Balls bounce. Critics denounce. The New York Jets get trounced. And Republicans? Republicans pounce.
It’s just what they do, according to an almost hilarious number of exactly-alike-phrased headlines, most recently and egregiously “Ocasio-Cortez Team Flubs a Green New Deal Summary, and Republicans Pounce” in the Feb. 11 New York Times. Search the phrase, and you’ll see how often it makes its way atop articles, and in which outlets.
The trope is not best understood as a deliberate or malicious act of media bias. Nor, it should be noted, is it necessarily inaccurate per se. It is, however, a word choice that illuminates how someone, or an entire newsroom staff, truly sees the world and feels about it. The term “othering” may be the greatest of many syntactic travesties left-wing activist discourse has produced, but othering is what the “pounce” language is. That’s why the right has noticed it and made a meme of it.
The use of “Republicans pounce” says more about the people who write the headlines than it does about Republicans, as the Green New Deal story epitomizes. Ocasio-Cortez released a plan to, essentially, deindustrialize the economy, calling for the end of internal combustion engines and air travel, the end of nuclear power, the end of widespread beef consumption to end “cow farts,” the recreation of vast treed wildernesses, and a host of other flatly unworkable and uneconomic notions. There were two Green New Deal documents, a nonbinding resolution in the house along with an FAQ that her own office distributed to NPR, among other media. When the FAQ turned out to be a political liability, they walked it back, with Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff tweeting that “early drafts got leaked” and “mistakes happen when doing time launches like this coordinating multiple groups and collaborators.”
Assessing this, the Times and others like it did do their core journalistic duty to report on this and on the reaction from Republicans. But the word choice shows how they experienced the story. Language is a guide to how we think. And the darling of the Democratic Socialists of America “flubbed,” a variation on the counterpart headline meme to “Republicans pounce,” which is “Dems in disarray.”
One chooses those words because you want Dems to be better arrayed. That’s their natural state. It’s where you picture them. And how do you picture Republicans? As a predatorory brute, creeping, ears flat and sharp teeth gleaming, hind muscles taut and ready to spring on the prey. Republicans aren’t people or valid political actors, they aren’t one of two parties vying equally to govern and legislate, and they certainly aren’t presenting an opposing political argument you might wish to consider. They’re stalking through the bushes, hidden and hungry and violent. When a vulnerable someone gets too close, Republicans pounce.
— Nicholas Clairmont
