@Marc:
I
never said this was a wholly conservative phenomenon, and I was the first person in this thread to point out that when it comes to lesser extremes of politicized language, other parts of the political spectrum also do it. I am not going to engage in false equivalency to say that "everybody does this but the way the GOP does it is weirder," because that's simply not true. The
whole point is that the GOP does some weird fucking stuff when it comes to language, and as far as I know it is unprecedented, at least for major parties democratic societies.
Most political propaganda is self-explanatory, these three examples are so ridiculous that the people pushing their adoption have to explain to their audience why they should use them. I challenge you to find any non-right-wing example as weird as the three I brought up. I wouldn't say that "the people's vote" and "hard Tory Brexit" are even as ridiculous as "death tax" or "Healthy Forests Initiative," but it's still roughly on that level.
This also follows on a long history of the GOP in the US
issuing top-down talking points for supporters to repeat ad nauseum, something which dates back to the Reagan administration. While not entirely unprecedented—"political correctness" after all derives from communist parties doing the same thing"—it is unfair to suggest that the left and right are equally complicit in this, in the US anyways. I know that you are annoyed at how much we look at stuff through an American lens, but I think that this is a phenomenon unique to the American right which you are trying to look at through the lens of the rest of the world.
But of course this whole argument started because you took my title literally and then said that I shouldn't have titles which mock one side of an issue. The whole "War on X" formulation is not only ridiculous, but taken seriously, it leads to politicians attempting to formulate policies based on military strategies. However your responses seemed to frame doing this as essentially reasonable, but my mocking of it as unfair.
@Kate:
Whether you intended it or not, your post is highlighting a different issue that happens to be far bigger on the left than on the right. "Cultural appropriation," "microaggressions," and "manspreading" are all new
concepts, but they are coached in language that describes what the left thinks they are doing quite well. While the right (especially white evangelicals) are also prone to overreacting to imaginary slights, I cannot think of an example that was so novel that it required a neologism to describe. But the terms themselves are not the issue, it is the concepts underlying them. Moreover, we have discussed all of these things already, and I don't remember anyone on TCS saying that we had to balance our discussion of these things with examples of conservatives being overly sensitive on threads about SJWs inventing new things to be offended by.