On today’s show, Alex and Calvin continue their series on Discourse and Manipulation by examining the role of manipulative silence in various post-mortems to the 2024 Presidential Election.

As a second-term President Donald Trump looms, many have been debating: what went wrong in the Democrats’ campaign? What policy positions, rhetorical strategies and slip-ups, or other contextual factors led Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to be so soundly defeated? However, amidst all of the post-mortem analysis by institutional Democrats and their surrogates in the media, some salient concerns seem to be missing: namely, the various causes and effects of economic and political precarity that many communities in the US are actively experiencing, and the Democrats’ seeming unwillingness to address these issues head-on. Instead, many are using this epideictic moment to blame scores of abstract, ill-defined terms for the election loss: “wokeness,” “inflation,” “misogyny,” “political headwinds,” and “anti-incumbent sentiment,” among others.

When we apply a Critical Discourse Studies lens, we can see that all of these concepts share a common grammatical category: each one is a nominalization, or a noun that has been made out of a verb or adjective. These nominalizations serve the useful purpose of obscuring or silencing important information, such as who is responsible for an action (or who/what is being affected by it), as well as the scale of the issue.

In this episode, we examine a series of texts that use manipulative nominalizations and other discourse structures to erase the specific ways that Democratic leaders, campaign staff, and consultancy firms have acted ineffectively and destructively both in this failed run and in the recent past (e.g. Biden’s and Obama’s presidencies and Clinton’s losing bid in 2016). Instead of taking real stock of this history, these texts are mainly platforms for powerful actors to attack broad, abstract concepts, or worse, to victim-blame the voters themselves. We conclude by reflecting upon how these manipulative silences betray the Democratic establishment’s inability or unwillingness to reckon with how its own economic and material interests might be at odds with policies and platforms that could help uplift the most vulnerable in our society.

Texts Analyzed in this Episode:

Maureen Dowd - “Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics”

National Organization for Women President Christian F. Nunes: “Racism, Sexism, Misogyny and Hate Won This Election, But We Won’t Let Our Democracy Be Destroyed”

David Plouffe dialogue on Pod Save America podcast episode: “Exclusive: The Harris Campaign On What Went Wrong”

Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse (Vol. 270). London: Routledge.

Huckin, T. (2002). Textual silence and the discourse of homelessness. Discourse & Society, 13(3), 347-372.

Van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage.

Cameron Mozafari's Twitter thread summarizing his work with Michael Israel on the changing meaning of “woke”

re:verb episode 71: re:pronouns

re:verb episode 14: re:blurb - Ideographs

An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)