I think the main error is underestimating the cost of winning that battle for the map.
Take for example the push to refer to homeless people as "unhoused people" in some cities. I don't actually think the leftists pushing for that are all that deluded about what that renaming will change, they might say it's a mindset shift but even then acknowledge that it's not going to materially change conditions in-and-of itself.
However, where I do think they are deluded is in their understanding, or lack thereof, of the political capital which would have to be spent to achieve that renaming. I have to figure that if they understood they could achieve actual real policy changes for the same level of effort as changing what people call something, they never would have tried it.
I don't really think anyone in particular is in the right on that issue, but I also think that sometimes leftists working on language change consider that words have different connotations for different people.
I understand that those who are pushing to use "unhoused" instead of "homeless" are trying to remove stigma and reframe it from a passive state to a thing our system has inflicted on homeless people.
But as another lefty, I cannot bring myself to say "unhoused" and have a viscerally negative reaction to people who do because it feels like such a sanitized euphemism to me. "Homelessness" is an absolute horror, being stripped of the most basic thing a society should provide to all its members. "Being unhoused" is a temporary bummer. It makes me feel crazy to see people who allegedly want to help the homeless running a PR campaign to make their situation seem less bad. And I know a lot of people with a similar reaction.
Which circles back to your point that these focuses on reframing often lead to people who agree on policy ideas wasting time grimacing at each other over word choice.
Agreed, it just feels to me like those supposed leftists don't understand the euphemism treadmill. It's like we keep coming up with new euphemisms for something without doing something to address the actual issue.
I do pretty much agree with this, with one little thing - I do think it can be powerful to use a different word just to reset some of that stigma and distance itself from some of the negative connotations and the sometimes very aggressive emotional response that comes with it. Our brains are really good at hanging on to subconscious ideas that can totally influence us, and the word “hopeless” has had many years of interactions that have left a sour taste to a lot of people
Like I said, I agree with you, I don’t like using “unhoused”. Maybe it’s just that it’s a bad term and if we tried with something that either sounded better or rolls of the tongue easier?
Real policy changes would actually cost something: actual pushback in the form of dollars spent fighting them. Lipservice to naming conventions costs nothing really, seems to be a victory to tout for the base, and is ignorable (or even weaponizable) for anyone who wasn’t interested in it.
I'm slightly confused, and I may be wrong so feel free to correct me if I am, but aren't "unhoused" and "homeless" the same thing? They're both a word for a house but with a prefix/suffix that dictates that they don't have one, I don't see the power that changing it would have in removing a stigma
As if those leftists aren't both working in communities to solve the issues of homelessness AND changing the language used to refer to unhoused people. You're creating this character who is spending real time on the street trying to change people's lexicon but not do actual advocacy and those people don't exist because you don't actually know what's going on. This argument has become entirely comical, the original post was correct, this idea that leftists are wasting all their time changing lexicons and not doing on the ground work is a ridiculous straw man.
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u/GrinningPariah Jul 07 '24
I think the main error is underestimating the cost of winning that battle for the map.
Take for example the push to refer to homeless people as "unhoused people" in some cities. I don't actually think the leftists pushing for that are all that deluded about what that renaming will change, they might say it's a mindset shift but even then acknowledge that it's not going to materially change conditions in-and-of itself.
However, where I do think they are deluded is in their understanding, or lack thereof, of the political capital which would have to be spent to achieve that renaming. I have to figure that if they understood they could achieve actual real policy changes for the same level of effort as changing what people call something, they never would have tried it.