Three words good, more words bad
THE RHYME AND REASON OF CATCHY POLITICAL SLOGANS LIKE ‘AXE THE TAX’
If there’s one thing Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre understands, it’s efficiency of language. Any slogan with more than three words is long-winded for the Conservative leader.
“Canada is broken,” was Poilievre’s first big hit, although it clocked in at a beefy six syllables. His latest efforts have been slimmed down even further. “Axe the tax” and “spike the hike” clock in at three syllables each, the absolute shortest possible version of a threeword slogan.
For a moment, it seemed like the Liberals were going to engage the Conservatives in a slogan arms race. A March 19 press release from the government came to journalists with the headline: “Keep the cash, care for climate.” It was an obvious nod to Poilievre’s dual “axe the tax, spike the hike” line, although it never quite took off the same way.
For political commentators, who are often quick to see any development in political language as “Orwellian,” it may be a little too onthe-nose. Admittedly, we’re not far from the famously simplistic propaganda chant “four legs good, two legs bad” from George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
But there is a reason these chants and slogans can be effective.
“Things like rhyme and rhythm resonate with us on a subconscious level, on a kind of animal level,” said Jack Mitchell, a Canadian poet who teaches classics at Dalhousie University, translates ancient poetry and has written an 8,000-line version of the original Star Wars film trilogy as a blank-verse epic poem.
Mitchell said he wouldn’t be too quick to assume that chants or slogans are dumbing down our political conversations.
“I think the rational and the irrational have to work together in politics. And if you’re too rational with no emotion behind it, then you get nowhere. If it’s all emotion and no reason, then you’re just going to be spinning around in circles. So, I think the politician’s task is to put rhyme and reason together, as it were,” said Mitchell.
Writers and politicians have been trying to distil their messages into phrases that are as economical as possible for hundreds of years. The phrase “if I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter” has been variously attributed to Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin and Blaise Pascal.
Former U.S. president Woodrow Wilson once said that if there was no time limit on a speech, he needed no preparation, but would need two weeks to prepare for a 10-minute speech.
Poilievre’s reputation for caring deeply about the language his party uses is such that former staffers marvel at his capacity to fret about the details of individual tweets, press releases and op-eds.
“There are politicians, in my experience, who care a lot about policy, and there are politicians who care a lot about the communications and the image side. And Pierre is somewhat unique, because he cares deeply about both,” said Dennis Matthews, a principal at Enterprise Canada, a national communications firm, who worked as an advertising adviser to former prime minister Stephen Harper.
There’s also the modern difficulty of getting through to voters that are now used to Tiktok videos and Instagram Reels. If attention spans were short in Churchill’s day, they can only be shorter in the social media age.
“The reality here is that the public is so distracted. It’s complete information overload out there, so getting noticed is half the battle,” said Matthews.
American politics has been full of chantable three-word slogans for years. In 2008, Sarah Palin popularized the “drill, baby, drill” chant during a vice-presidential debate, which was soon followed by Donald Trump’s “build the wall” and “lock her up” slogans. U.S. President Joe Biden promised that he would “build back better” after the COVID-19 pandemic, although he wouldn’t go as far as his left-wing base, which has wanted to “eat the rich” for decades. In the U.K., Boris Johnson swept to power promising to “get Brexit done.” And it’s no coincidence that one of the most famous marketing slogans ever is Nike’s “Just do it.”
Perhaps the catchiest of Poilievre’s slogans is the crowd-pleasing “defund the CBC” chant that regularly erupts at his rallies. It’s a more complex chant than the three-word, rhyming incantations about the carbon tax, but it’s catchy. It sticks in the listener’s brain like a pop song.
Mitchell said the vowel sounds — several E sounds (“de,” “see,” “bee,” “see,”) along with the soft U sound (“fund”) — remind him of Old English verse, which was alliterative for three beats, but never four in a row. “Defund” is two strong beats in a row — what poets call a “spondee” — and “the CBC” is iambic, which means two strong beats with soft ones preceding them.
That rhythmic drumbeat of hard syllables is “what makes it stick in the brain,” said Mitchell. The E sounds make it pleasing to our ears.
Matthews said that although the slogans are short and simplistic, they do the all-important job of summing up a political campaign. A catchy, but meaningless, slogan wouldn’t work.
“They are a distillation of much bigger arguments. Poilievre is making a much bigger point about affordability,” said Matthews.
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