A Conceptual Trash Heap
Toni Morrison was wrong when she intoned that language is violence. But let’s give her this: the reckless use of words can do violence, idiomatically speaking, to clear thinking and therefore to political analysis. Slinging about words whose meaning is muddled, misleading, or tendentious — or whose usage is meant to oversimplify or to inflame — makes it impossible to think rationally, coherently, and productively.
It is a tall order in this age of slogans and shibboleths to select one word to expunge from our political vocabulary, but if asked to do so I would nominate “neoliberalism.” A coinage of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the term remained fairly limited in its use for two decades, gaining currency at first in academic circles and then exploding in popularity after the financial crash in 2008 and Bernie Sanders’ rise to celebrity. Then, just when it was fading from overexposure, it surged back into fashion. Critics, scholars, consultants, and commentators now finger neoliberalism as the reason for practically all our political problems, especially the Democrats’ failure to keep the presidency out of the hands of Donald Trump.