Sticks and Stones Can Break My Bones

I literally, as I sat down to write this piece about the importance of choosing and defining good words, opened Bluesky to a post from Adam Conover scolding liberals for continuing to argue about the strategic use of language. Specifically, he seems to be looking at national pushback against DEI initiatives and drawing the conclusion that no matter the words you use — diversity, equity, and inclusion being values that most Americans seem to share — conservatives will find a way to turn them “into a vile slur.”

I’m sympathetic, but I also think that is very much the wrong conclusion to draw from the established premises (please show your work next time, Adam). DEI initiatives aren’t failing because the GOP managed somehow to poison the concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion; they’re failing because the left did a spectacularly shitty job of communicating what they meant to the American public in the first place. In reducing this movement to a snappy acronym without a clear and tangible definition to point to, progressives offered their right-wing opposition the chance to define the phrase for themselves — and conservatives used that opportunity to place DEI at the heart of a raging culture war, defining it entirely in terms of racial preference and prejudice when in truth these initiatives have as much to do with, say, veteran welfare as they do with the color of your skin. Moreover, Democrats subsequently struggled to figure out even which approach to debate mattered to their constituents — activists and politicians alike got immediately bogged down in discussions of whether affirmative action and DEI initiatives favored racial minorities and/or suppressed a true meritocracy, rather than pushing forward with their own narrative to explain clearly how and why DEI initiatives might help and matter to skeptical Americans. Liberals have never been good at letting go of the moral high ground to prioritize winning, and that forces them into abstract and theoretical fights that mean nothing to anyone outside their immediate ecosystem. (Not that liberals are alone in this; conservatives are also guilty of claiming unchallenged righteousness. It’s just that right-wing morality is more often than not read between the pages of the Bible, which means it resonates more with broader swathes of the American public than purely intellectual or philosophical arguments do.)

This is the role of language in building a meaningful political or social movement. I’m not going to stand on my soapbox and pretend that words are all that matter, or that they matter more than actual action or policy, because that would be utter nonsense. But I do think they matter more than most of us want to consciously admit on a day-to-day level, and they’re inarguably a key component to the narrative storytelling that progressives need to get better at if they want to win elections.

Think about how prominent Republican politicans have used language to tip public opinion in their favor. The easy example is found in a 1976 presidential campaign speech from Ronald Reagan, in which he amplified the newly introduced phrase “welfare queen” as a derogatory term to describe individuals who are supposedly abusing or misusing our welfare system. While Reagan used the phrase in reference to a real woman with a history of defrauding the American welfare system to collect benefits and drive fancy cars, Linda Taylor was and still is an extreme outlier — but that didn’t matter. Once “welfare queen” was introduced into our national lexicon, bitterness at this straw man stereotype consumed the country. And this notion that people on welfare are parasitic, leeches on a system intended to support “real” hardworking Americans, consequently persists to this day. This is the power of just two words in our political landscape.

Last year, MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication released a new algorithmically driven “Bridging Dictionary.” Still just a prototype, this tool identifies how words commonly found in American political discourse are used differently across the partisan divide, and goes further to suggest less polarizing alternatives. I’m sure the CCC masterminds behind this software intend for it to be used as its name suggests — to bridge political divides and reduce polarization — but it is also a valuable tool for exploring why we have such a hard time understanding how people with opposing beliefs and views think. And, more importantly, to craft better arguments.

Let’s revisit the debate over DEI for a moment. The Bridging Dictionary tells us that Fox News uses the word “diversity” in a critical or skeptical context, and often as a “focal point of their critique against perceived overemphasis on identity politics and social engineering.” Across the aisle, MSNBC views diversity positively, emphasizing its benefits and the importance of hearing from multiple voices. The website suggests “inclusivity” or “representation” as alternate terms that might emphasize the positive aspects of diversity without the ideological baggage.

But the Bridging Dictionary also calculates the number of times a term appears from left- or right-leaning sources in its dataset, displaying this ratio as a “usage share percent,” and that is maybe the most fascinating piece of this particular puzzle: “diversity” only shows up 23 percent of the time in left-leaning sources, while it shows up 77 percent of the time in right-leaning sources. This tells us that progressives have ceded ground, avoiding using the term because conservatives have loaded it with negative connotation and implication. And if that means that we now have to use alternative neutral language to reach independent and/or Republican voters, then we should — but it is also a symptom indicative of a larger political sickness within strategic Democratic communications operations. How did the basic concept of “diversity” become so corrupted? Why did Democrats allow the GOP to pervert a fundamental American value, and why didn’t they more aggressively define the term on their own ground?

Democrats cannot afford to continue to create and throw out language without defining it clearly and explicitly for the American people. If the trick is creating and establishing new narratives in the collective public mind, the obvious prerequisite is figuring out which words actually mean something to the people you want to reach — and to operate not off the assumption that everyone just de facto understands what you mean when you push something like DEI, but off the expectation that unless you can explain yourself in detail and a way that resonates with people on a day-to-day level, a sea of vitriolic and self-interested voices will drown out you.