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I was living in Washington four winters ago when Donald Trump made way, eventually, for Joe Biden. Something sticks with me from that time. If there had been no access to the news, no knowledge of the election result at all, an alert person walking the streets could still guess that Republicans had left town and that Democrats had moved in. There was a difference in dress. There was a difference in modes of transport. (More cycling.) Above all, there was a difference in common speech.
How so? Well, you were likelier to hear someone vow to be “intentional”. Or use the phrase “redemption arc”. Or accuse a third person of having “main character syndrome”. Or of doing something “performative”. You were likelier to hear “toxic” and “narcissism” and “cosplay” and — more on this in a bit — “gaslighting”. Your date was likelier to say, “I’m an empath”.
If these verbal tics were unique to ultra-neurotic people in one necessarily unusual town, we might leave it there. But four years later, other realms have succumbed to the same speech. Offices. Advertisements. Football podcasts. (“Give Saka his flowers!”) WhatsApp groups. Among certain kinds of graduates in the world’s big anglophone cities, this kind of talk is not that far from being ambient.
Liberals have evolved a language of their own. Or at least a dialect. Those who speak it tend to have no earthly idea how odd it sounds to others, and therefore what a competitive disadvantage it is versus the plain-speaking right. While conservatives have their own argot — “red pill”, “blue pill” — you have to delve quite far into the weirdo fringe to encounter it. Among the megastars such as Joe Rogan, not to mention Donald Trump, what stands out is an Orwellian directness. “Bros” or not, their speech is far closer to the American or Anglosphere median.
What characterises the dialect that we might call Liberalese? First, psychotherapeutic jargon. The spraying around of such concepts as intentionality is an attempt to give things a scientific and even medical veneer by people who mostly studied comparative literature. Second, an unbecoming obsession with transient pop culture. References to the “Beyhive” and to “Brat summer” are lost on much more of the population than liberals think.
Finally, there is the matter of cadence. I have given up my brave war against Upspeak, which is the habit of lifting one’s vocal pitch towards the end of non-interrogative sentences. The world has won. Except it is not the world, is it? It is progressives and centrists. You hear far fewer conservatives talk like this. Theories vary as to why they so dominate the podcast charts in a 50-50-ish nation. Here’s mine: they are easier on the ear. People who think him a dangerous fool on vaccines will nevertheless take three hours of Rogan over 30 minutes of someone? Who speaks? Like this?
To be clear, Democratic politicians don’t use Liberalese. Kamala Harris didn’t go around saying cosplay this and toxic that. But a party is judged on its proxies too. That is, the pundits, celebrities, scholars, business leaders and online activists who line up with that party. And the left’s proxies do speak in an alienating fog of in-group buzz phrases.
How did this speech emerge? One theory is that it is a class signifier. Because it is bad form to wear a sandwich board that says “I have a degree”, people evolved linguistic codes that distance themselves from the masses. This was true at the beginning, I suspect, but no longer. There is nothing ostentatious or even all that conscious about the dialect now. No, things are much worse than that. People don’t know they are using it. To pick them up on it would make no more sense than asking a German why they keep putting infinitive verbs at the end of sentences.
Style and substance are linked. If you can’t tell that a word lacks resonance outside of big cities, you can’t tell that a candidate does either. Even I don’t know for sure what “gaslighting” means, and I’m such a cartoon metropolitan that I have a favourite Eurostar seat. Meanwhile, the right is out there, in people’s ears, on their screens and all too easy to understand.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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