Language matters. When US President Joe Biden was still the Democratic candidate for the US election, his campaign was about preserving democracy. Now, US Vice-President Kamala Harris is the nominee, and the campaign buzzword is “freedom”.
It’s a smart messaging shift, and not only because she can use a Beyonce song as her anthem. While democracy was a term that resonated mainly with older Americans, pretty much everyone in the US can get behind freedom.
Freedom is a word used more by conservatives than liberals. Republicans talk a lot about the freedom to do things, such as worship or carry guns or not wear masks in a pandemic. But there is also freedom from something – like poverty, pollution or crime.
The economist Joseph Stiglitz makes this point in his recent book, The Road To Freedom: Economics And The Good Society, which argues not for only a rebranding of the word, but also a more progressive political economy. Ms Harris seems to be taking a page from it, by linking freedom to reproductive rights, as well as to keeping communities safe from poverty and gun violence.
Words matter not only in politics but also in markets, particularly given how the US view of basic factual data has become polarised. Stanford-New York University research found that the partisan divide in perceptions of the same economic data between Democrats and Republicans roughly doubled between 1999 and 2020, with recoveries tending to be the most divided periods.
One person may see inflation declining quarter on quarter as good news, while another is focused on the negative by looking at how much it has risen over three years.
In such an environment, language has the power to start or stall ideas.
Maslansky and Partners, a consultancy specialising in language strategy, has done research on why, for example, Democrats and Republicans have such different views on ESG investing. Aside from the fact that few Americans actually know what the acronym means (people were more likely to say it stood for “eggs, sausage and grits” rather than environmental, social and governance), the term itself is incredibly polarising. For conservatives, it is associated with a kind of forced morality.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that conservatives aren’t invested in the problems of climate change. Terms such as “responsible” or “sustainable” business may make more sense to the average person than ESG.
The consultancy found that “responsible business” in particular was less divisive. Investors associate it with companies that are focused on reducing their environmental impact. They also believe responsible companies are more likely to provide a positive experience for customers, be good employers and make money.
This gets at a core point, which is, as chief executive Michael Maslansky puts it, “it’s not what you say, it’s what your audience hears”.
More than 70 per cent of investors polled across political lines believe that clean energy will outperform the market over the next 10 years. But when investing, they are more receptive to terms such as “climate opportunity” and “climate risk” as something that businesses should mitigate than they are interested in, say, “environmental justice”.
The difference between words can be huge in financial terms.
As Mr Roy Swan, the head of the Ford Foundation’s mission investments team, told me: “My first big ‘aha’ moment about word choice came 15 years ago when a white CEO of a non-profit shared with me that, during a tour of the heartland, she learnt that terms like ‘social equity’ and ‘equality’ made white people uneasy. She believed this was why the non-profit had trouble raising money from donors in certain parts of the country.”
Mr Swan has started to push a new term “patriotic capitalism” to describe a blueprint for businesses that put country, democracy and the common good first. That’s a pretty broad mandate, but in practice, it might mean investing in companies that enable employee ownership, or pay a fair living wage or increase affordable housing.
He believes it is important to take words or phrases that have been weaponised, such as DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and boil them down to their core meaning – say, fairness.
Doing this may increase bipartisan appeal. Take patriotism. Like freedom, this word has in recent years been leveraged by the Maga crowd.
In my own extremely blue area in Brooklyn, New York, just putting a flag outside your house would be enough to raise the eyebrows of neighbours worried that there might be a Republican lurking inside. And yet, to the extent that patriotism helps bond citizens in a diverse liberal democracy such as the US, it is essential in maintaining a free and open society.
In the 1998 book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought In Twentieth Century America, the academic philosopher Richard Rorty said: “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement. Too much national pride can produce bellicosity and imperialism, just as excessive self-respect can produce arrogance.
“But just as too little self-respect makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient national pride makes energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely.”
I’m for patriotism, responsible business and freedom. I’m also for careful word choices that reflect our common agendas. FINANCIAL TIMES
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