Democrats Burn the Dictionary: Why AOC’s Border Newspeak Should Be Ditched

D imly aware that the border crisis is taking a toll on its popularity, the Democratic Party has finally resolved to do something concrete: It is going to burn the dictionary.

Wands outstretched and shouting incantations, prominent Democrats have begun to curse our language. In a livestream performed last night, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attempted to change the meaning of the word “surge” in the hope that she might be able to magic away the news from the border. “They wanna say, ‘But what about the surge?’” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Well, first of all, just gut check, stop. Anyone who’s using the term ‘surge’ around you consciously is trying to invoke a militaristic frame.”

Or, alternatively, they’re talking about the surge on the border.

“That’s a problem,” Ocasio-Cortez continued, “because this is not a surge, these are children and they are not insurgents and we are not being invaded.”

The “problem” here, of course, is that “surge,” “insurgent,” and “invasion” all mean different things, and that “they” — by which Ocasio-Cortez means “people with eyes who can read charts” — are only using one of those words. That word is “surge,” which, by any traditional use of the term, describes neatly what is happening on the border. If Ocasio-Cortez prefers, we could use a different word: Say, “deluge” or “swell” or “gush” or “flood” or “rush.” Hell, if she likes, we can call what is happening something entirely nonsensical: a “teapot” of migrants. But whatever we choose, it is not going to defy the reality, which is that there is a surge on the border. One suspects that, somewhere deep down, Ocasio-Cortez believes that if she can find a better word to describe gravity, she will become capable of levitation.

In Washington, meanwhile, Joe Biden has taken a break from litigating the word “crisis” and is joining Representative Joaquin Castro in his quest to remove the word “alien” from our immigration law. If, as seems likely, Biden prevails in this endeavor, he will have done nothing of value whatsoever. “Alien” derives from the Latin “alienus,” which simply means “stranger” or “foreigner.” The first definition of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is someone “belonging to another person, place, or family; not of one’s own; from elsewhere, foreign.” To prohibit its use by the government will not destroy this concept; it will merely attach it to whatever replacement word is chosen and, over time, imbue that word with the same political context. There are, indeed, a few disfavored terms that have lost their sting having been marginalized, but only because the ideas they represented faded out alongside them. It should be obvious to anyone who has ever read a book that “foreigner” is unlikely to join their number.

And if it does? Then we will be poorer for it. Already, mainstream news pieces on this topic tend to leave me more confused than I was when I started. As a matter of habit, outlets such as the Associated Press and Reuters call illegal immigrants “migrants,” and people with fake papers “undocumented,” and deportees “non-citizens,” and, in so doing, flatten the key distinctions so dramatically that it becomes impossible to tell what is going on.

Which, of course, is the point. Increasingly, modern progressivism is predicated upon the belief that reality is meaningfully created by language, and that if the substance of that language can be forcibly altered, the real world will follow on cue. In its benign form, this approach is merely hackish: Consider, by way of example, how desperately progressives try to bully the press into describing radical gun-control measures as mere “gun safety,” or how quickly Democratic politicians rush to describe anything they dislike as “Jim Crow.” In its more sinister form, however, it is disastrous for common understanding. It has taken just a handful of years for CNN to go from being a news network that reported on the world as it actually exists to being so cowed by external pressure that it fills its straight news stories with sentences such as, “It’s not possible to know a person’s gender identity at birth, and there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth” — a claim so patently ridiculous that, ten years ago, it would have been offered only by the sort of scatty, damaged, nutty professor-types who have multiple 35,000-word theories on the gendered way people eat dumplings but are incapable of changing a light bulb.

Politics, we are told, is the art of the possible. Increasingly, though, it is more accurate to say that it is the art of the euphemism. What is happening at the border is a real, tangible, physical problem: Too many people are coming to the United States because they believe that they will be allowed into the country if they do. Insofar as there is a verbal component to the matter, it is that many of those traveling have been encouraged to do so by Democratic rhetoric, but this is mostly a material issue that will be fixed by a combination of serious inquiry, a set of sober policies, and the efficient and persistent execution of the law.

And if that doesn’t work? Well, we can always amend the terms to our liking — so that nobody involved is able to tell what the hell we were talking about in the first place.