By Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday, March 31, 2021
Dimly aware that the border crisis is
taking a toll on its popularity, the Democratic Party has finally resolved to
do something concrete: It is going to burn the dictionary.
Wands outstretched and shouting incantations, prominent
Democrats have begun to curse our language. In a livestream performed last
night, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attempted to change the meaning of
the word “surge” in the hope that she might be able to magic away the news from
the border. “They wanna say, ‘But what about the surge?’” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“Well, first of all, just gut check, stop. Anyone who’s using the term ‘surge’
around you consciously is trying to invoke a militaristic frame.”
Or, alternatively, they’re talking about the surge on the
border.
“That’s a problem,” Ocasio-Cortez continued, “because
this is not a surge, these are children and they are not insurgents and we are
not being invaded.”
The “problem” here, of course, is that “surge,”
“insurgent,” and “invasion” all mean different things, and that “they” — by
which Ocasio-Cortez means “people with eyes who can read charts” — are only
using one of those words. That word is “surge,” which, by any
traditional use of the term, describes neatly what is happening on the border.
If Ocasio-Cortez prefers, we could use a different word: Say, “deluge” or
“swell” or “gush” or “flood” or “rush.” Hell, if she likes, we can call what is
happening something entirely nonsensical: a “teapot” of migrants. But whatever
we choose, it is not going to defy the reality, which is that there is a surge
on the border. One suspects that, somewhere deep down, Ocasio-Cortez believes
that if she can find a better word to describe gravity, she will become capable
of levitation.
In Washington, meanwhile, Joe Biden has taken a break
from litigating the word “crisis” and is joining Representative Joaquin Castro
in his quest to remove the word “alien” from our immigration law. If, as seems
likely, Biden prevails in this endeavor, he will have done nothing of value
whatsoever. “Alien” derives from the Latin “alienus,” which simply means
“stranger” or “foreigner.” The first definition of the word in the Oxford
English Dictionary is someone “belonging to another person, place, or
family; not of one’s own; from elsewhere, foreign.” To prohibit its use by the
government will not destroy this concept; it will merely attach it to whatever
replacement word is chosen and, over time, imbue that word with the same
political context. There are, indeed, a few disfavored terms that have lost
their sting having been marginalized, but only because the ideas they
represented faded out alongside them. It should be obvious to anyone who has
ever read a book that “foreigner” is unlikely to join their number.
And if it does? Then we will be poorer for it. Already,
mainstream news pieces on this topic tend to leave me more confused than I was
when I started. As a matter of habit, outlets such as the Associated Press and
Reuters call illegal immigrants “migrants,” and people with fake papers
“undocumented,” and deportees “non-citizens,” and, in so doing, flatten the key
distinctions so dramatically that it becomes impossible to tell what is going
on.
Which, of course, is the point. Increasingly, modern
progressivism is predicated upon the belief that reality is meaningfully
created by language, and that if the substance of that language can be forcibly
altered, the real world will follow on cue. In its benign form, this approach
is merely hackish: Consider, by way of example, how desperately progressives
try to bully the press into describing radical gun-control measures as mere
“gun safety,” or how quickly Democratic politicians rush to describe anything
they dislike as “Jim Crow.” In its more sinister form, however, it is
disastrous for common understanding. It has taken just a handful of years for
CNN to go from being a news network that reported on the world as it actually
exists to being so cowed by external pressure that it fills its straight news stories with sentences such
as, “It’s not possible to know a person’s gender identity at birth, and there
is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth” — a claim so patently
ridiculous that, ten years ago, it would have been offered only by the sort of
scatty, damaged, nutty professor-types who have multiple 35,000-word theories
on the gendered way people eat dumplings but are incapable of changing a light
bulb.
Politics, we are told, is the art of the possible.
Increasingly, though, it is more accurate to say that it is the art of the
euphemism. What is happening at the border is a real, tangible, physical
problem: Too many people are coming to the United States because they believe
that they will be allowed into the country if they do. Insofar as there is a
verbal component to the matter, it is that many of those traveling have been
encouraged to do so by Democratic rhetoric, but this is mostly a material issue
that will be fixed by a combination of serious inquiry, a set of sober
policies, and the efficient and persistent execution of the law.
And if that doesn’t work? Well, we can always amend the
terms to our liking — so that nobody involved is able to tell what the hell we
were talking about in the first place.
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