Would you agree that it has been in a different context by the left than it has by the right?
Yes.
I hear 'support the troops' usually when attached to 'but' in an anti-war context. When I hear a left winger use the term I hear 'anti-war'. When I hear a right winger use the term I hear 'kick some butt'.
That's fine, but I wouldn't call the lefty use "code." "Code" is when some in-group uses a phrase with a natural meaning to convey something other than that natural meaning, a meaning understood only by the in-group, a meaning with an imbedded wink.
If a righty questions a lefty's support of the troops, he's conflating supporting the troops with supporting the war. So the lefty's response is "I support the troops but I don't support the war," making a distinction between advocacy for the soldiers and advocacy for the war. It is a defense against the implied charge of being unpatriotic for not supporting the war.
The righty usage, support of the war, would be the coded one, IMO, although one could argue that it also has a natural meaning given that there's a lot of overlap between supporting the troops and supporting the war. The lefty usage is entirely natural. It is simply a more nuanced natural meaning. They're talking about the soldiers, themselves. The way you can tell that the lefty usage is not code is that they aren't trying to make any points about it other than in defense. You won't see lefty demonstrators with a rallying cry, "support the troops." If they have anything to say about it it's in the context of "I support the troops, too, in my own way, so stop thinking me unpatriotic."
So, like 'states rights' that has a clear and distinct body of doctrine that stands alone, when some people use the term there underlying purpose has a more central motivation than generally wanting states to have rights to legislate on their own. State's rights only becomes an issue when their is a particular social agenda that is regionally uncomfortable and distinctive as a cultural value from the National outlook.
"States rights" is an excellent example of code. I think "support the troops" is more an epithet and an anti-epithet. It's like the right staking a claim on "values" and the left arguing that they have values, too, although maybe not exactly the same set. |
