Soliloquy on Semantics

Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. — W.V.O. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism

Something that makes language difficult is that words’ definitions operate on the basis of fuzzy logic. Although people’s respective mental images of various objects and concepts often reduce to generalizations, the real world usually frustrates attempts to neatly characterize even minute entities let alone those broader in scope.

Picture an apple lying on a patch of grass. What you likely conjure is a red apple and green grass, despite the fact that both of those things are perfectly capable of existence in other colors. Color itself is a notable philosophical and social conundrum, showcasing the nuisance of categorization and of aligning people’s understanding of words’ meanings, especially for edge cases.

Such mismatches as between the spectra of the physical world and humanity’s more discrete mental models are relatively harmless in frivolous matters: is a hot dog a sandwich? how would a horse wear pants? grilled cheeses are not melts, etc. For more serious matters (i.e. politics and religion), however, disagreements arising therefrom can quickly spiral out of control. What constitutes a genocide? Who counts as a woman? Is the President a fascist? These questions of contemporary prominence are a few examples within an expanding genre. The health of the American body politic is creaking from a vulnerable spot: its language.

For one thing, the incentives [1] are clear in an increasingly democratized and decentralized information landscape: use whatever words necessary to drive the conversation. The punchier, the better. Thus, the tried and true way to tip the political scales (i.e. raise the stakes) meets the Internet age: re-direct, embellish, lie. It has never been easier, more personally accessible, to achieve virality and subsequent “fame”, and at only the small price of one’s integrity.

What’s more — nobody said these public discussions, vital for civic engagement, have to be led or participated in by actual Americans. The anonymity of the open Internet grants cover to state and non-state actors who wish to destabilize the United States internally via covert and coordinated campaigns. Case closed, right? Are Americans therefore not victims of the structural rewiring of communication due to technological changes as well as the concomitant efforts from external forces to amplify disputations? Not so fast.

While the phenomena described above are true enough, the devolution with respect to politics of the great English language is a multifaceted problem. Everyone is ultimately responsible for what they say and write. Alongside technology and infiltration is culture.

A recent G-File from Jonah Goldberg enumerates Benny Johnson’s [2] frequent and often literal use of the words “demon” and “demonic”, ostensibly to describe Democrats and their favored policies. One of the linked snippets refers to a 2022 exchange between Senator Josh Hawley and Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges (a literal demon, according to Johnson) during which Bridges refers to “people with a capacity for pregnancy”. After Hawley counters in favor of simply saying “women”, Bridges first states that his “line of questioning is transphobic and it opens up trans people to violence” then second that he is denying trans people exist.

You recognize already that similar examples are a dime a dozen nowadays. Exaggeration, caricature, overloaded and connotatively confused definitions, etc., which both Johnson and Bridges fall victim to, are mainstays; the alpha and omega of contemporary controversy is linguistic farce. Shibboleths form and dissolve in a matter of weeks, rendering incoherent virtually anything otherwise resembling an ideology.

Worse yet, these bickerings are no longer the fodder of lone crusaders and internauts. This goes all the way to the top. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller graciously noted that the Liberation Day tariffs, rammed through by the Executive under false pretense of a national emergency, were enacted to save the American Dream (and America herself) from death. Elon Musk advised that the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election could possibly decide the trajectory of Western civilization. Of course, there is White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt who expresses the wrath of God in almost every answer.

The distance between the worlds of online commentators, who’ve “won” the influencer lottery by misusing social media’s already perverse incentives, and the Presidential administration is not far enough. Finally, well…

Kristen Welker: “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States, as President?”

The President of the United States: “I don’t know.” [3]

A common refrain of this era asks who are (or where are) the proverbial adults in the room — whoever they are and wherever they are presumably hiding, they are few and far between, and they are not organized. The bar is set low: is an adult merely someone who can speak frankly and without resorting to cheap rhetorical tricks to obfuscate?

Decades of reckless speech by opportunists and media figureheads have chewed up, spit out, and chewed up again the American public who cannot help by this point persisting in a semi-permanent state of frothy rage. Who wouldn’t weep at the decline of the acclaimed Cronkite-esque newscaster when the whole gig has turned into a sty of personality monologuing amid reaction panels? With the rise of shooting-the-shit podcasters and bros just asking questions, what used to be an ethos of objectivity in journalism and intellectual exchange is now supercharged subjectivity. Trust in news, whether fact or fiction, is a function of how flattering that news is as well as the personal brand of the messenger.

This influx of subjectivity, represented by no one better than the President himself, has surfaced an extraordinary hazard for national discourse and is already being exploited. The immediate danger is all too apparent. The Constitution revered by so many is a covenant consecrated, above all, by the sempiternal understanding by every American of the government’s abilities, obligations, and contractual protections owed to him or her. The agreement is a spiritual one, the spirit of liberty, which must be coveted, sought after, and consistently renewed.

That spirit is violated when the dictionary definition of “facilitate” is obstinately contrasted to that of “effectuate”; it is violated when the idea of an “invasion” is stretched far beyond any reasonable allowance in order to assert use of a wartime statute; it is violated when over one hundred years of legislative and legal precedent on birthright citizenship is upended by executive order; it is violated when the entire information ecosystem for a major political party is a maelstrom of ipse dixit [4].

No, Madam Secretary of Homeland Security, habeas corpus is not a President’s Constitutional right to remove people from this country. On the contrary…

Again, all of this speaks to a cultural propensity in the political arena to disregard or outright reject how certain words generally make sense to most people [5]. Litigating “woke” (whatever that means) is obviously not the emphasis here, but up until recently Democrats were at the forefront of this trend. The bite has thankfully been taken out of examples such as “latinx”, white/Black capitalization, pronoun policing, etc., pruning them into innocuous memes; still, they symbolize a moment (not long ago!) when it was the left who was toying with labels to an absurd degree.

Nevertheless, the shoe is on the other foot which is now giving America a kick in the ass. Unfortunately, the very real and still seething backlash to the previous era has ushered in a revitalized President who is more openly corrupt than before and more welcoming, if not celebratory, of malfeasance in his administration. In venting frustrations at his irresponsible and offensive rhetoric, Americans hear that their President is to be taken seriously but not literally. The nature of a “fact” is as pliable as ever as a great conspiracy has washed into the White House with a self-deluded determination that they are uprooting another one.

Most everyday people [6] are absolutely guilty of hyperbole and losing their cool. It happens from time to time; one tries to improve and move on. Public officials, however, are supposed to adhere to a higher standard of ethics. What politicians say and the information used to defend their remarks often directs the country as much as their actions.

A constant casualty of these abuses of power, via risible rationalizations of tariffs, raids on and dismantling of government agencies, dubious police tactics, non-enforcement of laws duly enacted by Congress, arrestations and revoking of immigrant visas over speech, militarization at the border, the list goes on, is none other than American English. To recapitulate: that thing called “law” is merely words stringed together to represent the common sense, the fairness of a community. The meaning it has is imbued by the citizens it governs. When those words underlying law are at the mercy of an individual’s whims [7] rather than the society whole, that society no longer knows equal justice.

Politics as practiced in the greatest country on Earth should not be a epistemic soup of realism dangling barely above bellum omnium. The polis can only handle so much chaotic drivel divorced from sane argument before it bursts. So, the most important thing to do is to take a deep breath and a pause. The rank partisanship has to be unwound somehow and it ain’t gonna happen quickly. Objections against the subduing of the legislative and judicial branches on the alleged basis of the Executive Vesting Clause should be energized but also sober. Insist on the rules of the game.

Perhaps the last thing the Internet needs is another idiot scolding because the discourse isn’t going his way — so it goes. Many people would agree even so that more adults should finally enter the room, as many as it takes, to tell the wacky kids to cut it out, especially the one playing with matches.

[1] “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” — Charlie Munger

[2] If you don’t know who he is, you aren’t missing out.

[3] How interesting that the trailblazer of the unitary executive would have you consult with his lawyers what exactly his responsibilities are and what his actions signify.

[4] Ironically, the remarkable expansion of executive authority in this term, often justified by appeals to plebiscites and the President’s election by the people (doubly ironic when contrasted with the Electoral College), is ever closer in nature to what Romans understood as a “dictator”. The Founding Fathers (James Madison Alexander Hamilton, at a minimum) foresaw that, writing in Federalist No. 1,

…a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.

[5] Nota bene: this post is not meant to advocate for prescriptivism.

[6] Including yours truly.

[7] Yes, the Supreme Court are individuals with overarching authority to interpret U.S. law, but this role is generally accepted as granted by the Constitution and, of course, exists in the standard context of checks and balances between separate branches.

Edit: Federalist No. 1 was written by Alexander Hamilton, not James Madison.