Kidnapped words are the Janissaries of campaigns to promote an invented reality. Their original identities are obliterated. Worse, unlike the Ottoman Janissaries, figments of the past identity can be retained when its resonance is considered helpful. Words are kidnapped for two reasons. One is to slay them; the other is to exploit them. American politics offers rich examples of both variants.

The radical right in the United States effectively took control of the term liberal and all its variants so as to infuse it with strongly negative connotations. They succeeded so completely in transforming it into a political ‘dirty word’ that it has long been abandoned by Democrats. They now engage in all sorts of verbal gymnastics to avoid its designation for themselves, their ideas or their policy proposals. In the process, they expose any new coinage intended as a surrogate to similar calumnies. For example, one self-styled progressive Senator was accused by his opponent of not having the courage of his convictions to call his ‘tax & spend’ program liberal.

“Tax & Spend” is a vapid slogan that should be easily refuted – and thrust back at its perps with interest. The logic is elementary: governments exist in order to spend and tax. All governments must tax in order to finance public services whose provision is its reason for being. The generation of requisite revenues means taxing groups and individuals under its jurisdiction. The level of taxation corresponds to the value attached to the activities that government undertakes.

Hence, the key question posed by attacks on public spending – carried to absurd extreme by Musk’s DOGE crude decimation of federal agencies – is: what public services are the citizenry ready to give up if they wish to prioritize low taxation and debt reduction: MEDICARE, emergency medical care, epidemic disease control, research into cures of fatal medical conditions, disaster relief? Regulation of prescription drugs and food inspection, pollution control and clean-up, workplace safety? Construction and maintenance of transportation networks, electricity grids, water and sanitation infrastructure; educational facilities; national parks? Etc., etc. etc.

An honest, direct answer to such a blunt statement of stakes and trade-offs makes obvious the fatuous nature of the ‘tax & spend’ meme. Of course, there are serious matters of what taxes are levies at what rate and how they are allocated among numerous public needs. However, it is not the intention of the specious polemicists who thrill at taking a chainsaw to dismember government to engage such a discourse. Neither Musk nor his thuggish henchmen have the ability or temperament to do anything that constructive.

This regression from a word’s denotative meaning to slur to shrill expletive honed to provoke raw emotion is what occurs when language ceases to serve as a vehicle for communication and, instead, becomes a heady tonic for both speaker and target.

Conservative itself is a Janissary word. The literal meaning is one who conserves. In politics traditionally, it has been adopted by those factions who see virtue in the status quo and are skeptical of change - especially when change is sudden and challenges established principles. There is nothing conservative about modern day Republicans who have made a fetish of conservatism. They are at once reactionaries, who want to return America to a mythic past, and radicals who want to introduce basic changes in our public life.

Trump II’s dramatic assault on the American constitutional republic has gone far further; is creating a quasi-fascist autocracy that purports to act in the name of a fictive popular will while in fact installing a combine of marauding billionaires, Evangelical Christian jihadis, racists and psychotic sadists. MAGA polemics are free of any substantive content. It’s life blood is a pastiche of images: John Wayne riding high in the saddle, triumphant wars where our victory is ensured because in God we trust, Norman Rockwell portraiture of the true, idyllic soul of America.

As to their socio-economic thinking – more accurately, their primitive, incoherent emotional effusions, it is rooted in 19th century social Darwinism, their reference point the ‘Gilded Age’ of the 1890s. Rolling back the New Deal and everything associated with it, therefore, is objective number one. “Conservatives” also aim to fortify the arbitrary powers of the Executive, at the expense of the principle of ‘checks and balances’ etched in the Constitution, in a manner never before experienced in the United States.

Internationally, they are dedicated to building a world according to American specifications through generous application of American military power. This package is diametrically different from all that has been meant by conservatism historically. The reactionary /radicals kidnapping of the term for their own purposes is made possible by the free and easy use of vocabulary in a literally mindless political culture.

Exploiting Janissary words normally occurs when they are seen as having a positive image that can be used to market something rather different. Reform is an outstanding example. Its emotive power stems from the implication of progress, an unalloyed good in modern imaginations. Progress in turn implies improvement or betterment. Reform movements in the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world were associated with expansion of voting rights, the breaking of monopolies, the sweeping out of office of corrupt political machines, etc. The beneficiaries in those cases were the ‘people,’ the citizens, the common folk, the little man. Nowadays, the term reform has been abducted and put in the service of change that implies greater efficiency, especially the efficiency of markets, in disregard for the well-being of flesh and blood persons.

Liberal is a close cousin of the grander word Progress. Liberalism’s essence is the conviction that progress will ensue from following its precepts. Progress means more wealth and greater liberty - for all. For society to follow the course marked out by enlightened reason is to have the reality, not just the promise, of the good life. The collective good is synonymous with the individual’s good. The sum of satisfied individual interests is the common interest. The progress registered by the triumph of neo-liberal economic practices and policies contradicts this principle. Many people in the Western countries, most in the United States, have not shared in the aggregate wealth generated.

Nowadays, the promotion of any social change is labelled reform - whether or not its objects will find their situation improved. Market fundamentalists campaign under the banner of reform when they press for ‘flexible labour markets.’ That phrase is a euphemism for making terms of employment more onerous. Workers, in the wake of labour market reform, find themselves less secure in their jobs, less well paid and recipients of reduced fringe benefits. It can be argued, of course, that the change improves the overall efficiency of the economy.

The dogma of market fundamentalism says that systemic efficiencies help everyone. That is not true. There is a redistribution of wealth and even opportunity. There are winners and losers - certainly in the short and middle run. Whether everyone gains in the long run depends on the intervening factors of how market power is structured and what actions are taken by governments.

In the decades preceding the financial crash of 2008, reform was even the preferred term of those advocating an end to the regulation of financial markets. They succeeded. The heaviest costs of their success - and the resulting abuse and then failure of financial markets - were borne by the general populace. Their lives deteriorated rather than improved. There was a high positive correlation between implementation of that ‘reform’ agenda and society’s moving backward by the enlightened standards of the past century.

Similarly, American officials and pundits talk about the vital need for ‘Reforming’ entitlement programs - itself a euphemism for Social Security and Medicare. Reform in this instance means cutting benefits, i.e. a straightforward reduction in the value of what recipients get. Blatant untruths are propagated by the advocates of ‘reform’: Social Security is in crisis; there is no other way to fund these programs. It fact, it is funded until 2044 and there are reasonable ways to fund it thereafter - such as raising the ceiling for FICA and Medicare withholdings.

An honest public discourse would not use the word ‘reform.’ Instead, it would refer to cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits so as to distribute the nation’s wealth towards other ends, persons and purposes. It remains to be seen whether the harsh lessons administered by the ‘great recession’ will sensitize us to the practice of enlisting the Janissary words Reform and Progress into causes with no legitimate claim to the words

(To be concluded …)