The War on Language
How US politics corrupted language and doomed us to a never-ending culture war.
The weaponization of language has always been the first and foremost tool for politicians, lobbyists, and marketing experts to sway popular opinion. Frank Luntz, a communication strategist who has worked on behalf of the Republican Party for nearly three decades, describes his job as the exploitation of the emotional content of language. “When we are in love, we are not rational; we are emotional. … my job is to look for the words that trigger the emotion. … We know that words and emotion together are the most powerful force known to mankind.” Luntz became an expert on twisting and turning language in a way that serves the conservative agenda. Throughout his time serving the GOP, he invented phrases like “energy exploration” to refer to oil drilling, “climate change” to make global warming less frightening, “pro-life” instead of “anti-abortion”, “illegal aliens” instead of “undocumented immigrants”, and he propagated the use of the term “death tax” to have the general public turn against an estate tax that only affects 0.2 percent of the wealthiest Americans. And while Democrats are historically a few steps behind in the linguistic war, they managed to meet most of these challenges, by coining terms like “pro-choice”, “climate crisis”, or “Dreamers”.
Linguistic professor William Lutz describes this kind of linguistic witchcraft as “doublespeak”, after the deliberately obscure and misleading political language spoken in George Orwell’s 1984. Of course, this kind of word-twisting did not start with Frank Luntz or the modern GOP. One could argue that it’s a natural part of politics. In his thesis book, Doublespeak, Lutz gives us a few examples: “The Reagan Administration didn’t propose any new taxes, just “revenue enhancement” through new “user’s fees.” Those aren’t bums on the street, just “non-goal oriented members of society.” There are no more poor people, just “fiscal underachievers.” There was no robbery of an ATM, just an “unauthorized withdrawal.” The patient didn’t die because of medical malpractice, it was just a “diagnostic misadventure of a high magnitude.” And the U.S. Army doesn’t kill the enemy anymore, it just “services the target.”
This word twisting might seem harmless at first, but it inevitably affects discourse and policymaking. After all, Lutz’s doublespeak led to tax cuts for the ultra-rich, squashing action on global warming, and tougher stances on immigration. And once linguistic war becomes fair play for everyone, it also leads to a deeper erosion of our language. For example, our definition of recession has always been two successive quarters of negative GDP growth. But when the US slipped into it in 2022, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen took the euphemistic route too stating that the actual definition of a recession is a “broad-based weakening of our economy” a.k.a. recession is what she says it is. From a politician’s point of view, this is a natural part of their playbook, but for a society it’s poisonous. How could we solve or even address our problems if manipulated language shrinks or magnifies their reality of them? How could we talk to each other if words and their meanings differ for everyone?
During the Second Gulf War, a legal scholar, John Yoo, came up with a vast array of legal interpretations that were used to stretch and challenge international and constitutional law. You provided the legal basis for the mass surveillance of American citizens and for the torture of enemy prisoners. He used language to dismantle existing torture laws in three steps:
- He argued that the crime of torture, described by US law, requires the perpetrator to have the intent of causing severe pain or suffering, but since the intent of an interrogator is to gain intel, no matter how they get it, it wouldn’t constitute torture.
- He found some leeway with the phrase “severe pain”, as it’s not specifically detailed in law what severe pain actually means, therefore it’s open to interpretation.
- Since the US, by law, does not torture detainees, when they do it, it’s by definition not torture. And as a chef’s kiss, he also coined the term “enhanced interrogation” to further obscure the language around what was once known as torture.
William Lutz argues that whoever controls the language controls how we see the world.“I think the most important point of 1984 is that power grows not out of the barrel of a gun, not out of the thought police, or out of rule by terror… It grows out of language.” And even if we find some of the examples of doublespeak transparent and laughable, they’re not necessarily designed for mass communication. Their purpose is not to seduce the majority of the population, only to serve those who already subscribed to the speaker’s ideology. They are designed to provide people with the right tools to create impenetrable echo chambers and to justify their actions. Or the way we usually say it today: to speak their own truth.
Historically, doublespeak has been a top-to-bottom game, with only a handful of people at the top manipulating language that trickled down into policymaking and into our national conversations. These word trickeries undeniably contributed to a slowly but surely growing division and tribalism within Western society, but the damage wasn’t terminal. Unfortunately what even Orwell and Lutz couldn’t have predicted was that the rise of social media put this linguistic nuke into the hands of every single person with an internet connection. So now, in a sort of grassroots way, millions of loud new voices were able to join the political discourse, and they did not hesitate to use doublespeak to favor their agenda.
But this is where the linguistic war took a big turn, and the underdogs gained the upper-hand.
After decades of being on the short end of the stick, the political left finally got tired and gave up on playing nice. The people who once embraced Michelle Obama’s motto of “When they go low, we go high”, got so disillusioned by their losing streak that peaked with the election of Donald Trump, that they finally turned the table and decided to play dirty too. But they didn’t just want to manipulate language to serve a political agenda. They started to weaponize it in order to reshape society. And in a brilliantly sinister way, they hijacked the most loaded expressions in our language in order to bring weight and gravity to even the most petty grievances they had.
In, 2010, the New York Times used the term “white supremacist” on 75 occasions. In 2020, they used it over 700 times. Part of the reason of course is the rising fascism on the political right, but it also shows the changing political and media landscape that’s not afraid to use fighting words just to make a point. But the problem is that when we use a phrase like white supremacy in relation to anything from movies to art museums, housewives, dietetics, the farmer’s market, or mathematics, it trivializes the word.
Expressions like supremacy, racism, sexism, misogyny, and abuse, were usually reserved for actual victims in our society, in order to bring awareness to true injustices. But now an entire political wing hijacked and squeezed them out to fight any real, perceived, or made-up micro-aggressions. And the problem is that at first, the over-utilization of these words brings a false perception that our society is so deeply rotten to the core that everybody around us is wolves in sheep’s clothing. This ideology of drawing swords at every interaction simply turns us against each other and regresses society into a more tribal and primal form. And when the false perception finally shatters, and we realize that these words have been inflated and their meaning got diluted, the power and weight they carry diminish. And then we have to face a new problem, where the screams of true victims will be lost in the cacophony of a mindless culture war…
While this corruption of language may have started with the conservative right, with social media and the progressive left going berserk too, it’s now spread to every corner of society and permeates all our conversations. But, when language gets dismantled and manipulated like this, it eventually breaks communities, creates echo chambers, undermines the democratic processes, and shatters societies over political lines. The story of the Tower of Babel tells us too; when we can’t understand each other anymore, even the most advanced civilizations can regress back into a more primal, tribalist form. Yet, in the current culture war, both sides tend to wield the most powerful linguistic weapons like reckless children who found their dad’s gun.
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