The Weekly Sift

TrumpSpeak sends the word’s original meanings down the memory hole.

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A theme I return to now and then is how the Right takes a word that has been effectively used against it and breaks that word through repeated misuse. I’m not sure when this practice began. Probably it had already been going on for some while before I noticed it; I was reading Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, a 2008 book whose apparent purpose is to destroy any notion a reader might have of real fascism. (Did you know Hitler was a vegetarian? Take that, liberals!)

Word-breaking doesn’t always work — the Bush administration and its apologists never did completely break the word “torture” — but far too often it does. One of the great recent successes of conservative word-breaking is “fake news“, a once-useful term that originally referred to serious-looking links invented to be social-media clickbait and attributed to websites that purported to be newspaper sites, but weren’t. (For example, there is no Denver Guardian.)

Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign was a major beneficiary of viral fake news, like the Denver Guardian’s “FBI agent suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in apartment murder-suicide” which was shared on Facebook more than half a million times, in spite of being a complete fiction that had been reported by no actual news organizations. Promoting fake news was, in fact, one of the primary ways Russia supported Trump. Obviously, this wasn’t something Trump wanted people to talk about, or even think about. Something had to be done.

So by repeated misuse, Trump captured “fake news” and redirected it to refer to accurate news stories he didn’t like. As a result, “the fake-news media” no longer brings the Denver Guardian to mind. Instead, it now encompasses The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN.

Today, if you use “fake news” in its original sense, no one will know what you mean. Mission accomplished.

We’re currently witnessing a multi-year campaign to break “socialism“, a word George Orwell sometimes used to describe his own political philosophy. But in a world where Joe Biden and Jon Ossoff are “radical socialists”, how can you even start a conversation about public ownership of the means of production? Such a thoughtcrime is not yet impossible, but it is becoming increasingly difficult.

“Religious freedom” and “religious liberty” are likewise broken. Now they primarily refer to Christian privilege. So Christians can ignore anti-discrimination laws because they have “religious liberty”. Meanwhile, the rest of us only have “religious liberty” in situations where conservative Christians agree with us. For example: A Christian pharmacist’s “religious liberty” is violated if he has to fill a birth-control prescription, and so a pharmacist of some other religion might claim a similar privilege. On the other hand, a Hindu waitress who doesn’t want to serve steaks should just find another job; firing her would not create any kind of religious-liberty issue.

But the latest word the Trump and his allies are trying to break is particularly ironic: “orwellian”. Vox explains:

When Josh Hawley and Trump Jr. use the term “Orwellian,” they are indulging in precisely the kind of lazy and dishonest obfuscation Orwell railed against. They are taking the haze of imprecise associations that have accumulated around the word — bad, dystopian, someone somewhere overreaching probably? — and trying to attach them to such urgent issues for human rights as a politician losing his book contract after a scandal and the most powerful man in the world getting kicked off a social media platform. They are, to put it in terms of which Orwell would approve, lying. They are pretending that very reasonable actions from private corporations are the same as the government kidnapping citizens and shoving their faces into cages full of rats to brainwash them. And they are trying to convince their followers to pretend the same thing, until the pretense becomes real and everyone agrees to believe the lie. [links added]

Originally, “orwellian” had a variety of related meanings, all of which derived directly from George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984. The word might, for example, refer to a bold lie that completely inverts the truth, like the 1984 party slogans: “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.”

Rudy Giuliani’s statement “Truth isn’t truth” — which supposedly explained how an honest man like Trump might commit perjury if he testified under oath — is orwellian in this sense. But so is Trump’s claim that Democrats are stealing the 2020 election, because that claim is itself the center of Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election. The related lie that Democratic “election fraud” centered in majority-Black cities like Detroit, Atlanta, and Milwaukee is similarly orwellian, because inner-city Blacks are precisely the people most likely to be disenfranchised by Republican tactics like gerrymandering and voter suppression.

“Orwellian” might also legitimately refer to an authority’s demand that you believe what you are told rather than what you can see for yourself. That usage derives from this 1984 quote:

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

So Trump was being orwellian when he told a VFW convention: “Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. … Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

But probably the purest meaning of “orwellian” would apply to the process I’m describing here: breaking a word so that the idea it once captured so well becomes inexpressible. As Orwell wrote in “The Principles of Newspeak“:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. … This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

If Trump and his allies succeed in breaking “orwellian”, they will have gone a long way towards removing this thought from the public mind. Then “orwellian” will have lost all substantive content, and will simply become a way to cast shade: “You said something I don’t like.”

And we will have lost any term that expresses what just happened.