"The Next Culture War": god terms and devil terms

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/opinion/29brooks.html

In his Op-Ed piece titled "The Next Culture War," David Brooks calls the culture war waged by religous conservatives "obsolete" and insists that now is the time for people on the right and left alike to be focusing on the economy. "Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally," he states. He explains that, although our economy emerged resilient from the boom-bust cycles in the past, our ability to cope with economic difficulty has weakened. Brooks blames this trend on the fact that people no longer exercise self-restraint, and have replaced it with extreme self-indulgence. Appealing to the moral concept of values, Brooks uses the phrase "economic values" to refer to the standards by which Americans ought to be spending their money. One particular evil that he mentions is the way that government funded gambling targets the poor and only increases their suffering. Through this example and others, Brooks is appealing to an audience with a strong sense of social justice and moral values alike, in an attempt to motivate them towards action.

Placing Brooks' article in terms of Weaver's chapter, "indulgence" has become a "devil term" while "personal restraint" is now a "god term." Although Brooks does not state this explicitly, he implies that the indulgence of the 1990s and early 2000s has become a shameful part of our country's economic past. He insists that if we do not make changes in the direction of personal restraint, regardless of our political affiliations, then our nation is headed towards permanent decline: "A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible." Armed with overtly religious terms such as "values," "crusade," and "self-restraint," Brooks makes a strong rhetorical appeal to people who adhere to old-fashioned values and believe that returning to old traditions of self-restraint will save our country's economic future.