The Language of the Right
How Terms on the Right Don’t Mean What They Factually Mean
“Fake news” was a term that didn’t have meaningful social cachet before the November 8th, 2016 American presidential election. Sure, it was something that was half-jokingly applied to hard-right outlets like Fox News, but “fake news” didn’t prompt that instant recognition and pang of emotional resonance that a properly charged political term does.
The term began to pick up steam after the election as those on the American left grappled with the stunning loss of Hilary Clinton. One thread that was seized upon relatively early in that long, dark night of the political soul was that there was a plague of misinformation bearing the markings of true media organizations that were nonetheless distributing highly-distorted or outright-fabricated information. The term for these outlets that caught on and gained social resonance was “fake news,” describing those hard-right distortion machines that passed themselves off as media groups.
Then, something curious happened, something that has happened over and over again since the beginning of the culture wars of the 80’s and perhaps even before that: the right took over use of that term. Specifically, it became one of Trump’s go-to phrases to describe literally any media coverage that stood at odds with his disposition and agenda in any way. Done in this way, “fake news” keeps emotional resonance but loses factual grounding.
To arrive at that usage, though, you have to be willing to understand that there’s topical content in the term — something about reporting — and equally understand that it’s a negative term that indicates lack of authenticity. That is, it requires a reinterpretation of that term oriented more toward the emotional impact of each part of its construction rather than the factual reality of it — fake is inauthentic (that is, outside of what I believe); news is something that is circulated widely (that is, more people than just my immediate social group are talking about it); fake news is, thus, something outside of what I believe that a lot of people outside my immediate social group are talking about.
Then, something even more interesting happened. After Trump popularized this usage, it caught on with nearly every White House staffer and right and hard-right pundit and spokesman out there, and they used it as an out-group signifier, thus moving the term even further away from the factual grounding. Working from the above definition that we had generated as part of the ingestion of the term, we now have “something outside of what I believe that a lot of people outside of my immediate social group are talking about that is specifically promoted by my social enemies.” Now, then, we have arrived at a term that is composed of the same two words as the original but means nothing like it. We have taken something that means one thing and have completely rewritten the definition of it in addition to using it to indicate group membership (or lack thereof).
Altogether, then, this is the playbook for the generation of terms in the “right lexicon:”
- A term with factual meaning begins gaining social capital in discourse.
- The right takes that term and reinterprets it based on emotional resonance.
- The right then shades that term with group signification and separates the term even further from factual grounding to the point of being a different term outright that happens to share the same words as the original.
What’s important to underline here is that “fake news” is far from being unique in this regard. In every right and hard-right movement, you have these terms crop up that started as one thing, became “rightitized,” and then became a favorite term of that movement to signify in-group membership or out-group ostracization. As one example, we have“Christian” being used to signify membership and adherence to group norms rather than one’s closeness to the ideals of the Biblical New Testament. As another example, we have “triggered” being used to signify any kind of intentional attempt at emotional disturbance and harm inflicted on a someone with whom a person disagrees rather than a term which helps identify one’s emotional traumas. We have “democracy” being used to denote the social milieu of pro-Republican, pro-white institutions, practices, and figures instead of representing, leveraging, and codifying the will of the people at large and that people who promote the latter understanding are not participating in “democracy.” The list goes on and on.
In the end, then, it must be said — somewhat glibly — that words mean things. The chief problem, however, is that sometimes these socially capitalized terms reflect their factual meaning.
Other times, however, they don’t.
