Washington air crash rhetoric highlights changing use of language in politics
As with any seemingly inexplicable disaster, the Washington plane crash has raised many questions. Most obvious are the reflections of disbelief that in this technically obsessed age numerous interlinked safety and warning systems could have failed to prevent a hi-tech military helicopter and an equally hi-tech civilian aircraft slamming into each other with such tragic results.
That such a thing could happen at all raises fundamental questions about the safety of air travel generally and the electronic mechanisms that protect it. That said, there have long been concerns about the congested and complex airspace around Washington’s Reagan National Airport which can challenge even the most experienced of pilots as they navigate around hundreds of other planes, military aircraft corridors and nearby restricted military sites.
One highly experienced pilot, Ross Aimer, a retired United Airlines captain and chief executive officer of Aero Consulting Experts, told Associated Press “This was a disaster waiting to happen.”
It seems that commercial aircraft and military helicopters have always passed within a few hundred feet of each other on the approaches to Reagan National Airport, which hardly leaves much of a margin for error. Indeed just 24 hours before Wednesday’s fatal collision a different regional jet had to abort its landing and go around due to a nearby helicopter. The exchanges between the air traffic controller and the two aircraft in Wednesday’s tragedy make it clear that all concerned had an awareness of the proximity of the two aircraft, and there may even have been some visual contact, but all this was insufficient to prevent the collision which killed more than 50 people.
Normally in such inexplicable and situations, and especially when it is effectively a national disaster that could have significant ramifications, a familiar and much measured narrative response is heard – remorse and sympathy for the victims, a determination to uncover the cause and a sensible reluctance to draw any early, rash conclusions. However, on 8th November all that changed, and we are now moving rapidly into an uncharted and largely unpredictable landscape of political rhetoric that has already begun to redefine the parameters of social discourse. Like it or not, this new world of brash polemics is something that everyone is going to have to become accustomed to, and engage with.
In the early press briefings after the crash, US President Donald trump not only reacted to reporters’ questions about the possible causes of the Washington crash, but he positively engaged in several speculations and personal thoughts about the causes of, and background to, the crash. Most alarmingly, Mr Trump was happy to say that he thought the ‘diversity policies’ of previous US administrations may have been a significant factor in the disaster. After the mainstream media recovered from this highly unexpected take on events, much was made of the fact that the president’s comments were presented without evidence. In the subsequent press exchanges journalists homed in on Mr Trump’s remarks and asked him for an explanation. In return the president argued that changes made by Barack Obama and Joe Biden to the way air traffic controllers were selected to make the career more ‘diverse and inclusive’ had effectively lowered the bar to a dangerous level, and Wednesday’s crash “could have been” a result of this policy.
One of the distinctive traits of Mr Trump’s rhetoric has always been a certain type of generalised language that the media still has yet to become accustomed to, nor seems to have the alertness to deal with. In this instance the phrase ‘could have been’ attempts to underpin Mr Trump’s allegation, but of course this accident ‘could have been’ caused by a whole range of imponderables. Unfortunately, we are still only just emerging from an era when journalism – and the public narrative generally – has been fixed on issues of individual rights rather than broad social principles, hence the temptation to reduce the whole discussion about the Washington crash to one of ‘diversity negligence’. That’s not Mr Trump making this mistake, but the journalists who jumped on it rather than critiquing his broader responses to the disaster. One could even argue that the ‘diversity’ comment was an astute distraction that journalists fell for.
I dwell on this exchange because it illustrates graphically the challenges that not only journalists, but wider society, is going to have to confront as incoming national leaders increasingly re-write the parameters of social discourse – and by consequence – start to redefine the limits of public morality. One only has to look at the determined commitments to social justice expressed by recent Labour politicians, and their inversion by the same individuals once in power, to see that language – and especially the language of social justice – has become increasingly meaningless and fluid. For instance, both Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have spoken out previously about their passionate objection to more airport runways, yet in power both are now endorsing enthusiastically the controversial third runway for Heathrow airport. Similar handstands have performed over pensions, heating allowances and the WASPI compensation.
One can of course argue that opinions can change over time, or different circumstances can require different responses, but when there’s a whiff of hypocrisy and contradiction in the air, it’s not just the individual politician, but the whole institution, that is diminished. If you want to see the evidence of this you only have to look at the results of last year’s General Election. Labour claimed an historic landslide victory, securing 9.6 million of the country’s 48 million registered voters, with the Conservatives securing just 6.8 million. Claiming a mandate to govern with less than a quarter of the country’s vote is questionable, but the un-discussed statistic – and the real elephant in the room – is the 19.2 million citizens who didn’t bother to vote at all.
Equally, in Wales, there’s a Senedd election coming up in 2026, and a recent YouGov Barn poll puts Labour, Reform and Plaid Cymru neck and neck at 16% of the vote each, but non-voters are expected to total a whopping 31% of the electorate, making non-voting by far the biggest political statement of the Senedd election. As no doubt Mr Trump would say to coin his favourite generalisation, “It’s a bad situation”.
In recent months a great deal has been made about the increasing threat to British life from what politician and commentators like to call ‘the far right’ – which generally refers to a gathering of a few badly overweight blokes with tattoos, beer cans and a union jack banner, which isn’t actually very ‘far right’ at all, thank goodness. For politicians of the old school such displays present an existential threat to the social order, when in fact they’re sadly actually far more broadly representative of contemporary public opinion. It was of course this misunderstanding that led not only to the Southport riots, but to the wholly irrational and disproportionate government government response to them.
Whether it’s erroneously tagging public disorder as far right extremism, or blaming plane crashes on diversity initiatives, the misuse and manipulation of language is now becoming something of an epidemic in global politics. As we’ve seen in the recent political reshaping of many countries across Europe, the misuse of populist rhetoric can all too easily turn the facts of urgent social issues into divisive metaphors, which in turn can affect profoundly the way cultures and populations act and think. Over recent years in particular some of the most fundamental words that underpin democracy have been challenged, and even concepts that we once thought were immutable and unambiguous – such as ‘freedom’ and ‘truth’ – have now taken on a far more fluid and uncertain meaning. Thus it becomes perfectly tenable to blame a plane crash on diversity policies, and to blame right wing extremists for the public reaction to the Southport atrocity.
When in 1948 George Orwell began writing his dystopian novel 1984, he took himself off to the Scottish island of Jura, where the remoteness and limited life resources gave him the necessary space to reflect on the detail of the novel he felt compelled to write. As a detailed aside to the main text Orwell became utterly absorbed in the concept of Newspeak, a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person’s ability for critical thinking. Written at a time when Britain was going through a very similar period of ideological flux to the present moment, Orwell understood perfectly that language – and even special words and phrases – were the key to population control and ensuring political stability.
Whether it’s the sweeping generalisations and hypothetical theories of Donald Trump, or the rigid and contradictory rhetoric of the UK Labour party, the disengagement and antipathy of the general public to politics and social discourse is a challenge and concern as deep and damaging as any political dogma. As the great Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton once famously noted: “When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.” The same may well be said of confidence in politics and politicians.
Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and theologian