By Noah Rothman
Monday, January 20, 2025
Who can say precisely what role the Democratic Party’s
bizarre rhetorical contortions played in contributing to its exile to the
political wilderness, but they couldn’t have helped. “Latinx,” “Birthing
persons,” and “bipoc,” among other inaccessible linguistic signifiers, served
only to advertise their users’ membership in the progressive tribe – the price
of admission being the degree to which they alienated themselves from the
people they sought to represent. It was a costly experiment, and the GOP shouldn’t
be eager to make the Democratic Party’s mistakes.
But they seem to be. At least, Donald Trump seems to be.
During a January 7 press conference, Trump indulged in some idle semantic imperialism when he mused about “changing the
name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring.”
Well, that errant thought is now policy. “Donald Trump will order the renaming
of the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Mount Denali in his first hours as the 47th
president,” the New York Post reported (and incoming White House press
secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed). In addition, Trump will
declare that America’s tallest peak will revert to “Mount McKinley,” reversing
an Obama-era order that rechristened the mountain “Denali.”
The latter revision makes some practical sense since
“Denali” has only had that moniker outside Alaska for ten years. Precisely no
one has ever called the body of water on America’s third coast “the Gulf of
America.” But you can anticipate the evolutionary trajectory Trump’s lexical
innovation will follow.
If the short-lived fad around “Latinx” is instructive,
the “Gulf of America” will become a contested territory in a political proxy
war. Those who decline to adopt this novelty with sufficient zeal will expose
their disturbing lack of commitment to the cause. A social stigma will form
around the use of this geographic feature’s erstwhile designation, but only
among a cloistered caste of MAGA faithful. Outside those rarified redoubts, it
will still be “the Gulf of Mexico,” and anyone who says differently will expose
only the totality of their boutique ideological commitments. It will sound
deeply foreign among all but the most dogmatic and render its users alien to
the uninitiated.
Why anyone would want to follow in the footsteps of the
Democrats, whose tyrannical linguistic codes contributed meaningfully to their
political ruin, I cannot speculate. But, for whatever reason, making oneself
into an embarrassing spectacle appears to be a seductive proposition.
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