One very clever word was coined after the Second World War – ‘meritocracy’ – and gained currency. Apart from one very important new word – ‘totalitarianism’ – our only innovations afterwards were a few combinations, such as ‘welfare state’, or ‘stagflation’, or ‘social justice’, and many weak or weasel words like ‘governance’, ‘innovation’ and ‘impact’ (and the two worst words in our contemporary political lexicon: passion and delivery: our politicians evidently seeing themselves as a cross between Christ crucified and Postman Pat). What we saw in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a thousand-and-one commentators reconfiguring old terms, recolouring them, reordering them: trying to build a house out of cards printed before 1848, certainly long before 1914. Since 1848 our political language has – believe it or not – mostly stagnated. The Revolutionary era of 1789 to 1848 gave us ‘liberalism’, ‘socialism’, ‘conservatism’. The Late Renaissance gave us the singular word ‘state’ and also the dread word ‘policy’. The Romans gave us ‘constitution’, ‘liberty’, ‘empire’. In my own line of concern, the Greeks gave us ‘history’, ‘philosophy’, ‘politics’. Certain places at certain times have thrown up extremely useful new words. One of my old professors at Cambridge, Quentin Skinner, has a line somewhere about how the surest sign that we have arrived at a new concept is the fact that we find ourselves with a new word. Political correctness versus common sense. Anyone who thinks that to say this is to leap from the sublime to the ridiculous fails to understand the gravity of our current situation.
Part of my point is to explain why the continued encounter of Toby Young and James Delingpole is essential. In Part II, I shall make a distinction on our side, between the language of the blue pill and the language of the red pill. In Part I, I shall distinguish our language from the language of the enemy: namely, the politically correct language of the BBC, the Guardian, the universities, the church, the higher educated in general.
What I want to do in this piece is make some general claims about political language in our time.
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