The Name Game

While reading yet another screed online where President Obama is either a socialist or trying to establish a socialist nation, I considered the disjointed reasoning behind said screed and others like it I've endured. I recognized that a large part of the efforts to derail Obama's proposals have centered on emotional symbols, especially when corroborating facts are thin. The most powerful symbolism is often the simplest: the names we use to label people.

The epithet of "socialist" has been thrown around freely by Limbaugh conservatives and the Tea Party set, like a magic tar that should stain the president and scare the rest of us back into line. The mere mention of the most vile leftist monikers -- socialist, Marxist, communist -- fans the wildfire of irrational anger and fear, and the mob mentality at so many town hall meetings on health care reform is a logical result of the baiting language that has been used.

Some folks on the left have their own f-word -- fascist -- that they throw around like a rhetorical gold MasterCard. Most use it the same way as the right use socialist, with a there-I-said-it certainty and nothing else to back it.

It's easy to push someone's buttons and motivate opposition. But what gets built this way? When we can't listen to the ideas in a proposed course of action because one or both sides are substituting inflammatory language for reasoned debate, nothing meaningful can be accomplished. With the great problems of our time, we can't settle for a grade-school playground level of discourse.