Pylimitics

It’s pretty common lately in political speech to see the phrase “playing the [x] card”. It’s generally meant as a criticism, meaning that if a politician “plays the gender card” or “plays the race card”, it somehow delegitimizes whatever point they’re trying to make. 

The first of these cards to be played appears to have been the “race card,” which began appearing around 1974. In the UK publication The Observer; a story that year included “…the Tory leadership declined to play the race card.” In that case the usage was simply descriptive, not critical; the Tories, I guess, could have used the issue of race but did not. 

The gender card shuffled to the top about 15 years later, and this time its first appearance seems to have been in the US. The Boston Globe said, in 1990: “…if Murphy plays the gender card in her ads she will lose the broader coalition…”. An alternative to the gender card is the “woman card” — it’s a bit more specific, of course, but politically about the same thing. This one showed up in the UK, in The Independent in 1991: “Ms Switzer’s riposte is to play the ‘woman’ card for all it is worth…”. 

Why cards? It’s probably because playing cards are embedded surprisingly deeply in our culture; people have been playing games with cards in the relatively modern senses of both the cards and the games for about 700 years now. Cards have been used metaphorically for a long time too. “Such news might create a panic at Vienna, and cause Russia to drop his cards…” appeared in Vanity Fair (the novel, not the magazine) in 1848. 

There have been other card-oriented phrases in the language for centuries too. The term “sure card” goes back to the 1500s, and means something that will ensure success. “‘Capital!’ said Mr Lenville: ‘that’s a sure card, a sure card. Get the curtain down with a touch of nature like that, and it’ll be a triumphant success’.” That’s from Nicholas Nickleby, published in 1839. 

Jack London, in the 1910 book Burning Daylight, referred to a “good card”: “How important the card was to become he did not dream, yet he decided that it was a pretty good card.”

You might notice that the cards in these linguistic allusions are very close to actual, physical cards, while the political kind of cards are far more metaphorical. There’s a sort of bridge between these kinds of uses, at least in the UK. In the 1800s “playing the Orange card” was an appeal to the Ulster Unionists in Northern Ireland. The origin of that phrase is (for a change) known; it was coined by Lord Randolph Churchill, who was also Winston Churchill’s father. There’s some speculation that it might even have loosely referred to some sort of physical card signifying membership in an organization. It probably didn’t refer to a unique item in a deck of playing cards, because, come on, if just one card was orange everybody would know exactly what it was, even from the back. It would be too easy to play the cheating card.