It's not that these words don't have meanings. It's that their meanings have been rendered meaningless.

From Liberal Newspeak by Daniel Greenfield. An interesting interpretation of language, communication, media, etc.

Liberal Newspeak is the hybrid product of advertising, academia and bureaucracy. It takes ideas from creative leftists, rinses them in conformity, uses techniques from the ad world to make them as safe as possible and then shoves them down everyone's throat.

Newspeak's objective was to enforce linguistic schizophrenia as a means of subdividing personalities, killing rational thought and making opposition into a form of madness. Liberal Newspeak's is less ambitious. It settles for muddling your brain. Like modern advertising, its goal is to make you feel comfortable without actually telling you anything.

Liberal Newspeak is the chirpy announcer in a drug commercial soothingly telling you about all the fatal side effects while on screen couples have romantic picnics and go whitewater rafting. That is the job of most of the news media. Forget outliers like MSNBC which caters to a self-consciously prog crowd. The media's real job is to be that announcer telling you that if you vote liberal, your taxes will go up, your job will go to China and you will die, without getting you upset about the terrible news.

The dictionary of Liberal Newspeak is full of empty and meaningless words. Community, Care, Access, Sharing, Concern, Affordability, Options, Communication, Listening, Engage, Innovating and a thousand others like it are wedged into sentences. Entire pages can be written almost entirely in these words without a single note of meaning intruding on the proceedings.

It's not that these words don't have meanings. It's that their meanings have been rendered meaningless. The techniques of advertising have been used to pluck up words that people once felt comfortable with and wrap them around the agendas of the liberal bureaucracy.

And I don't think this is solely a Left issue. It might predominate there but I think this aversion to pursuit of facts and truth is common across the full spectrum. All of us as citizens have to reverse it, not simply fight one party or the other.

I think Greenfield is on to something interesting. The Gramscian strategy of the old Soviet Union of fostering postmodernism and critical theory as means of undermining the intellectual foundations of the West has paid huge dividends without benefitting anyone. The cognitive pollution is pervasive. Part of what Greenfield is pointing out is that postmodernism and critical theory themselves are not really the threat. They long ago lost any intellectual rigor or support. The marketing of those ideas is what has been incredibly successful.

Liberal Newspeak isn't the work of the engineers of the left, but its marketers. It doesn't bother with frontal attacks on language. Instead it reframes everything in comforting language while teaching you to use the appropriate terms that change the context completely. It owes less of its perversity to Marxism than it does to Madison Avenue. The language that was used to convince millions to buy junk that was bad for them or that they didn't need is used to convince them to buy liberalism.

While the implications of Liberal Newspeak are ominous, its tones aren't. It deliberately embraces the feminine side of language. It strives to be comforting, nurturing and soothing. It never tells you anything directly. Instead it makes you read everything between the lines. It rarely answers questions. Instead its answers indirectly explain to you why you shouldn't even be asking the questions.

Liberal Newspeak is a language of preemption. It preempts questions and ideas. Its terminology is so vague that specific questions require a convoluted assemblage of words. The more specific the question, the more convoluted the sentence, until asking even a simple question is like trying to make a wish with a genie. And then the sheer amount of words makes the meaning impermeable.

You can't think in Liberal Newspeak. You can only feel good or bad, angry or self-satisfied. There is no room for thoughts, only feelings. You can feel guilty in Liberal Newspeak. You can be outraged, self-righteous or concerned. But you can't weigh one idea against another because it isn't a language of ideas. It's a vocabulary of emotional cues that could just as easily be taught to a smart animal.

One of the consequences is unintended consequences.

Liberals policies go awry so often in part because Liberal Newspeak makes propaganda easy, but practical planning very difficult. The language they use is designed to make people comfortable with uncomfortable things, but descends into meaningless waves of bureaucratese when discussing any specifics. That is the difference between marketing ObamaCare and making ObamaCare work.

Greenfield points out one of the attributes that makes the marketing so effective - there is no there.

Liberal Newspeak is full of terms about listening, engaging and sharing, but it's a closed loop.

It's language as a command and control mechanism for establishing conformity. There is no room for debate in Liberal Newspeak. Arguments are settled with emotional resorts to the dominant political agendas of the day.

There is no way to disprove anything in Liberal Newspeak. All you can do is denounce your opponent's lack of ideological conformity while claiming that your experience gives you special insight into the form of oppression that the political agenda is meant to solve.

And this is where we are now.

Newspeak was concerned with the manipulation of meaning, while Liberal Newspeak is concerned only with emotional cues tied to identity. It doesn't replace meaning, it displaces it. It has emotions, but no ideas. It is the noise that takes the place of the signal and the hum that ends a conversation. Its purpose is to take an individualistic culture where ideas were proven through adversarial contests of the intellect and reduce it to a conformity that promises safety in exchange for never thinking again.

How do we take back the conversation, focus on real problems and expand the knowledge frontier to find real solutions to problems that people really want solved. That is the antidote to the Gramscian infections of the mind.