 227). Two years further on, however, Docherty’s plea for freedom of speech rings ironically hollow in a now deeply embedded ‘cancel culture’ and a culture where arts and humanities are viewed as less important to society than the sciences.