Language in Politics

Lately I’ve been thinking about language and politics.

As Shawn McCreesh writes in the New York Times, “The very language that Mr. T*ump and his administration are using to smash the federal bureaucracy is now also the official language of that bureaucracy, because it is being dictated by the man doing the smashing.”

The T*ump administration has changed the very definitions of words to do their bidding. For example, “fake news” from T*ump’s first presidency, or “the weave” (his description of his relatively incoherent speech). With Truth Social and regular public rallies, T*ump has a platform for his “original” use of language. He spouts catchphrases like “stop the steal,” and “drill, baby, drill.” He uses nicknames for political figures, like Crooked Joe for Joe Biden, Sloppy Chris Christie, Crooked Hillary, Ron DeSanctimonious, and others.

Then there are the geographical shifts: the Gulf of America, instead of the Gulf of Mexico. Red White, and Blue Land for Greenland. The 51^st state for Canada.

There are the lists of words that can’t be used by government agencies and have been scrubbed from websites and disallowed in scientific papers and grant applications: Activism. Climate. Undocumented. Equity. Gender. Transgender. Environmental Justice. Nonbinary. Pregnant people. Assigned male at birth. Antiracist. Trauma. Hate speech. Intersectional. Multicultural. Oppression. Words that present a multifaceted truth, instead of the whitewashed truth T*ump wants to present. He wants to send society back to the 1950s, when these words weren’t commonly used, and the issues they raise are easier to ignore.

Everyone knows the original words and the meaning of those words, but it’s easier to let them go, than to fight to keep them. How do you fight on behalf of language? It’s like shifting baseline syndrome, where we think that the current language is how it’s always been, even though it was different even just ten years ago. Even DOGE has now become a household name, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is a cynical play on the DOGE coin meme from the cryptocurrency world.

If we look at these language changes through the lens of George Orwell’s 1984, the T*ump presidency is practicing doublethink: where we hold two realities in our minds at once. Orwell described it as, “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.” This is why there is an “Executive Order Defending Women,” which doesn’t do much to defend women but requires the purge of words like gender ideology and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and the use of pronouns in email signatures, at the CDC.

Another Orwellian term is Newspeak: “a purposefully ambiguous and confusing language with restricted grammar and limited vocabulary.” T*ump is known for his limited vocabulary and restricted grammar, on show at all the rallies he’s hosted. His ambiguous language often has to be clarified by his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. She confirmed, for example, that “It’s a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the “Gulf of America.””

Then there is the unperson: someone whose existence has been excised from the public and private memory. This applies perfectly to migrants—they’re being shipped out of the country and excised from our memory. It also applies to those who don’t have rights under the new regime, like trans people.

The most telling wordplay from Orwell’s book is the governing body’s statement that “WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” The attack on the Capitol was just a peaceful protest, “a day of love,” as T*ump says, and the participants just happened to get inside the White House. Freedom is slavery especially if you’re a blue state, which is supposedly enslaved by the ideology of the left and its “woke-ness.”  Ignorance keeps you from questioning the government, and makes it easier to go on with your life without being bothered by silly political details.

This all reminds me of Celeste Ng’s novel Our Missing Hearts, which takes place in a hyper-patriotic America where everyone spies on everyone else, books are hard to get and read, and you must keep your head down and not attract attention. “For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic.”

This doesn’t sound too different from what’s happening now. Between 2023-2024, school libraries pulled over 4,000 books from their shelves that discussed gay couples, racism, sexism, and history. These books include classics like The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and The Color Purple by Alice Walker. The bans are disproportionately aimed at LGBTQ+ authors, authors of colour, and women authors.

Reading is an integral part of learning a language—understanding how authors string together words and paragraphs to build entire books. Reading opens up different worlds through language, worlds that readers can explore. Students gain immeasurably from reading—language skills, empathy, compassion. What are students missing by not being able to read these books?

I don’t live in the US and don’t have kids that I would worry about. But I worry about T*ump-style politics bleeding across the border into Canada. We have a federal election this year, and the Conservative candidate has been campaigning to be Prime Minister ever since his party voted him as leader of the Opposition. Pierre Poilievre is a little man with little slogans (“Axe the Tax,” “Common Sense Canada,” and “Freedom”) and nicknames for political figures (like “Sellout Singh” for the leader of the NDP party). He holds rallies and avoids talking to certain media outlets. Sound familiar? Yup, it’s coming right from the MAGA playbook. Poilievre is appropriating the language of the right, but I hope that language will be a hard sell here in Canada.