Clichés as a Political Problem

This paper addresses clichés as a political problem that requires critical attention in democratic theory, shedding new light on the current situation, often described as “post-truth politics.” Political theorists have identified four problems as major destabilizing phenomena for democratic communication: falsity, coercion, conformism and incommensurability. Those categories remain influential, as scholars and journalists ascribe the current democratic crisis to “post-truth politics,” which is composed of falsified information, conformism to authority, or incommensurability resulting from partisanship. However, they do not exhaust the problems inherent in democratic communication. I argue for a fifth category of problems: clichés. Clichés do not override the other four problems and often accompany them, but they present a distinctive and serious political problem for democracy. Clichés are distinctive, because while the other problems damage political communication by distorting the truth, individual autonomy, or consensus, clichés do so even in their presence. As such, the problem of clichés seems rather serious as they discourage the use of easy solutions, such as the truth, in the political arena. This paper consists of two parts. The first part delineates the problem of clichés. On the one hand, clichés are conducive to democratic communication: they help disparate and inarticulate opinions congeal into a viable political force. On the other hand, clichés endanger democracy’s survival by freezing our opinions on pre-existing ideas. The lack of new ideas can destabilize democracy in three ways: First, limited set of opinions can foster partisanship among constituencies; second, lacking the ability to produce new ideas, democratic society may be unable to accommodate a changing environment; and last, a flood of monotonous opinions can foster popular political apathy. Simply put, although necessary to democratic stability, clichés also destabilize democracy through their inability to accommodate differences. Having identified the problem of clichés, in the second part, I explore how to tackle it. The difficulty here is that clichés discourage easy solutions. First, in tackling clichés we cannot appeal to truth, autonomy, or consensus, which democratic theories deploy to fight other problems; clichés are compatible with these traditional modes of attack. Clichés are difficult to dispel, because they are, to some extent, beneficial to democratic communication. Finally, but most importantly, clichés are ineluctable from our communication: every opinion, including those that criticizing clichés, cannot but appear to be cliché. These difficulties render conventional measures to secure democratic communication—namely, freedom of speech and pluralism in opinion—insufficient vis-à-vis clichés. Freedom of speech per se does not dispel clichés. Opinions that are freely formulated by autonomous individuals can nonetheless remain clichés. To supplement these measures, I propose a diagnostic approach. While the conventional solutions to problems in democratic communication are prescriptive in that they aim to dispel identified problems, the proposed alternative is diagnostic. The alternative approach warns us against the danger of clichés by detecting them, but abstains from furnishing prescriptions for their resolutions.