Fighting Words

The American political lexicon is one of exaggeration. Itxu Díaz, in his latest piece (which you can read alongside all past and forthcoming National Review articles at a discounted rate for a limited time), observes how potent words can be hollowed out after serial misuse.

The accusation fascist — which should be handled like a stiletto: infrequently, precisely, lethally, perhaps somewhere in the Italian countryside — has been dragged across our earth as a muckrake. Its blunted tip now hardly breaks the skin.

It’s not the only weighty term that the Left has obsessively brandished and rendered ineffective. Vladimir Putin’s drift toward nuclear war is, we say, dangerous, but according to MSNBC so is being displeased by some decision at the Department of Justice. Toxic were the arrows that Apollo let rain upon the Greek camp outside of Troy, scattering plague and death, but I wager that you’re more likely today to find the word attached to something like “digital manspreading.” Here’s how to spoil two perfectly fine words: The term microaggression is an oxymoron. The (Greek) prefix neuters the (Latin) noun, producing a descriptor that can only apply to what is fundamentally unaggressive.

Even the very word violence (now sometimes synonymous with silence) doesn’t hit the way it used to. Many terms have been so cheapened in recent years, but it is the currency of the most forceful ones that has been the most dramatically devalued.

Leftists are not the only ones falling for this sort of verbal hysteria; we all ought to mind our words. This November, commentators from all quarters say, is to be for the Democratic Party not merely a thorough electoral defeat — as it very well should be — but a “bloodbath.” Meanwhile, dozens of Republican campaign ads, such as this one by and for Blake Masters, cast illegal immigrants as invaders. The territory of the United States hasn’t been threatened since 1812, but we know very well what an invasion looks like — and we know that ossified immigration policy is not it. (We also know that the word invasion does not have “a long history in white nationalist circles,” as NPR witlessly claims.)

This isn’t simply a matter of semantics. Besides the obvious corollary to the problem Díaz points out (that one day some old boy is bound to cry wolf when there really is one), the abuse of language also renders concepts — not just the words that denote them — unrecognizable.

Giorgia Meloni is no fascist, and nobody who calls her so expects the new Italian government to, say, mobilize against Abyssinia in an attempt to reassemble the Roman Empire. But we dull our skill of making such comparisons when we allow terms such as “fascist” to be restyled to describe, for example, an individual who has twice spoken at CPAC. And when we dull our skill of making such comparisons, we hyperreact vocally and remain utterly confused practically. I have yet to read an opinion that follows the panic over Meloni to its natural conclusion: e.g., that the United States should now occupy Italy, mandate an institutional referendum, and prevent a NATO member from being overrun with Blackshirts or forming an alliance with an eastern emperor.

The Left may be bereft of adjectives. Those of us with the conservative instinct — who recognize that beautiful things such as the English language are, as Roger Scruton puts it, easily destroyed but not easily created — should wield our word-war instruments carefully.