Politics and the English Language

George Orwell has talked about politics and written English’s qualities to some extent are common—“First is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision”. Like Hillary Clinton’s Democratic convention speech that was vagueness and boring to made her husband asleep. In her full speech, I saw that she just focused on beating her enemies of the presidential election so that we can make America greater, not terrorism.

George Orwell also said that politics language “makes lies sound truthful”. This sentence made me think about an article Art of the lie from The Economist mentioned that we now live in the era of “Post-truth”. Politicians are always lying, but we are in a dangerous era of “post-truth politics”. In the past, the political lying just created the wrong view of the world to people. Nowadays, politicians make people “feel true” of the lies instead of the fact itself. Like DNC speech from Clinton, she said that “the man of Hope, Barack Obama. America is stronger because of President Obama's leadership, and I'm better because of his friendship.” Did she really think so? Maybe few months ago, she just considered that the chaos in Libya and Syria was President Obama’s fault. What’s more, she said that “we’ll build an economy where everyone who wants a good paying job can get one”. It sounds like a good plan. However, how could she deal with the negative impact on overall employment while raising the minimum wage? Meanwhile, more informal low-paying jobs would appear underground, which means maybe the workers benefits and protections cannot be guaranteed.

“Politicians are always fakes.” They always make promises that people would have better life in order to have more supporters for their presidential election. But it is hard for them to do it or maybe they do not plan to do it at all. That is why the approval rate of a politician would decrease after he became a president. Politicians are good at telling lies as truth.