The Words of the Year Perfectly Capture the Right
Trumpsters, don’t even try to gaslight us into believing you’re not always in goblin mode
The words of 2022 were goblin mode, in the United Kingdom, and gaslight, in the United States.
In these times of the right’s determined distribution of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and pursuit of lazy thinking, those choices make perfect sense.
We are all now more than familiar with gaslighting, which dates back to the original 1940 film “Gaslight,” (remade by MGM in 1944, starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman), in which a deceitful husband repeatedly lies about many things, including gaslamps dimming in the lower part of the house as he secretly lights lamps in the attic, to shake his wife’s sanity.
A real-life usage example of gaslighting, the word of 2022 selected by the folks at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, would be, say, Donald Trump insisting that he is a good businessman or that the 2020 election was stolen. When any of the scores of open traitors in Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Josh Hawley, refer to themselves as patriots that would also stand as an excellent example of gaslighting. The claim in no way fits the reality; it refutes what anyone of good faith can plainly see, that these people broke their oaths of office and should not be allowed to serve again at any level.
Nazi propagandists knew all about gaslighting, about how you simply need to repeat some untruth over and over to get a surprisingly large percentage of people to believe it, even in the face of contrary evidence. In recent years there’s been no end to the GOP’s efforts to gaslight the public, from Trump’s ceaseless lies about voter fraud to his claim that all presidents walk away with classified documents to his habit of referring to himself as one of the greatest presidents of all time (“Better than Lincoln, better than Washington”).
Just this year, I wrote about how Republicans have tried to gaslight us on their “originalist” view of the Constitution, on liberals being sexual deviants, on liberals being the elite, on mass shootings in America being “unthinkable” and, on how some unnamed others are coming for you and all your stuff.
Goblin mode was new to me. As the Oxford English Dictionary has it, the 2022 winner describes behavior that is “unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.”
For some, the term can describe positive behavior, describing people who reject some unnecessary societal norms, which many have done in the face of the pandemic. But one could also say that many Republican leaders have been in goblin mode since their frat boy days, or at least from the Age of Rush and Newt, when they were trained to despise their fellow members of Congress across the aisle and dig in their heels at everything rather than allow government to function.
Let’s try it in a sentence:
As president, Trump was in goblin mode from the first day he took office, when he would watch television all morning in what he called “executive time” [spot the gaslighting there?], to his determined effort to attack his own government and destroy all norms, all the way to his lazy, unconcerned response to the Department of Justice trying to retrieve stolen classified documents.
The disgraced, twice-impeached, document-stealing, ever-grifting, insurrection-fomenting, perpetually lying, Putin-loving former president has been in goblin mode since childhood, allegedly cheating to get into college; cheating on wives, apparently even when they were expecting; harassing, groping, and sexually assaulting women (“I don’t even wait…”); and cheating competitors (not to mention, U.S. taxpayers) while playing golf, a game based on personal honor.
But in our era of trolls (in the sense of those unhappy fellows who find their deepest satisfaction by annoying others, whether under a bridge or online or, say, as the owner of Twitter), these words bubbling to the top make perfect sense. Because what the far-right wing desires most is never again to have to present policy options — all that hard work of thinking things through and making compromises! — and just somehow “MAGA” a version of the country that never existed or even a feudal state of play, where women and other serfs and peasants know their place and only deserving people (white Christian men) have a say in running a regressive government to keep the masses down.
Think ”Game of Thrones” with the fire-breathing dragons replaced by mouth-breathing white nationalist cretins who now apparently are game to attack their own country’s critical infrastructure and scientific advances like the COVID vaccines that are still saving lives.
Speaking of cretins, Elon Musk has repeatedly huffed and puffed himself on various unsavory topics and blown his ram’s horn inviting all exiled trolls back to Twitter so they can taunt and gaslight the public to their heart’s content, while he himself, in hyper goblin mode, repeatedly threatened and more than decimated the employees of his own company.
Five conservative Catholics dominate the Supreme Court, a few definitely holding medieval views on personal freedom and “religious liberty.” They like nothing more than to gaslight the public about not being partisan hacks while being wined and dined by conservative groups. Both justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are perpetually and seemingly gleefully in goblin mode, the former overturning Roe while quoting seventeenth-century English jurist Matthew Hale, who was perfectly happy to excuse marital rape and to put women to death for witchcraft, and the latter happily refusing to recuse himself from cases pertaining to Trump’s violent attempted coup, which his wife, Ginni, worked diligently to foment.
Filmmaker, activist, and all-around mensch Michael Moore may dress like he’s in goblin mode but he’s decidedly not. He correctly predicted that there would be no red wave in the 2022 midterms and worked hard to convince the rest of us not to give up hope. He accurately refers to those five justices as “priests” in their robes handing down theocratic decisions. And, as he put it, though the corporate media did its utmost to downplay it, one of the top reasons Republicans did not do well in the midterms was pretty simple: “The right-wing Supreme Court issued a religious edict on June 24th reminding women they are second-class citizens.”
In addition, Florida Senator and infamous Medicare fraudster Rick Scott annoyed Mitch McConnell and others in the GOP by not gaslighting the public about Republican intentions. He did us all a favor by publishing his infamous 11-point plan to remake our democracy into a theocracy headed by religious zealots, one free of those endless “entitlements” of Medicare, food stamps, and Social Security.
As it turned out, most Americans like living in a democratic republic that offers at least some semblance of a social safety net.
And voters took notice. Armed with these two well-chosen words, gaslighting and goblin mode, we can hope the majority of them continue to clearly see the endless nonsense coming from the right — especially from their cult leader abuser — in a way many on the right no longer can.
As the people running these high-profile dictionaries know, words matter.
