I’m pretty sure this is unique to this election, and I’m pretty sure this starts with Sanders…

This election has created a lot of social media-storms, Medium-storms, and just general small-time small talk about Very Big Words in politics and history.  In the last four months, ever since Sanders moved from protest candidate to a real pain in the party’s neck, the following words have been hotly debated chattered:

• socialist – of course, because Sanders is a Democratic one, but few (myself included) bother to dig deep into what he means by it, or to understand the European flavor of the word.  I suspect there are three reactions:  1) distrust – from an association of socialism with bloody systems of state communism; 2) enthusiasm – from people who are leftists and know/believe socialism to be something more akin to Orwell’s definition of socialism as “common decency” and a critique of unfettered capitalism; and 3) code – simply a critique of capitalism, market forces harnessed for social outcomes.  (I skipped #4 hard-core socialists because I’m not sure that they – people who have read and thought deeply to find their tendency – take Sanders seriously as a socialist.  Chomsky doesn’t.)
• revolution – I’m most surprised by how seriously this word is taken, and that it’s taken more seriously than socialist.  John Hodgman had a dickish smug liberal moment  in his endorsement of HRC when he wrote:  “Major change is ALWAYS incremental. Unless you want to have a REAL revolution, with shooting and stuff. You might. I do not.”(*)  To my mind, there are again different ways in which the word lands in people’s political minds:  1) revolution == big change, big enough to change the game;  2) revolution == upending the entire political order; and 3) revolution == something involving the execution of the ruling class (or the losing class).  I find it silly to address Sanders’s use of the word on any but the first.  Revolution for Sanders has meant taking money out of politics, re-distributing wealth, and putting societal requirements on an equal footing with capitalism.  All three of those things have been, until Occupy, heresies.  (Remember the grief Obama got when he told Joe the Plumber “we gotta spread [the wealth] around?)  So while they may not meet everyone’s definition of a “REAL revolution” I’m hard pressed to find a better word to express the impact of those changes.
• liberal – I discovered some surprising dimensions around “liberal” on social media.  During a long FB exchange (which I’m having trouble finding, so I’ll have to paraphrase), people were doing the usual critique of HRC:  “I want to vote for a liberal, and HRC isn’t that.”  A woman who is a committed Democrat, jumped into the thread, and said “It’s hurtful when people claim I’m not a liberal because I support Hillary.”  What surprised me, here, is that I genuinely thought most Clintonites and Clinton strategists didn’t want to be seen as liberal, that they were working very hard to shed that moniker.  It never occurred to me that someone would be hurt when their liberal credentials were denied.  More to the point, though, that exchange highlights how unclear the defining set of beliefs underlying the word liberal have become.
• left – there’s a funny moment at the end of Inequality for All, the documentary about Robert Reich and his class on income inequality.  He says, in his always amused voice, that he was surprised to find out he was a leftist.  “I haven’t changed my views in over 30 years”, it’s just that the world has moved to the right of me.  I frequently tell people I’m a leftie to warn them off of topics or give them an excuse to go and refresh their drink, but I have no idea what I’m talking about anymore.
• progressive – probably the most misused (especially by me).  Progressivism has a very specific history, grounded in actual organizations calling themselves progressive.  It’s also used as something to the left of liberal.  Plus also it gets used as describing left of Hillary if you don’t want to characterize her.  And, finally, it has a nice ring to it – like evolved – that lets you connect to intersectional identity politics without being academic or embarrassed to be an affluent white person talking about  intersectional.
• movement vs moment – this is the most recent one:  is it a powerful movement we should take seriously,  or is it just a moment?  This is another facile way of dismissing something that we’re in the middle of and we want to deal with in one of a couple ways without having to Google something or get into details.  With movement versus moment, I can 1) dismiss Sanders as a fad, media sensation, or what the kids are doing before they move onto the next bright shiny object; 2) question the intellectual or organizational seriousness of the people; or 3) genuinely challenge the importance of the phenomenon, but with a very strange, excessively fluid set of criteria.

Lots of reasons to vent on this sloppy, slippery language.  But one of the most important reasons is again to highlight how facile our language is.  Movement vs moment, in particular, shows how short-sighted our conversations are.  This one comes from Facebook  as Sanders is laying off people from the campaign: