The left’s use of language

The left specialise in coming up with new terms to apply to those who don’t agree with them, so they marginalise their views. Helen can’t comment on an issue without mentioning those awful fundamentalists, for example. And we’ve had them invent terms like “New Right”, “neo-liberal” and “neo-conservative”.

I’ve long suspected that many on the left don’t even understand what the terms are meant to mean, and think they are all interchangeable terms of abuse.

We see this today with Matt McCarten, who says:

In those days, of course, the National Party and their neo-conservative allies believed that workers and bosses needed to increase the size of their cake so that we could all get a bigger piece of cake.

Now a neoconservative is generally characterised as a conservative who supports an aggressive foreign policy.

So having McCarten talk about neo-conservative allies in the context of employment policies makes as much sense as having someone attack Labour and their environmental allies over Labour’s tertiary education policies.

Basically he just uses neoconservative as a general term of abuse. It means don’t listen to the arguments, they must be wrong because they have a “bad” label applied to them.