Slogans are effective forms of communication ranging from those which tersely summarize a point of view to those which make a social structure into a point of view to those which establish categories that effectively deny there is an opposing point of view.
George Orwell thought that slogans like “War is Peace” would obfuscate or even abolish thinking, an intellectual in his dystopia suggesting that talk could be disconnected from higher brain functions. Orwell was incorrect. Slogans have been available for millennia as ways to craft simple but deep messages and some of them are artful enough to persuade large numbers of people while others fail to be convincing. Trump renamed the “Department of Defense” the “Department of War” because the new name showed the United States to be more bellicose but everyone knew what the department did by whatever it was named. “Black Lives Matter” was an imperfectly crafted slogan in that it was to be understood as meaning “Black Lives Also Matter” but is treated by its opponents as meaning “Only Black Lives Matter”. A more successful slogan which doesn’t even use words is the multi-hued LGBTQ+ flag which means the group has a flag, which means it is a group out in the open and constitutes like other flags a corporate group that amounts to an ethnic group each having its own distinct but respectable customs rather than living in the shadows. There are any number of other slogans that have come into history that shape history, some even to abolish the very idea that they negate, and let us consider some prominent ones.
Some campaign slogans are anodyne. Eisenhower’s “ I Like Ike” had a ring to it because it rhymed but was little more than name recognition of a shorthand familiar name. Nixon’s was “Nixon is the One” which implied a bit of inevitability. FDR did better with proclaiming in 1932 “A New Deal for the American People” which carried on TR”s Square Deal as the announcement of a program and so was followed by Truman's "Fair Deal” and with slight alteration to Kennedy’s “New Frontier” which emphasized adventure and innovation and followed by LBJ’s “Great Society” which emphasized inclusiveness, a very different and more political theme. FDR added a song title to his repertoire: “Happy Days Are Here Again”, which is a nice anthem for a dour time, and JFK had a tune titled “High Hopes” that exhibited a feeling of exuberance in a time of elegance. as was also exhibited by the First Family when John John was dressed very fashionably and everybody noticed that..
Slogans as summing up the spirit if ab Administration lapsed in the years since then Hillary Clinton’s “Stronger Together” was less than memorable and just an attempt to be uncontroversial while Trump came up with MAGA which was a very successful slogan for Trump because his adherents did not have to specify what were the aspects of the past that made America great. It could mean racial inferiority or women in the kitchen or a time when Irene Dunne or Bette Davis produced a movie a year, which is indeed a time about which I feel nostalgic. The Harris campaign did not copy a term that captured the anti-constitutionalism that Trump re[presented, though anti-rumpists have come up with the term “No Kings” for its rallies but has not caught on as part of ordinary public discourse.That just shows that people are nonplussed at the enormity of Trump‘s changed point of view or else deep down don’t see there is a nothing much wrong with him even if he may be personally crude.
Some slogans become prominent because they are accurate descriptions of social structure but are also used as slogans to summarize or advocate for a way of life. So Democracy is a specific form of politics whereby the masses of people are able to control the government for good, when it is expressed in elections or for ill when it allows mob rule and activists use the word to mean either one of these things or the other or applaud the word to mean you can shout out that the umpire is blind. The same transformation of a description of a social structure that becomes a slogan for a way of life hap[pens with the word slavery which strictly speaking means an indentureship where people are owned by other people rather than serfs who are entailed to a property but becomes in history a slogan for the way of life of a caste system and is extended to include wage slavery or slavery to fashion.
Slavery was a lively issue since the time of the American Revolution and people dealt with the concept differently so that Washington freed his sl;aves and Jefferson, who wanted to eliminate slavery in the Declaration of Independence, did not free his slave subjects. The term was replaced by similar terms at later times and had to be answered in also related but redefined terms. The Southern United States wanted to remain the caste system of racial slavery through Jim Crow by proclaiming the slogan “Segregation Now and Forever” and Martin Luther King Jr, answered that with parading voiceless demonstrators dressed in their Sunday best to declare that the cast of slavery was obsolete and King used an answering argument not just a slogan to convince uncertain white sympathizers the rhetorical question of how long need they wait until blacks are ready for emancipation because the southerners said never and the moderates until blacks had become developed enough as a people to deserve voting and public accommodations. So policy, structures and slogans get intertwined. The same had been the case under the Confederacy which did not in its Constitution define what was meant by slavery much less the conditions under slavery to be federally regulated but said only that the practice was permitted in all the Confederate states, which would make it important enough to be included as that nation’s constitution to be treated not as just a word but a body of law.
Beyond even that mixture of slogans with structure are slogans even so powerful and so popular that they move to abolish their opposition rather than answer them. A particularly powerful slogan is that of “reproductive rights” which have universally replaced the s;ogan of “freedom of choice” as the slogan of pro-abortionists. Rather than a species akin to free speech, reproductive rights means that everything that has to do with the birth process is a matter of a woman’s right and akin to appendectomies and gall bladder removals. It is just the extirpation of an unwanted foreign body. There is no status at all for the fetus, whether and when it is a human being, though anti-abortionists insist that it does have some rights of its own which are totally neglected by the pro-abortionists. There is no trade off of values, claims on both a fetus and also a mother, but only the claim of a mother to her rights, never mind that women are only capable of being the host of the inevitably parasitic offspring and so have a responsibility to the creature the woman carries. It is often the case that the slogans of one side are so persuasive that the other side disappears, as happened with “Segregation Forever”, and this seems to be the rhetorical situation at the moment in that opponents of abortion are reduced to showing early time heartbeats as a sign of their being real rather than talking about fetal rights.
A less persuasive slogan of antiabortionists who also offer a slogan more than an argument is the Catholic claim that people should not engage in “unnatural” kinds of birth control without bothering to spell out what “natural” means, however many the theologians who offer themselves as experts on the matter. Clearly, abortions and condoms are unnatural because they interrupt the carrying out of the biological process. But what was at one time recommended as the rhythm method whereby couples wou;ld monitor using medical devices the times when women would ovulate was also unnatural in that people thought about when not to have sex as well as to use devices. But all thinking is natural rather than artificial and so any willful denial of one’s natural inclinations is then unnatural even if theologians concentrate on mechanical rather than more scientific intrusions on what comes naturally.The natural thing would be for men to engage their impulses and have sex as often as possible in which case all those sperm would have a chance to meet an ova rather than curtail that through custom and law. Any thought is natural but the term is selectively applied as a slogan and is disregarded by the laity as is clear when Catholic families come to church with fewer children than was true in earlier generations. Natural is not a powerful word anymore and I expect Catholic theologians will catch up with that in a hundred years or so.
Another slogan that attempts to obliterate rather than oppose its opposition is the claim that theIsraeli invasion og Gaza is genocidal because so many Gaza children are dying, never mind that a legal definition of genocide requires intent. The death of innocents speaks for itself, is dreadfully shameful, without bothering to note that historically the starvation of people in medieval sieges, in Vicksberg, in the blockade of Japan in the last year of WWII was regarded as legitimate warfare. So the outrage against starving civilians, even if that fact is granted, is a new thing, invented against Israelis and not previously applicable but nonetheless having taken over the field of discussion to the point tat in fact Israel claims it is giving food aid to Gaza in large quantities. Slogans work.
The three kinds of slogans-- the weakest as a short summary for a point of view, the more powerful one of the name of a social structure that is used to advocate a point of view, and the third most powerful usage as a way to abolish rather than answer an alternative point of view. Is available in contemporary discourse and are mobilized in three major claims made by Trump before and since his second Presidency. He thinks of there being a war against the border and those cities he labels as rife with crime and disorder, the term “war” in previous times to be applied to Eisenhower’s crusade over Europe and by LBJ as a war on poverty and by Nixon as a war on cancer. The term is a social structure where the honest folk of the heartland oppose the cultural elites on the coasts and would abolish or at least subdue those people by seeing them as enemies rather than opponents that are to be dealt with by military measures and Trump has of late characterized all Democrats as reprehensible. The second issue is sloganized as the politicization of the justice department which refers to the events under Biden where charges were made against him he says were all; baseless , and so structurally has to do with whether the justice department can operate or ever did operate independently of the White House. The opposing point of view that is abolished is that there is never any question that the Justice Department is independent in that Trump is not out to restore independence from Biden but to do that as well expressing whatever is the view of the president. To be partial is inevitable.
The third issue is stated in a slogan that he says that as President he can do whatever he wants to do, which echoes his brief pronouncement of years ago that if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue his followers would support him. The Supreme Court seems to uphold that view when it decided last year that a President could not be tried for a crime within its official duties in the President could be exculpated from shooting his wife by simply claiming he was being attacked by her and attacking the President is illegal and there can be no hearing to determine whether this was a personal or official event because to have such a hearing would violate that the President was not subject to an official crime. That reference can be placed within a theory of the unitary executive which conservative theorists have offered as a reading of the constitution and means that every part of the executive branch is at his beck and call, and is extended to mean that opposition to the President’s dictates are just illegitimate. Whether these three slogans will succeed is yet to be seen.