Against ‘Why Do You Care?’ as a Political Ploy

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

 

Mayor Pete objects to one of the Trump administration’s linguistic changes:

He’s kidding, right? It’s a joke? There’s a hidden camera somewhere, and, after ten or so seconds, someone will laugh, break the fourth wall, and confirm that we’re all in on the ruse?

 

Good grief is this just classic progressive behavior! Day in, day out, progressives try to change names, descriptions, idioms, and the quotidian words we use to describe things. They aggressively police the language, demand instant and uniform compliance from the most disconnected of bystanders, and justify themselves by insisting that their preferred alterations are prerequisite to the maintenance of safety, democracy, inclusivity, and more. But if anyone notices — or, heaven forfend, objects — they retreat instantly to asking why that person cares so much, and to characterizing the shift that they so earnestly sought as being of no importance whatsoever.

 

Evidently, renaming “Notice to Airmen” to “Notice to Air Missions” was sufficiently crucial for the Biden administration to have pushed it through. An–d not just on a whim, mind you, but as part of an “Inclusive Language Summit” that it ran — and boasted about — in 2021, on the basis that “words make a big difference in whether or not people feel welcome in the aerospace community.” It simply cannot be the case that this works in only one direction. If what we call things doesn’t matter, then it didn’t matter when the names of those things were changed, and it also doesn’t matter if those names are changed back.

 

Buttigieg’s implication is that focusing on that sort of thing is a distraction because, an administration’s time being limited, it stands in the way of other endeavors — such as ensuring “safety.” But this was true in 2021, too, when, as head of the Department of Transportation, Buttigieg oversaw the reform. There is nothing magical about Republicans’ relationship with the universe that deprives them of this same reality.

 

A similar attempt to have it both ways has attended pretty much all of the smaller changes that the Trump administration has made since Inauguration Day. Certainly, it is true that the reversal of previous Biden-era policies on plastic straws, incandescent lightbulbs, and water pressure are not the most important things that the new government will do. But, as points of political dispute, they are at least as important now as they were when the Democrats were fretting about them, and, given how much the public disliked the changes that Biden made, they are arguably more so.

 

At one level, this bad habit is typical everyday politics, and its practitioners are simply looking for a way of criticizing the other side that doesn’t sound petty. At another, though, it really is indicative of how progressives see the world. On issue after issue after issue, it is clearly they who are seeking reforms — often at the expense of thousands of years of unbroken historical practice — but, rather than correctly regarding themselves as the ones who are demanding a shift in norms, and internalizing that, they seem earnestly to believe that it is their critics who are the wreckers. This is why, having decided about five years ago that men ought to be allowed to compete in women’s sports, they immediately adopted a rhetorical pose that cast their opponents as politically obsessed weirdos who were suspiciously interested in the topic. “With all that’s going on in the world,” they said, “this is what you care about.” But, of course, it wasn’t. It was what they cared about. Everyone else was just caught up in their madness.

 

So it is with “Airmen” and “Air Missions.” The United States could adopt a Greek-style direct democracy, in which every single decision was explicitly ratified by a majority of the voters, and ten thousand years would pass without that change in terminology being suggested, introduced, debated, or passed. It is, quite literally, on nobody’s mind. To conclude from this that the villains of the piece are those who undid it, rather than those who solicited it in the first instance, is absolutely bizarre.