The magical words of politics
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I spent Saturday morning watching American inaugural addresses on YouTube. Yes, it's true, I am a geek. I also spent last night watching a range of major British political speeches, to compare and contrast. This little exercise has left me with something of an anthropological conundrum. Well, perhaps it's not really a conundrum, but it is curious how political language, and political speech as a reflection of social mores, manifests differently in America and in Britain.
Take for example, inaugural addresses of incoming American presidents. Through the ages, the tone and structure of these addresses varies very little from president to president. America has such a strong sense of self, its place in the world, and importantly, where it is going, that you could almost write a script for a presidential address absolutely blind to the politician delivering it. Of course, the style might vary a little from FDR to JFK to Reagan to Obama, but there are clear commonalities through the ages.
Actually, I thought it would be interesting to see a word cloud of all US presidential inaugural addresses over the last century. And being the geek I am, I had to go ahead and make one. So I collated the transcript of every address since Woodrow Wilson in 1913 into a single document, and fed it into a word cloud maker. I also created two other word clouds, one with all of the Republican inaugural addresses since 1913, and one with all of the Democrat addresses from the same period.
Click here to see the word cloud of all US inaugural addresses since 1913 for yourself.
The words that jump out from the main word cloud are 'world' and 'people'. How interesting. After those two, the stand-out words are 'new', 'must', 'America', 'peace', 'freedom' and 'great'. The next level down, the most used words are 'government', 'nation', 'life', 'hope', 'work'. The next level words including 'faith', 'strength', 'justice' and 'God' come in.
Very interesting.
Looking then at the differences between the Democrat and Republican inaugural word clouds, there are some interesting points. For example, for the Democrats, the words 'world', 'new', 'must', and 'people' are all top level, most used. This suggests that incoming Democratic presidents focus their speeches on the idea of renewal. In the Republican word cloud, the word 'country' comes far higher in the ranking of word use than in the Democrat cloud. But 'great' scores around even for both parties.
It's difficult to compare this with British speeches, as incoming prime ministers don't tend to make inaugural addresses to mark the occasion. It's also slightly more difficult to find speeches going back 100 years. But to give something of a comparison, I found the 'Downing Street doorstep' speeches of the last three prime ministers, Cameron, Brown & Blair, and created a cloud out of them. These are the speeches that PMs make when they first enter Downing Street after being asked to form a government by the Monarch. They tend to be much shorter than US inaugural addresses.
The results are starkly different. The overriding king of the word cloud is 'government'. With 'country' and 'people' a distant third and second place. How interesting. I assert that this comes from the different political cultures of the two countries, where in the US politicians tend to seek a loftier rhetoric, calling on values and a sense of nation. In Britain, politics is about the pragmatic governance of the country. 'New' and 'change' are the next most used words, marking the occasion of a change of national leader.
Just for fun I made a word cloud for each of those three prime ministers too. The differences are interesting. Tony Blair and David Cameron each have 'government' as by far their biggest word in the cloud, whereas Gordon Brown has three words almost of the same size at the top: 'change', 'British' and 'people'. I wouldn't have guessed it myself, but Gordon Brown's Downing Street rhetoric on becoming Prime Minister was much more in the style of American inaugural addresses than both Blair or Cameron.
The two modern-day prime ministers who are the most popular out of the three, Blair & Cameron, focus on the pragmatic government they intend to pursue. The politician with the most lofty rhetoric on day one in Downing Street ended his political life as one of Britain's least popular politicians of the 20th and 21st centuries. I wonder if this is because people felt he didn't match the rhetoric with actions or if indeed the rhetoric itself is a problem.
It bothers me that our politicians in Britain don't feel more inclined to reach for the lofty, to paint a picture of a brighter future or to inflate the ego of the nation with reminders of how great we are. I feel we need it a bit more, that rallying cry, that reminder of the halcyon. Politics should be about hope and vision, not pragmatic governance. Alas, it seems the British political culture doesn't agree with me.
Anyway, whether you agree with me or not, it is in the very least interesting. For us geeks at least.
