Hobnobbing with the King of Hearts

by

Ted Crook

Conservative professionals like Frank Luntz are extremely good at the creation of two and three word phrases of incredible emotional force.   While  facts can never be correctly expressed in two or three words,  emotions thrive in such expressions.

“Tax and spend”, “pro life”, “less government”, “lower taxes”, “freedom first”, “our constitution”, “liberals are ______”, “crooked Hillary” “Deep state”, and the subject of this essay, “bleeding heart liberal”, all evoke emotional responses which don’t rely on truth.

All these phrases provoke cheers or anger much more strongly than any longer statement would.

Progressives are very bad at producing short phrases to establish their positions. Being"pro choice” is a much weaker position that being “pro life”, even though it more accurately expresses the position of progressives on abortion.  It can even be argued that many conservative positions are really anti-life, but the winning score in this two word contest goes to them.

An aside:  In the context of these short phrases, one name to Google is George Lakoff.  I won’t give details, here, but much of his work in linguistics has been an analysis of this area of political speech.

One other aside:  while progressives are hard put to counter any of these epithets directly (the typical response is to sputter in abject frustration), I would suggest that they may be effectively countered by calling them what they are: two or three word lies.  The phrase “two word lie” can be correctly applied to almost all two word expressions--even though it is a phrase of only three words.

“Bleeding heart liberal” is a phrase that has been around for a long time.  It is, of course absolutely accurate in the sense that the heart of a liberal, in pumping blood, is always “bleeding”.  If it implies that only  liberals have bleeding hearts, then it is stating that all conservative hearts have stopped.

It is meant to evoke ideas somewhat like these: a soft touch, an easy mark, possibly gay, over generous, too accepting, impractical, vegetarian, and unrealistic.

It is remarkable that such a large part of the ideological divide can be seem to be expressed in three words--a tribute to the strange genius of the conservative who first expressed them.

Since the human capacity for compassion and empathy is the glue that holds society together, the statement--meant as an insult--actually refers to the best traits ensuring human survival.   These traits, of course, being shared by all.

It is, of course, droll to point out that humans who lack compassion and empathy --who lack “bleeding hearts”--are sociopaths and, often, serial killers.  Thus, this conservative description of progressives can be made to imply that conservatives are sociopaths.  None of us would want to come to that conclusion.