My kids watched “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” for the first time today. There was a scene in it in which the main character, Ransom Stoddard (played by James Stewart), was teaching class. He asked one of his students to talk about what kind of country America was. She stood up and said that we are a Republic.
I have often wondered when we lost that battle – the battle of words and the battle of premises. It makes sense that references to the United States transitioned from the plural – the United States are – to the singular – the United States is – after the Civil War. Even this took decades to become standard. According to vocabulary.com, “the House of Representative’s Committee on Revision of the Laws had ruled in 1902 that “the United States” should be treated as singular, not plural.”
This semantic change is not inconsequential. We tend to use the phrase “that’s semantics” as a flippant dismissal of the importance of words. In the military, it is common to hear leaders talking about “changing ‘happy’ to ‘glad’” as an almost contemptuous indictment of the idea that words mean things.
However, when we look at this semantic change from the United States are to the United States is, does this not highlight a change in thinking, and even of identity? If we take one simple word, amongst the most common words in the English language, and simply change tenses, then it changes the meaning, even the identity of a nation. In this case, it unifies a nation to be “Unum” rather than “Pluribus.” A simple change in tense changes the heart of who we are.
As recently as 1962 when “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” was released in the theater, it was not controversial that the United States was referred to as a Republic. Benjamin Franklin was famously asked words to the effect of, “What form of government, sir, have you given us?” To which he famously replied, “A Republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
In the Constitution of the United States, it decrees in Article 4, Section 4, that “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion…” (I left that last phrase in on purpose, because it is not being honored today either.)
In my youth, I wondered about the merits of the 16th and 17th Amendments. The 16th Amendment turned parts of the Constitution on its head. In the original document, the Federal Government was specifically forbidden from imposing an income tax. The 16th Amendment imposed an income tax. I think that is related, but tangential to this topic. The 16th Amendment empowered the Federal Government far beyond what the Founders had envisioned.
More to the point, though, the 17th Amendment provided for the direct election of Senators. What did that do, but to change the nature and purpose of the Senate? Originally, the Senators were to be representative of their States as a part of the body politick. They were empowered to further the rights of the States as sovereign entities, and to defend their position in the balance of power of a decentralized Republic.
The Senate existed to represent the State legislatures and to preserve State authorities in opposition to a bloating Federal Government. And yet, We the People abdicated that wisdom of the Founding Fathers and morphed the Senate into a super-House of Representatives.
Why did we do that, if not for the advancement of a single change in words: democracy as having primacy over republic. The direct election of Senators was more democratic, and we were being taught to value “democracy” at the expense of “republic.”
Is it coincidental that our two major political parties bear the names of democracy and republic as a delineator at a fundamental and philosophical level? Not at all.
Yet, we live in a world where democracy is worshipped and republic is hardly understood. That is because we looked at the issue as “changing happy to glad,” while others valued semantics. The result, much like “the United States is/are,” is a fundamental change in how we as a society view ourselves.
Political “science” professors talk about things like Democratic Peace Theory, and nearly universally categorize the United States as a form of “democracy.” In our high schools, our children are taught that the United States is a “democracy.”
Democracy. What is it but a sacred cow to empower the centralized elites, while castrating the diffused authorities of the Republic that we were promised?
There are many words and many “semantic” differences that have similarly profound effects. Is it coincidence that proponents of murdering babies deflect semantically, and “fight for a woman’s choice what she does with her own body?” Who could oppose the idea that a woman has a right to choose what to do with her own body? But if we accept the language of “pro-choice,” then we accept the premise that it is her body that is in question, not the baby’s. Was January 6th an “insurrection” or a protest that turned into an out-of-control riot? Is that semantics? Harkening back to the 1992 election, Bill Clinton reframed our system of Checks and Balances as “gridlock.” Was that merely semantics?
Even a mere suffix to a word can have profound implications. Whenever one makes reference to “the Democrat Party,” its partisan adherents are quick to make a correction: “It is the Democratic Party.” With two letters tacked onto the end of a word, the meaning is changed with broad implications. It becomes no longer the title, but a descriptive label. It creates a rhetoric that whatever the “democratic” party does supports democracy, while inferring that the opposing Republican Party is undemocratic by juxtaposition. We see this rhetorical trick playing out in the US currently, as it is supposed that democracy itself is on the ballot. The subtext is clear — either vote for the “democratic” party or vote for tyranny.
When are we as a people, and as a Nation, going to learn that words mean things, and the smallest change in verbiage can have profound effects on the course of the country? We have to get smarter, and reject the premises at the semantic level, or else we have already lost the battle and the war.
The “battle for the soul of America” that Joe Biden campaigned on is real. And the front line of that battle hinges upon whether we allow the reframing of words to support their ideas or ours. Hearts and minds will be won or lost based upon which words win dominance.
We must be active in engagement in the war of words. The words themselves precede any chance at winning the war of ideas.
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