Word Choice Matters: How Congressional Republicans are Fueling Political Dysfunction
The so-called “Biden Regime”
Everyone knows that our politics feels broken, filled with animosity and mistrust. Stories about political violence against legislators, their families and vigilante style political operatives abound. Throw in recent attempts to shoot at political opponents by those seeking election themselves and things don’t look good for the state of US democracy.
The temperature of our political discourse doesn’t have to be at a boiling point. The people we entrust to lead our country as elected officials have the opportunity to set examples and bring the level of vitriol down. Both Democrats and Republicans talk a lot about how they don’t like the fractious nature of our politics and exiting members of Congress often point to the more hellish, threatening side of governing as a reason to leave.
In this particular moment Congressional Republicans have set out a line of rhetorical attacks, using military metaphors such as “IRS Army” to whip up the anxieties of voters by contributing to idea that day-to-day politics is war. Another inaccurate and damaging term that is on the rise with Congressional Republicans, is the “Biden Regime”.
On May 17, 2021, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) wrote to constituents talking about his efforts to lead a coalition of legislators to demand that the Biden regime stop interfering with the Arizona election audit. The details of Gaetz’s efforts can be found here, but the notable piece from a rhetorical standpoint is the use of the word “regime”.
The word regime is typically reserved for authoritarian governments. The types of places the US has intervened to overthrow sitting governments and those which are so bad to their own people that foreign governments sanction and cut off ties. More common uses of the word regime by members of Congress include the “Iranian regime”, “Maduro regime”, “evil regime”, or “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a radical terrorist regime that is focused on attacking Americans”. Though one could make the argument that “regime” simply means a system of governing, that’s not how this term is used in practice. There are about 1,440,000 search results from Google for “authoritarian regime” and just 648,000 for “democratic regime”.
In the year and a half since Gaetz first used the term, Representatives Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Chip Roy (R-TX), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Jody Hice (R-GA), Byron Donalds (R-FL), Bob Good (R-VA), Austin Scott (R-GA), Kat Cammack (R-FL), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-FL), Michael Cloud (R-TX), and Lance Gooden (R-TX) have taken to using the phrase as well. If this collection of names seems familiar, it might be because a good number of them made up the 20 Representatives who refused to support eventual Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the first week of the 118th Congress. In contrast, in prior years only one Democrat ever wrote about the “Trump Regime”.
These federal legislators write about the Biden Regime as failing on border policy, as fueling terrorism, hurting children, attacking patriots, favoring labor unions, harming babies, pushing a woke LGBTQ agenda onto the military, and more. Stefanik writes bluntly what everyone else implies, “…it is how the Authoritarian Biden Regime is choosing to rule.”
Boebert — who is one of the representatives who most often uses the term — sends some of the most problematic content when uses “Biden Regime”. For example, in 2021 she wrote to constituents in her official capacity stating,
“Reports are circulating that the Biden regime has held January 6th rioters in solitary confinement, while at the same time, they are letting BLM rioters that attacked federal buildings off with just a few hours of community service.”
A claim which Facebook had flagged as inaccurate information to be taken down and which Politico investigated and deemed Mostly False.
Gosar — the other person who most uses the term — also sent messages in his official capacity to his constituents promoting a distorted falsehood, that’s better seen than described:
The claim that Biden would make instant immigrant millionaires is outside the bounds of rationality, and was discounted as such when Biden himself was asked about the claim. The notion of settlement payments to immigrants came from lawsuits against the government on behalf of a fraction of the 5,500 or so children who were horrifically separated from their parents at the border during the Trump administration. And there is no evidence that the Department of Justice made a set of newly minted, recently orphaned children who were torn from their parents upon arrival in the US.
The veracity of the claims used by those saying “Biden Regime” would be concerning if there was compelling evidence that President Joe Biden, Congressional Democrats, or anyone in the relevant executive agencies were intent on applying unlawful, authoritarian power to the people of the US. But that’s not the case. Policy disagreements and claims of policy failure are fair game for political communications, but implying authoritarian activity is not reasonable political discourse. When members of Congress use these terms and actively spread this false sense of authoritarian “reality”, they do harm to the politics of the US. The attempt to make people operate in fear. They set a bad example of how to have hard discussions for politically interested people. They provide the opposite of what we would want as role models for children. Rhetoric that is used to provoke anger and fear under the guise of governance is not a way to get things done. It works to scare people and to make political violence more acceptable, and can even provide what looks like justification for harming others.
Political opponents in a democratic system do not have to be enemies. When elected officials describe others in power in ways to inspire fear and hatred, they are not working to make our politics better. This sort of thing should be called out when it happens, and as someone who maintains a database of official congressional communications, I get a fuller picture of how members of Congress try to relate to constituents, while most other people only ever get to think about the statements made by their own individual representatives. As someone who works with college aged students on questions of politics and government, I also deeply care about the way we conduct ourselves. If we want our politics to calm down, we need to call for better behavior from the top. Pointing this behavior out is the first step.
