Overview
The New Jargon is Agre's term for the cultivated rhetorical technology of emotional abuse deployed by the American far right for political purposes. Developed most fully in his long RRE post 'the new jargon' (December 2000), written in the heat of the Bush v. Gore crisis, the concept applies linguistic and discourse analysis to conservative political speech in a way that is distinctive in Agre's corpus.
What makes 'the new jargon' remarkable is its analytical precision. Agre doesn't just call out bad-faith rhetoric — he dissects its specific mechanisms with the tools of a linguist:
Significance
This is Agre at his most directly political, but the analysis draws deeply on his intellectual toolkit. The concept of 'capture' is present in how the jargon captures and restructures discourse; the concept of 'grammars of action' is present in how the jargon provides a phasal lexicon of stereotyped speech patterns that practitioners acquire through cultivation. The analysis of how conservative rhetoric systematically undermines legitimacy through projection connects directly to Agre's institutional analysis framework.
Written 20+ years before widespread discussion of 'post-truth politics' and disinformation, Agre's analysis is remarkably prescient in identifying the systematic nature of the rhetorical technology and its corrosive effect on democratic institutions.