In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell says that a writer can avoid the heavy lifting of making an original or insightful argument by simply turning his pen on autopilot and fueling it with “ready made” clichés. “They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself,” writes Orwell. “It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.” More than a half century later, liberalism (and too much of conservatism) has switched to autopilot. For reasons I will discuss below, liberalism imposes itself not through sustained argument, but through a shabby tyranny of clichés, which hides its ideological underpinnings behind a façade of trite phrases and homespun truisms.
Let us start with the example of “social justice.”
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