DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

When Ferdinand Marcos ruled the Philippines, he had the habit, both in his public utterances and in his communications with the U.S. government, of describing his opponents as communists. All of them -- left, right, and center -- were so described. As a result, the term "communist" lost all meaning in public policy discussions of the Philippines.

During the post-World War Two red baiting period, I.F. Stone wrote that the term "red" had been expanded to cover all kinds of things, such as the New York Herald Tribune (a Republican newspaper), President Truman, and the anti-communist organization Americans for Democratic Action. "The red label cannot be avoided in these days of hysteria," Stone wrote. If it applied to everyone and everything, then, it had lost its meaning.

I thought of these instances when I recently read a Rasmussen opinion survey: "Only 53 percent of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20 percent disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent ... are not sure which is better. Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37 percent prefer capitalism, 33 percent socialism, and 30 percent are undecided."

Analysts have been trying to explain the sudden upsurge in popularity of socialism and decided that because so many on the rightist fringe are calling President Obama a socialist, his popularity was rubbing off on socialism. (No one seemed to believe that the public might mean what it was saying.)

Of course, if socialism is defined not by its tenets but by its use against a public personality, then the term has lost its meaning. The loose use of the term by entities like Newsweek and the Republican National Committee prompted Forbes magazine to run an article defining it before everyone lost sight of that part of the ongoing political war. (Forbes also noted that real socialists disdain Obama's policies as "democratic capitalism.")

Forbes reported, "Another poll conducted this month by ConservativeHQ.com found that 70 percent of self-identified conservatives consider Obama's political philosophy 'socialist' or 'Marxist,' with 11 percent calling it 'communist'."

Now, clearly, it can't be all of those things, and it's noteworthy that many of the same people who use "liberal" as an epithet to describe Obama also call him a socialist.

Marxism, communism, socialism and social democracy are not the same things, much less the same thing as liberalism. I used to work at a Reno television station where a fellow reporter was always dubbing Democrats as "socialists." One day I got him to fall silent for the rest of the day by asking him to define it. That's one of the pitfalls of these kinds of discussions in the U.S. where people are not familiar with these permutations and use the terms interchangeably. (European democracies have a wider range of political parties and ideological choices.)

This kind of manipulation of language to make political points is also used to influence commerce, advance religion, and so on. Repetition can make words lose their meaning (thus, people tune commercials out after hearing them a couple of times), and that process is accelerated the more out of touch with reality words are. For instance, Hubert Humphrey's "politics of joy" had little resonance for the public in the year he expressed it -- 1968, when society was coming apart in alienation and violence.

C.S. Lewis once predicted that the term "Christian" might one day lose all meaning. I would argue that process is already underway. When the term can apply to both George Tiller and Matthew Shepard and to their assassins, to anti-gay figures like Richard Ziser and gay rights advocates like Katharine Jefferts Schori, it has lost a heck of a lot of its meaning.

Gov. Jim Gibbons' mantra "No new taxes" had a very different meaning when he ran for governor in a year of prosperity and government had less connection to the public, than it does this year when members of the public are hurting and turning more and more to government for support.

The congressional health care war is now getting underway in D.C. What do you want to bet we are going to see and hear plenty of instances of abuse of language?