The War on Words: Political Labels

The definition of the word “racism,” according to my copy of the American Heritage Dictionary, is:

1. The notion that one’s own ethnic stock is superior.

2. Discrimination or prejudice based on racism.

In today’s world, I might expand on that by changing item 1 to “the notion that there are differences between races or ethnicities that make some superior to others,” as that includes those who think their “ethnic stock” is inferior as well.

Progressivism has an alternative definition, which is simply “prejudice + power.” Progressives also say that we all have at least subconscious prejudice such that prejudice can be assumed. All that leaves is power.

Progressives then point out that white people are “in power.” Suddenly, to the progressive, white people are inherently racist, and it is impossible for anyone else to be. In other words, the definition of the word “racism” to the progressive is “white.”

The word fascism has also been stripped of its original meaning. Fascism is a system of total state control over society, with private “ownership” allowed only under government authority. Fascism uses profit as an incentive but only under strict regulation. This system is fundamentally incompatible with movements that emphasize personal liberty.

The left refuses to define fascism clearly. Instead, they circulate lists of supposed characteristics that are selectively crafted to resemble conservative policies. At the same time, they ignore actual fascist practices such as state-directed market control, corporate obedience to government mandates, and aggressive censorship. Many of these practices are openly supported by the modern left.

George Orwell warned that “political chaos is connected with the decay of language,” and today that decay is not just visible, but systematic and deliberate. Our cultural and political systems no longer operate on a foundation of shared truth. They now function through linguistic manipulation where meanings are distorted, feelings override facts, and words are no longer used to describe reality, so much as to control our perception of it.

This phenomenon is what I call the War on Words, and, over the years, I have written extensively about how the political left has re-engineered language to shape thought, limit speech, and marginalize dissent. The campaign began with the re-definition of the words described above, which were flipped to better implicate political opponents while allowing actual racism and actual fascism to flourish under more socially acceptable branding. It escalated through rhetorical strategies designed to disqualify entire perspectives before they could be heard, using labels such as “mansplaining” and “gunsplaining.” It then moved into open suppression, where terms like “terrorism” and “hate” were used to justify legal and institutional action against ideological opponents.

My favorite example is the word “could,” which has become a rhetorical device used to suggest guilt without evidence.

There are countless recent examples. On The Jim Acosta Show, James Carville warned that “Trump could tamper with the midterm elections.” In The New Republic, Liza Featherstone’s article “Soldiers Are Taking a Stand Against Trump’s Abuses” suggests that the military is bracing for the possibility that Trump could issue “illegal orders.” What Trump actually does is irrelevant—he’s guilty of anything it’s even possible for him to attempt.

It is not just Trump who is portrayed this way. The entire Republican Party is painted with the same speculative brush.

I could jump off my roof and face-plant into my driveway, but I won’t. I could soak in a bathtub of gasoline, roll in thumbtacks, and set myself on fire, but that’s not going to happen either. There are countless reckless, absurd, or self-destructive things I could theoretically do, but the fact that something is theoretically possible does not necessarily make it even remotely likely.

Chaos theory holds that nothing is truly random; outcomes only appear so because the systems involved are too complex to fully measure, making outcomes appear unpredictable. In truth, outcomes are governed by cause and effect but those relationships can go far beyond our ability to track them. As a consequence, most of the things that are possible would never happen, even given an infinite number of tries.

The War on Words is a real thing used to distort reality, and it affects political labels as well, particularly the labels “conservative” and “right-wing,” so let’s discuss those labels as another extension of the War on Words.

We first need to understand that conservatism is not a fixed thing. Conservatism is the desire to preserve an existing order or to move a nation closer to its founding ideals. What those ideals are—and, by extension, what is considered “conservative”—changes with time and place.

When the United States was founded, it was breaking away from a monarchy, and both the words “liberal” and “liberty” share the same root for that reason. The liberals of the revolutionary era were those seeking greater liberty for ordinary people, while the conservatives favored preserving the monarchy.

The same sort of thing applies elsewhere. The Soviet Union was a communist state, which meant that communism was conservative. A Soviet dissident advocating free markets and individual rights was considered radical. In modern China, the state centrally plans while allowing limited private ownership, wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Communist Party in many cases. This mixture of communism and fascism is what defines post-Mao China and is the conservative position within China today.

People have become lazy—some encourage that laziness—by pretending that “conservative” or “right-wing” describes a single ideology that applies universally across all nations and eras.

Otto von Bismarck unified Germany under a system that included massive social welfare programs. The German people had long dreamed of a unified German nation and tended to view nationhood in ethnic rather than geographic terms. As a result, ethnic national socialism was on the political right in 1930s Germany. That does not mean it was on the political right in the United States, either then or now.

Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act and National Recovery Administration were modeled after fascist Italy. That does not make Roosevelt a fascist in a political sense, but it does show he had a desire for the economic model of fascism in the same way conservatives may like the economic reforms Pinochet imposed in Chile, without liking any of the political authoritarianism Pinochet used.

It becomes confusing when people treat “conservative” and “right-wing” as interchangeable terms across all times and places, and since what is considered “right-wing” changes depending on the specific society being examined, what is in opposition to the right must change as well.

Conflating things together is how some American activists can claim that Rand Paul is somehow adjacent to Hitler based on both being categorized as “right-wing.”

Nazism was fundamentally opposed to individual rights, civil liberties, and limited government. Libertarianism is built upon those principles. The two philosophies are polar opposites. Germany did not really use the term “libertarian” at the time, but those who had what we would today call “libertarian views” were sent to Dachau as political dissidents.

The comparison also highlights an important point: freedom is not a single thing. People can favor liberty in one area of life while favoring restrictions in another. 

The American left wants less individual economic freedom while much of the American right favors greater economic freedom. At the same time, America’s cultural foundations are based on Judeo-Christian values; to the extent that those values remain part of the nation’s moral framework, preserving them is conservative while rejecting them is not.

This sometimes creates the impression that the left favors liberty more than the right, but really the debate is not about moral liberty so much as about which moral standards should govern society and which institutions should preserve them.

The American right wants economic liberty under a shared moral framework. The left wants to make tolerance for immorality the only remaining moral value and wants to do this through a welfare state. Increasingly, the left wants central planning as well.

On an economic scale, the right wants more freedom and the left wants less. On a moral scale, the right wants shared, Judeo-Christian values, and the left wants multiculturalism, with moral values left up to the individual as much as possible. A progressive might say they want “moral freedom,” but, as a Christian, I would say they want freedom frommorality, which is something very different.

In a healthy two-party system, both parties contain multiple factions that compete during the primaries before eventually compromising around a candidate they can all support. In an unhealthy system, both parties develop ideological purity tests and ostracize dissenters. In our system today, most congressional seats are “safe,” which further separates the parties by encouraging “safe seat” legislators to become firebrands against the other side, discouraging cooperation. Compromise with the other side is seen as weakness.

The language of politics often obscures these realities, and this extends to the labels we use.

The American left prefers terms such as “liberal” and “progressive” because of the connotations those words carry. These words imply “liberty” and “progress,” which have positive connotations. The left is also very good at using words with negative connotations to label political opponents, while ignoring the denotations (the actual meanings) of those words.

Weaponizing connotation by ignoring denotation is at the heart of the War on Words.

We need people to understand that “left-wing” and “right-wing” are not universal. They vary from nation to nation and can change dramatically over time. Once that understanding becomes common ground, we can begin having meaningful conversations about what different groups believe instead of treating politics like a football game and simply trying to “win.”

This goes beyond labels, too. If we cannot agree on what words mean, then we cannot reason with one another, and if we cannot reason with one another, then we cannot govern ourselves. 

That is the end goal of the War on Words: to replace a self-governing people with a managed population, trained to fear the wrong ideas, avoid the wrong questions, and attack the wrong targets. This is not just a struggle over vocabulary. It is a struggle over how we perceive reality and over who is permitted to describe it.

If we want to preserve freedom, we must reclaim language. The fight begins not with weapons, but with words, used correctly, precisely, and without apology. Speak truth even when it’s dangerous. Defend meaning even when it’s mocked. If we do not reclaim our words, we will lose far more than our voices. We will lose our collective mind, and with it our freedom.

What can be done? Start here: refuse to lie. Refuse to use words in ways that betray their meaning. Challenge euphemism. Demand precision. Defend the reality to which words point. This may seem small, but in a world where language is the battlefield, truthful speech is a force-multiplier.

Reclaiming language means demanding consistent use. If someone misuses a word, don’t get defensive and don’t immediately correct them. Ask a clarifying question, or ask for their definition instead.

If someone misuses “racism,” ask them to define that term and don’t continue moving forward until you have an agreed upon definition. If someone misuses “fascism,” ask them if they are referring to the economic system by that name developed by Giovanni Gentile, in which the means of production are controlled and centrally planned by the government and maintained by party-aligned trade unions, but with a state-controlled profit system of nominal “ownership.”

You may not settle on a definition, but what you will do is to force the person with whom you are conversing to admit that they are using very different definitions of those words, and, in the case of “fascism” and “racism,” you may be able to show them that the actual definitions describe the progressive.

I am using the word “progressive” to describe the left, but note that this is a word that originated under Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt, and though that movement may align more closely with the left than with the right today (and has been, thanks to connotation, accepted by the left), really the true “progressive” is just a subset of thought.

There is no good word for the left today. The heart of the party has become deeply collectivist, but with a mixture of fascism (Elizabeth Warren), socialism (Graham Platner), and communism (Bernie Sanders). The left is also globalist, and if not outright racist, it is at least race-obsessed.

But the left is also transitory—without fixed meaning, without fixed morality, and without fixed belief. We are witnessing a party in transition in which the typical voter increasingly finds himself or herself lost.

The leadership on the left knows they are lost, which is why they run on hate instead of policy. Give them time and they will change the definition of the word “hate,” too. That is not an attack on the political left either. It is only an attack on the leadership, which, in running on hate, has made compromise impossible.

The political right, by nature of wanting to conserve traditional values and norms, has some big blind spots that can overlook significant harm. We need a strong political left to force us to see when change is necessary. But the left needs the right as well. Without us there is a temptation to focus only on the problems while ignoring everything that works. The left needs the right to enforce the framework within which problems can be solved to give us a more perfect union rather than a completely different one.

What I want is to convince both sides to dispense with labels and to talk again; not as partisans, but as people. Even where we lack a shared morality, at least let us have a shared language again.

Let that be our 250th birthday present to one another.