The MAGA Abuse of the English Language

Modern Republicans have distorted our political lexicon. Here's how to correct it.

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The Americans have done it again: they’ve ruined the language.¹

Alright, alright, not all Americans are responsible this time.² Instead, it’s the ways that modern Republicans have savaged political English, slapping words with exact, precise definitions onto a loose agglomeration of concepts willy-nilly until they’re unrecognizable distortions, sometimes even inversions. This isn’t like calling a crow a raven. Instead, it’s more like if you were to point at an elephant and call it a chihuahua. These are not understandable near misses.

This is a problem because a shared political reality requires a shared political language to describe concepts. Thinkers from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt and George Orwell understood that words matter and that the lexicon we use to describe our social world directly influences our perceptions of it.

Orwell, who is quoted endlessly for 1984, wrote a somewhat less famous essay called “Politics and the English Language,” in which he decried how linguistic contortions could excuse even the most egregious abuses. “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.”

In short, Orwell explains that “political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” More recently, the violent attack on January 6th has been described by one Republican as “a normal tourist visit.”  Orwell’s warning is apt: corruptions of language can lead to corrupted minds, where doublethink becomes commonplace.

So, allow me to take a moment to correct the record when it comes to the MAGA abuse of the English language. Feel free to share this with anyone who uses these terms incorrectly. I’m sure they’ll be most appreciative and will promptly thank you for your benevolent kindness!

“Coup”

A coup, or more formally a coup d’état, refers to an illegal seizure of executive power through force, usually carried out by the military. (I know quite a lot about this one because coups were a core component of my DPhil research).³ Coups can come in a few different varieties. For example, in Thailand, they usually have what I call institutional coups, in which the military brass all get together and agree to take out an elected leader. There’s no need to storm the palace, so to speak, because it's obvious that the entire military vs. a single elected leader is only going to end with one outcome and that outcome isn’t favorable for the elected leader. By contrast, there are sometimes what I call lone wolf coups, which happen when a rogue actor in the military tries to overthrow the regime, hoping to establish himself as the new leader.

In these definitional varieties, you might notice a conspicuous absence: “But Brian,” you ask, “why didn’t you include the most devious coups of all—the kinds that happen when a somewhat unpopular older president decides not to seek re-election and his successor is chosen through the legal, official formal rules of that candidate’s political party?” I see that I can’t sneak anything past you, discerning reader! So, I will engage with your most interesting question and address this head-on.

The reason I didn’t include it in my typology is simple: that is not a coup.

Crucially, it’s not illegal. It wasn’t a seizure of executive power. It didn’t involve force. And unless I missed some rather big news, I didn’t see any soldiers holding Joe Biden at gunpoint and forcing him to transfer the presidency to Kamala Harris. What the MAGA zealots are calling a “coup” fits precisely zero components of the definition. It is completely normal behavior in a democratic country. Please stop calling it a coup. It just makes you look stupid.

“Marxist”

As a man who occasionally writes or speaks about American politics in the “lamestream media,” I have developed a devoted base of fans—and some of them write to me. I recently received this lovely message from one kindly gentleman who sauntered unannounced into my inbox:⁴

A “Marist” typically refers to those who, according to a quick Google search, “strive to breathe in the Holy Spirit so that in all things they may think, judge, feel, and act like Mary.” However, since that seems like a strange thing to suggest for shoving up one’s “numb skull” [sic], and because I am a so-called Man of the World with fine-tuned powers of deduction, I have inferred that my digital admirer was attempting to call me a Marxist.

Donald Trump, similarly, following in the footsteps of that most renowned public intellectual, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has aimed to brand Kamala Harris as a “RADICAL LEFT MARXIST.”

A Marxist, as you might recall from your studies, refers to those who adhere to a political philosophy of the late Karl Marx, in which dialectical materialism is used to analyze social change, often through the prism of class relations.

Because of linguistic slippage over the last century or so, some may also plausibly consider it appropriate usage to describe someone who aims to run a modern government according to the bastardized principles of Marxism that were brought to life by avowedly Communist regimes, such as the Soviet Union. In this version of the definition, one might plausibly refer to someone as Marxist if they hope to create a society in which private property is not protected and a command-style economy obliterates capitalist competition.

What it does not include, you might notice, is a left-of-center candidate for president in arguably the most capitalist nation in the world who is running a campaign centered around ensuring less state control of reproductive choices; who sponsored legislation to use capitalist “market forces” to speed up the transition to more sustainable energy sources; and who has never espoused any real challenge to America’s extremely capitalist economic structure. (In most European nations—which are also capitalist, not Marxist—many Democratic politicians would be considered somewhere between centrists and center-right when it comes to economic policy).

Kamala Harris is like “a Marxist” in the same way that Donald Trump is like a selfless, empathetic hospice nurse who, if he ever stumbled into any unearned family money, would instantly give it all away and donate anonymously to a child cancer ward.⁵

Democracy

If you amble with a click and a grimace into the festering pustule that is Elon Musk’s Twitterhellscape—and mosey your way over to the dystopian American politics corner—you will no doubt encounter a memorable specimen who lurks within that pustule, waiting to pounce at you.

He is known as Republic Guy.

If you were to take a David Attenborough approach to Republic Guy, you would note that he is easily observed in the wild whenever someone says something positive about democracy; always adorns himself with an $8 blue tick; has between 238 and 418 followers; and believes that the appropriate response to most neural stimuli is to shout: “We’re a REPUBLIC, not a DEMOCRACY!”

Republic Guy believes that he has always produced a singular mic drop moment whenever he responds to the notion that Trump is a “threat to democracy,” but alas, his faith is misplaced.

Allow me to explain, perhaps a touch unexpectedly, by showing you a photograph of my pet, Zorro, who we can all agree is a regal, majestic beast worthy of admiration.

Now, upon viewing his magnificent snoot, you may be tempted to say:

Wow, what a gorgeous dog!

OR

That’s a lovely Border Collie!

Those statements are not the same. However, both are perfectly acceptable responses to seeing Zorro because—bear with me here, it’s complicated—a Border Collie is a type of dog.⁶

We are blessed with the the cognitive riches of linguistic hierarchies, in which individual words can belong to larger categories of meaning. This yields the following astonishing fact:

An elected federal constitutional republic is a type of democracy.

In other words, Republic Guy is basically shouting from the rooftops something akin to: “That’s a BORDER COLLIE, not a DOG!”

See how stupid that sounds?

The confusion comes from the fact that hundreds of years ago some Founding Fathers used the word democracy to refer to what we would now call unconstrained direct democracy. You can forgive them: there weren’t enough democracies around back in the 1770s to develop a more sophisticated typology. Thankfully, it’s possible for language to evolve over 250 years to match the surrounding world.⁷

Today—and for quite a long while since the 1770s—the word democracy signifies something much broader. This is true for everyone in the world except a weird subset of the American political right, which seems hellbent on insisting that the United States is definitely not a democracy and never should be, either. (This is where we get a weird crossover episode of linguistic insanity, such that some MAGA people will claim that the “Democrat Marxists want to turn America into a democracy with their coup,” which is a statement that should make everyone’s head explode, Looney Tunes™ style).

The word democracy now refers to a variety of systems of government that aim to be “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” in stark contrast to the polar opposite of democracy: autocracy. North Korea, Russia, and China are vastly different kinds of governments but all three are autocracies. Democracy, like autocracy, is a big tent. Subset descriptors like “federal republic” or “totalitarian dictatorship” live within those two big tents. Think of these subsets as dog breeds, even as they belong to a larger species.

The overwhelming majority of democracies today are not direct, but indirect—often known as representative democracy. France is a republic, while Britain is not, but both are representative democracies. The United States is accurately categorized among peer nations as a flawed representative democracy—specifically a federal constitutional democratic republic.⁸

The exact definition of the word democracy in the context of representative democracy may be up for debate, but pretty much everyone agrees some must-haves: free, fair, competitive elections with universal suffrage that determine who leads; rule of law with an independent judiciary; formal political institutions that constrain executive power; access to independent sources of information; governments that are responsive to the preferences of citizens; freedom of expression, press, assembly, religion, and so on.

Donald Trump is a threat to democracy—and to the republic. Both are true because the latter is a subset descriptor of the former.

So, Republic Guy, if you’re reading this: Please stop, I promise you there are better ways to spend your finite time on Earth.

Why “Weird” Works

Now, I will conclude this edition with a novel political usage that is appropriate: applying the word weird to those who wrongly believe that “childless cat ladies” run the world; to those adorn themselves in bizarre t-shirts that depict Trump as a ripped superhero riding a bald eagle; or to a candidate who praises the “late, great Hannibal Lecter” in one breath before meandering over to his favorite story about sharks and boat batteries.

But rather than elucidating these objectively weird behaviors at length, I’d like to explain why this punchy little label has cut through and made a difference in the 2024 election campaign. It harkens back to an edition I wrote previously: Schemas and the Political Brain. If you’re interested in the world of political communication, I’d recommend reading the whole thing, but here are a few key paragraphs:

We often process information using schemas, a key concept within psychology, neuroscience, and cognition. Understanding how they work is crucial for making sense of modern politics. The political brain is a brain defined by schemas. Political movements that understand that fact will usually beat those that don’t…

While political junkies might be able to rattle off an endless array of statistics and understand the minutiae of policy, very few people devote that level of intellectual bandwidth to politics. That means that most people process political information using a lot more cognitive shorthands, making schemas exceptionally important.

Effective politicians are able to imbue a constellation of facts with a new meaning, providing voters with a fresh cognitive shortcut to make sense of the political world. Donald Trump is not, as he’s claimed, a “stable genius,” but he is extremely skilled at defining his opponents in ways that stick. In effect, he’s providing voters with a new schema with which to understand the political landscape.

…The lesson, then, is not that fact-based arguments are meaningless in politics, but rather that facts are most effective when they’re nestled within a ready-made intellectual framework for how to make sense of the world. Effective political movements use facts to reinforce schemas, but they understand that the schemas are what matter most. It’s a depressing truth, but getting the right taglines, slogans, and vivid ways of presenting political opponents is often far more important than being right.

In this instance, the slogan is both effective and right. What’s ingenious about the use of the word “weird” in this context is that it’s so obviously true. It is weird.

Calling something weird doesn’t diminish the importance of describing the serious stakes of the election and why Trump’s machinations pose a threat to America’s democratic institutions. But it does provide a neat, memorable schema that voters can use to make sense of a lot of bewildering information, classifying some of it under a single, devastatingly effective label.

Words matter. Political language used incorrectly, Orwell warned, “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

We can counteract those avoidable foolish thoughts, but we must all insist on reclaiming a shared lexicon that’s accurate, refusing to surrender to the zealots who bafflingly claim that normal democratic political processes—in arguably the world’s most capitalist economy—are the hallmarks of “a Marxist coup.”

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1. I should be using “we” here, but one joy of being a newly-minted dual national is that I can use “we” or “they” flexibly, opening up a new universe of linguistic possibilities.

2. One must be careful not to repeat alright three times in written text lest you want the genie of Matthew McConnaughey to be summoned, not to grant wishes, but to just say “alright” at you, ceaselessly, forever.

3. A DPhil is what they call a PhD at Oxford. It’s just one of those things—like having to process to a specific building while wearing a bowtie to take an exam (I’m not kidding)—which is part of the arcane world there.

4. No “Dear Brian”? No “I hope this message finds you well”? No “best wishes”? What is our world coming to?

5. I chose this specific inversion not by accident. You may recall that Eric Trump, apparently at his father’s behest, shifted money destined to help kids with cancer…into the Trump Organization instead.

6. Admittedly, a strange, neurotic, wonderful type of dog, but part of the Canis lupus familiaris species nonetheless.

7. It is also weird and foolish to fetishize the Founding Fathers as bearers of some secular Holy Grail of flawless knowledge. Many of them owned slaves. They agreed that enslaved people should be counted as three-fifths of a person for official purposes. Yes, they came up with a pretty good Constitution, but these were not infallible gods and we would be unwise to pretend otherwise.

8. America is accurately classified as a “flawed democracy” because it has many institutional features and failures (gerrymandering, the egregious role of money in politics, the politicization of the Supreme Court, voter suppression, the Electoral College, etc). which are far less democratic than peer nations.