The left has always been adept at using language to promote its revolution. After all, Stalin once said that ideas are more powerful than guns.
Thus, the left works hard to craft key words and expressions that resonate with the public, inflame passions and gather sympathy for its cause. Its ideological wordsmiths understand the importance of using these words to mask the dark agenda behind their revolutions.
Something Has Changed
However, something has recently changed in the American left. Liberals are no longer expressing themselves well. They are adopting terms that offend and belittle ordinary citizens. The left’s rabid and impatient activists don’t want to mask their intentions anymore with words. They now push their unattractive programs using expressions that unmask their extreme goals quickly, regardless of the consequences.
Old-school liberals are noticing the change. The Third Way, a group of centrist Democrats, recently complained about the shift in language by releasing a memo expressively titled “Was It Something I Said?”
The moderates’ memo blames the radicals for saying things that bring their cause to ruin, and are now asking them to stop.
The Use of Talismanic Words
Indeed, words have consequences in the political battle for hearts and minds. Catholic thinker Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira affirmed that the left has long developed a science in which its ideologues choose special words that they then use to subvert society. This science is carefully studied and implemented.
His insightful study, “Unperceived Ideological Transshipment and Dialogue,” meticulously showed how the left employs very flexible and attractive words and expressions with multiple meanings that can express a wide range of positions and emotions.
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Liberal media then endow words like dialogue or peace with an almost magical quality of persuasion, which, through constant usage over time, pulls people leftward. These ambiguous “talismanic” words hide their true intention of moving an unsuspecting individual or community toward a new, often illegitimate, mentality or position without them being aware of the change.
Past leftist expressions endowed with talismanic qualities include dialogue, peace, détente, coexistence, tolerance, diversity, gay, ecumenism, love, pacifism, pastoral, inclusive, equality, pro-choice, and others.
He observed that all revolutionary movements use such words to mislead the unwary. It takes time to develop and spread them, but they help movements overcome resistance from rightist opposition and neutral parties, which can be formidable obstacles to revolutions. Conservatives can combat this maneuver by unmasking the false meanings behind these talismanic words.
Third Way Confirmation
The Third Way memo is a negative confirmation of Prof. Corrêa de Oliveira’s thesis about talismanic words because it identifies them in a similar way. Its authors affirm the effort needed to find these words and show what happens when these expressions go awry.
For example, the memo acknowledges that talismanic words exist by listing their characteristics and goals. Such words should “include, broaden, empathize, accept and embrace.” This description corresponds to Prof. Corrêa de Oliveira’s characterization.
The statement also admits that developing its message is a deliberate effort that is not left to chance. The Third Way criticizes the failure of “a party that spends billions of dollars trying to find the perfect language to connect voters.”
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Finally, the memo admits that liberals, and especially Democrats, have failed in their use of these words. This has had disastrous consequences. Instead of attracting voters, the party is alienating them by crafting expressions that make the left sound “extreme, divisive, elitist and obfuscatory”—precisely the leftist characteristics that talismanic words hide well. The new words fail to mask the left’s extreme intent but openly proclaim it.
Pleasing a Few
Thus, the left is failing to employ the right talismanic words to advance its agenda. Activists are using expressions that are disconnected from the mainstream. Third Way complains, “To please a few, we have alienated the many—especially on culture issues.”
Above all, the left is failing to choose elastic, non-threatening talismanic words that everyone can relate to and which it can distort. Such moderate-sounding words appear normal and raise no alarm.
The radicals have trouble using more moderate-sounding terms because they themselves can no longer identify with anything moderate, even as a mask.
By insisting that everyone must adopt its woke terminology and inclusive jargon, Democrats have created a verbal wall between themselves and most average Americans who live outside the leftist narrative. The left inadvertently shows its true face by taking off the mask.
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Third Way insinuates that the radicals do not realize the harm they are doing or how foreign their words sound to the average American. The memo begs the radicals to reconsider their choice of words but does not ask them to reject their toxic ideologies.
The Spectacular Failure of Talismanic Words
The Third Way memo is a fascinating study of a spectacular failure. The leftists, not conservatives, document this disaster.
The liberal authors of the memo compile a long list of failed talismanic words that lost their magic charm, if they ever had one.
The memo goes a step further by categorizing the terms and commenting upon their negative effect. The result is anti-talismanic words that repel, rather than invite, end conversations, rather than start them, and confuse rather than clarify.
What makes the crisis worse is that the left is doubling down on its failure at a time when it needs to find a way out of the mess it is in.
Talking Down to the Masses
Walking through the graveyard of spent expressions is a lesson on failed propaganda. Some terms enjoyed some limited success while others never gained any traction.
In the “Therapy-Speak” category, for example, the memo lists words that speak of liberal hurt feelings, not mainstream resilience. The American public is asked to identify with triggering, othering, microaggressions and safe space. Of course, it doesn’t. Leftist radicals assume most people are weak-willed victims and all others are oppressors, a simplification that does not reflect reality.
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The category “Seminar Room Language” lists words that imply intellectual superiority instead of the “kitchen table common sense” of the average American. These expressions include subverting norms, systems of oppression, cultural appropriation, and existential threat to [democracy, the planet or whatever]. The effect of these words is to blame all problems on systems, not individuals.
Organizer, Gender and Race Jargon
Other categories aim to establish empathy through inclusion or attempt to identify with individuals who face disadvantages.
For example, the “Organizer Jargon” category is meant to cause empathy for those not represented in modern social structures. However, the terms ultimately convey bitterness, entitlement, and struggle. Some expressions found in this category include radical transparency, small ‘d’ democracy, stakeholders, food insecurity and person who immigrated.
The “Gender Orientation Correctness” category wants to establish empathy by forcing inclusion upon everyone. However, the category screams word policing since it threatens anyone who misgenders or mischaracterizes with cancelation. Such words that shame people into compliance can never elicit empathy.
In this regard, the memo has a list of expressions that the left has weaponized. There are now birthing persons, pregnant people, cisgender, deadnaming, and even the ever-growing LGBTQIA+ alphabet. All these are expressions that mislabel people into created fantasy categories. The average American cannot relate to them.
A similar section is dedicated to expressions that confound even those being described. Thus, the average American (and Latino) is encouraged to use the neutral yet absurd Latinx designation instead of Latino or Latina to describe someone of Latin American origin. Other confounding words include BIPOC (Black, Indigenous People of Color), allyship, and intersectionality.
Explaining Away Crime
A final category deals with crime and law enforcement. The left is active in trying to minimize crime and defund law enforcement.
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To achieve this goal, it will use new terms to describe criminal situations more empathetically. Thus, the list includes expressions such as carceration, justice-involved, and involuntary confinement.
Such terms insinuate that the present justice system is an unjust social construct that victimizes those who break the law. It sends the message to ordinary Americans that their security is unmerited and an unjust privilege. The criminal, as the radical left’s “true” victim, not the robbed octogenarian, must be presented in the best possible light.
A Failure to Communicate
The left’s failure to communicate represents an inability to follow the rules that worked so well in the past to take society leftward. To “please a few,” the memo says, the left yielded to the impatience of party radicals who no longer want to hide behind words to push their sinister revolution forward.
This failure represents an opportunity for those who defend Christian civilization. Christians are now freer from the effects of the powerful and terrible weapon of well-crafted talismanic words. People alienated by anti-talismanic words are more open to hearing the truth, which is naturally good and beautiful. Christian activists must speak out freely, boldly and clearly.
There is no need for artifices that mislead the unwary. The object of words is to speak the truth, not to be semantic weapons manipulated to serve toxic leftist ideologies. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the Word made Flesh. He is the Truth, who sets men free.
First appeared on Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
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