How Strategic Lingo Swallowed Progressive Thought

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Pleased to make the cover of the Washington Examiner Magazine…

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Progressives have a problem with euphemism, and the problem is they take their euphemisms literally: they believe their own spin and, therefore, are consistently shocked when reality is not as skewed and hyperbolic and morally obvious as they expect — when they even notice. With the Obama craze and rise of the Tumblr/TikTok generations, virtually the entire elite progressive discourse has collapsed into symbolic abstractions, quibbling over semantics rather than many realities of their constituents’ experience.

With so many creatives in the coalition, liberals have long been much better at marketing than they give themselves credit for — savvily defining policy debates ranging from “pro-choice” to “anti-immigrant.” This use of manipulative and charged language has become more of a liability than an asset for progressivism, however, since the deployment of euphemism is seen by the progressive faithful more as a moral mission than mere acts of marketing or political rhetoric.

And so liberals still struggle to explain why elections remain stubbornly competitive. Sure, there are hordes of deplorables out there, and some evil billionaires, but cutting-edge progressivism in the eyes of its votaries is so self-evidently superior that Democrats should easily hold 70 or 80 Senate seats. Racists, transphobes, racist transphobes, etc., probably account for most of the problem, they typically conclude. But some of it, liberals overdosing on euphemism think, is that they are just so smart, so nuanced, so honest that their genius simply sails over a lot of people’s heads.

As arrogant as that may sound, it used to contain a certain kernel of truth: Back in the ’80s and ’90s, dweeby wonks like Bob Kuttner would lay out labyrinthine policy schemes only to often lose to folksy Republicans tossing out poll-tested red meat. But then along came George Lakoff. In his influential 2004 bestseller Don’t Think of an Elephant!, the celebrated liberal linguist laid out a blueprint for progressives to emphasize a vague rhetoric of values over concrete proposals or details — to win by making the enemy socially or culturally unacceptable more than by making the case for particular policies.

The book became a sensation and (along with Frank Luntz’s Words That Work) the cornerstone of a course in political communication I took at Brown that became more or less the basis of my career in progressive journalism and marketing. Blogging for Bill Moyers on PBS and then through over a decade as a flack at Columbia University, one of my most important jobs was always keeping abreast of the latest strategic lingo — how best to package the ever-evolving narrative. Part of that involved learning how to walk on eggshells around colleagues always finding fresh reasons to be offended on the basis of a code of linguistic etiquette that was subject to change without notice, while a lot of the rest was figuring out how to help make the new conventional wisdom sound more credible.

When I started out, terms such as “homeless” and “illegal immigrant” could still be used, if only gingerly and after more suitable synonyms such as “unhoused” or “undocumented.” Such possibility of frankness receded during the Obama years and especially amid his second term.

Variously manipulative new vocabulary has proliferated ever since, such as “people experiencing homelessness” and, of course, “asylum-seekers” and “orderly crossings,” with shameless spin doctors angling not just for electoral dominance but sheer oneupmanship. The weaselly terms I faced most frequently, and strained mightily to avoid, were “underserved,” “underprivileged,” and “underrepresented” — used in place of “low-income” or “minority,” much less something English speakers might actually say out loud to describe what they mean, such as “poor.”

It wasn’t enough for such buzzwords to describe the situation: They needed to imply a whole cosmology that one would be a bad person to question. A poor person’s living conditions were not so much the complex, idiosyncratic outcome of luck and decisions but the product of a “society” that just wasn’t providing enough services or distributing enough privilege. If not for intersectional oppression, we’d all be shopping at the Chappaqua Whole Foods.

Over the past few years, the engineering of language has become so blatantly Orwellian as to stir up more backlash than it successfully controls thought. One recent Washington Post social media post had it that “a transgender Democratic lawmaker” has been “silenced in the state House after criticizing GOP colleagues who support a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender children.” Much of this patter is tendentious, charged, and just plain uninformative. The default is to read it without learning that the lawmaker in question was “silenced” because of disruptive behavior breaching Robert’s Rules of Order for a parliamentary body, not for the particular subject of the protest. Meanwhile, “gender-affirming” and “care” are terms that only make sense if you agree that gender is imposed from birth, unrelated to biological sex, and that fashionable treatments by American clinicians constitute something intrinsically beneficial rather than harmful.

But that’s just one example. These types of euphemism make up vast and ever-increasing swaths of the progressive lexicon in government and journalism and advocacy, making moral stridency unavoidable but communicative clarity an ever-steeper hill. Branding a comprehensive scheme for legally mandated group discrimination as “equity” or the maiming and mutilation of autistic 8-year-olds as “gender-affirming care” might finally be a bridge too far. Forgive this shallow objection as a former practitioner of the dark arts of spin, but is there no artistry to political sugarcoating anymore?

Most progressives really do earnestly mean well, but they are too busy trying to keep up with the neologisms and angling to win news cycles to see how hollow and detached their discourse has become. Day after day, they lob symbols among one another as if the memes and slogans still have anything to do with crafting sustainable policy or making ordinary people’s lives any better.

The sad irony is that all their grand ambitions of a planned society depend on having substantive conversations and debates. By burying themselves in propaganda and preventing the very possibility of polite dissent, they’ve doomed their best intentions.

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Read at the Washington Examiner Magazine.

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Next: A Nod To Bob

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