Why Our Political Fights Devolve Into Wars About Words

In August 2024, I moved with my family from Chicago, Illinois, to Milan, Italy, to test out living overseas for a year. In the months after relocating, the American presidential race took an unprecedented turn with then-Vice President Kamala Harris navigating a late nomination to the Democratic ticket, Donald Trump surging to win the election, and Americans absorbing major societal shifts resulting from Trump’s victory. 

Amid all these events, my news intake shrank. In Italy, TVs aren’t as common in public places as they are in the U.S., and where I did see them, they usually played soccer games rather than CNN, so my updates on American politics and society came mostly from browsing The New York Times in the morning and barrages of texts from friends in the U.S. After several weeks, I realized I didn’t want to spend my year abroad on my phone monitoring the shifting status of policies back home, analyzing the minutiae of American politics, and contemplating the future of democracy. 

So I came up with a simple rule: When I encountered a news story, I’d mentally set it aside if it was mostly about words. If the story was about action, I’d consider it worthy of attention.

American society has argued, fought, and debated over language for the better part of the 21st century, and we are due for a course correction in where to devote our energy.

This somewhat arbitrary distinction between words and actions revealed to me three related insights. First, despite a cascade of action surrounding the 2024 election, much of the news I encountered concerned words. For example:

• A Democratic think tank’s electoral advice to stop using words like “safe space,” “the unhoused,” and “privilege” 
• President Trump’s executive order to change the name of Alaska’s Denali back to Mount McKinley 
• A dispute over whether then-President Joe Biden had called Trump supporters “garbage” after a comedian at a pro-Trump rally referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” 

A second, more obvious insight is that the stakes tend to be lower for events related to words than for those related to actions. Consider what’s at risk when President Trump renames things — the Department of War, the Gulf of America, and Super Intelligence — versus when action is taken in these domains: the Minab school strike in Iran, lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea, and Anthropic’s models, running unsupervised, breaking into real-world computer systems. 

My third insight is that, given this distinction in stakes, the amount of attention we devote to vocabulary compared to behavior is disproportionate. American society has argued, fought, and debated over language for the better part of the 21st century, and we are due for a course correction in where to devote our energy.

The collective obsession with words relative to deeds is nothing new (remember the “War on Christmas,” anyone?), yet this focus may have accelerated in recent years. In his special Red State Blue State, comedian Colin Quinn highlights the centrality of freedom of speech to America’s founding but also pokes fun at its legacy: 

Free speech, boy, did we take that one too far. Nobody ever shuts up in this country … Free speech did nothing but gave everybody an opinion, and social media ruined opinion because free speech was never meant to go electric — that was an acoustic art.

Social media (and the internet as a portal for speech, more broadly) is merely one driver of what can best be called verbalism: a preoccupation with words relative to substantive action. Additional likely drivers of the fixation on language involve the general transformation of the media ecosystem over several decades: the rise of podcasting and livestreaming, the broader syndication of talk radio (combined with the 1987 repeal of the fairness doctrine, which had required broadcasters to devote time to competing political viewpoints, helping prevent the more polarized radio content of today), and the explosion of cable news.

The business model of cable news may have also contributed to the rise in verbalism, as recent research by economists Shakked Noy and Aakaash Rao indicates. Cable news, unlike regular broadcast news, tends to grow its audience by shifting coverage from economic issues to cultural issues, which capture more attention, in order to attract otherwise politically disengaged people. The issues that Noy and Rao categorize as cultural rather than economic (e.g., racial equity, political correctness, the influence of cultural elites) also often evoke fights over phrases, slogans, and terminology. 

Beyond the emergence of social media as a firehose for opinion and concomitant shifts within traditional media, rising material security globally may also drive verbalism. According to political scientist Ronald Inglehart’s postmaterialist hypothesis, which is supported by over four decades of World Values Survey data, as countries become safer and wealthier, their citizens’ values become less rooted in survival (i.e., meeting basic needs) and more concerned with self-expression, including a focus on free speech. These findings also dovetail with the idea proposed by several scholars that battles over symbols — including speech, vocabulary, and ideas — are largely the obsession of contemporary elites. As historian Christopher Lasch wrote in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995), “In our preoccupation with words, we have lost sight of the tough realities … What does it profit the residents of the South Bronx to enforce speech codes at elite universities?”

When our problems become so big and complex that they feel unsolvable, we resort to trying to address simpler things within our grasp.

Implicit in many of the scholarly treatments linking material security to a fixation on language is the idea that arguing over vocabulary is something people do only once “real” material problems are solved. I find this premise reasonable, but I also wish to complement it. 

My take is that when our problems become so big and complex that they feel unsolvable, we resort to trying to address simpler things within our grasp. Consider the most recent iteration of “the culture wars,” which centered on issues of liberty and systemic oppression, questions of social inequality and meritocracy, and the challenges and merits of integrating distinct ethnic and cultural groups within a pluralistic society. These are tough and, in some cases, intractable problems. And while some made valiant attempts to address these issues through action, they were often drowned out by endless debates over which university campus speakers to invite and disinvite, whether words equate to violence, the appropriateness of the term Latinx, the function of land acknowledgments, the prominence and proper use of pronouns, the efficacy of “defund the police” as a slogan, and the importance of debate itself. 

To offer a more recent example of this distinction between words and deeds, consider the Gaza War. Since the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel responded with an offensive that has killed an estimated 74,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, how much of the discourse has focused on the appropriateness of slogans like “From the river to the sea,” the conflation of Zionism and Judaism, and the technical meaning of the term “genocide” relative to discussion of what to do about actual land, actual human lives, and actual policies? Resolving the conflict between Israel and Palestine feels impossible, but opining about phrases on protest signage from the comfort of your phone is something anyone can do.   

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman popularized the concept of “attribute substitution” to describe the process of replacing a hard question with an easy one. When confronted with a challenging question such as “How dangerous is air travel?” we subconsciously replace that question with an easier one such as “Have I heard of any bad experiences on airplanes recently?” The problem with such substitution is that it often leads us to the wrong answers, which helps explain why people misjudged the danger of air travel after the September 11 attacks, leading more people to drive rather than fly, resulting in more traffic fatalities. 

Attribute substitution is a useful metaphor for our fixation on words, and I worry that by replacing hard questions (“How should we materially address the systemic displacement of Native Americans?”) with easier ones (“Should Minneapolis’ largest lake be referred to as Lake Calhoun or by its original Dakota name, Bde Maka Ska?”), we are both seeking and obtaining the wrong answers. If nothing else, focusing on words rather than actions leads us to expect and demand less than what is possible to make a better world.

Recently, while driving on Interstate 90 just north of Chicago, I spotted a banner presumably painted in advance of the 2024 election that read, “I miss gas at $1.79/gal and mean tweets. Trump. Save America Again 2024. Honk if you agree!” Journalist Christina Lorey noticed the same banner and posted an image of it to her Instagram account in September, suggesting that it had not aged well given the surge in gas prices.

I could not help but wonder, however, whether for many Trump supporters, the mean tweets — the words — make higher fuel prices all worth it. In a now-viral article from The Financial Times published one week before Trump’s second inauguration, an unnamed banker is quoted as saying of Trump’s election, “I feel liberated … We can say ‘r*tard’ and ‘p*ssy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.” And as many of the above examples make clear, this fixation on language as a political tool is by no means confined to conservatives. Whether urging Joe Biden to use the term “abortion” or lauding Kamala Harris for calling Trump a “fascist,” liberals have demonstrated repeatedly that verbalism is bipartisan.  

Given how little Americans trust their institutions to enact meaningful policy that improves lives, some may feel that the most they can hope for is political leadership that both employs and enables their ideologically preferred terminology. The problem arises when we confuse winning proxy wars over language with solving big societal challenges. Verbalism becomes dangerous when the easy work of personal expression substitutes for the painstaking work of collective action. 

During my year abroad in Milan, I came to enjoy the music of famed Italian singer Mina, especially her duet with actor Alberto Lupo, “Parole, Parole.” In English, the title translates to “words, words,” which Mina sings exasperatedly as she dismisses Lupo’s spoken compliments as empty gestures. There is great wisdom in this unwillingness to equate words with deeds, and we would do well to remember that even as we are awash in speech, what we do will always matter more than what we say.

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