Words, Words, Words, and Propaganda

When was America great? Apparently, in 1984. As in the 1984 of Orwell’s dystopian future.

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

This is the third post in a series about techniques of propaganda, how they permeate public discourse, and how they threaten democracy. Earlier pieces include “Propaganda In Our Time” (posted March 16), “The Real Pronoun Problem” (posted March 19), and “Who’s Your Daddy? The Father and Propaganda” (posted March 23).

When a mob stormed the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, most Americans watched in horror. They saw a Capitol police officer being beaten with a flagpole, an American flag fluttering with each blow. They saw windows being broken and breached. They saw members of congress fleeing down hallways. They saw a mob chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”

As months passed, the history of the event was rewritten by switching out a few key words. On his FOX News show, Tucker Carlson broadcast snippets of video that showed the “insurgents,” now “protesters,” peacefully walking through the Capitol as if they were on a sanctioned tour. The video was real; it just portrayed the partial truth that some of the crowd, not the mob part, did not resort to violence.

This is one way to move us a little closer to the Newspeak of Orwell’s 1984—playing a shell game with words. Another way is to shift the meaning of words without telling anyone.

When Bill Clinton was asked if he was having an affair with Monica Lewinsky, he replied, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky.” If “sexual relations” means intercourse and does not include oral sex, then Clinton could convince himself that he was telling the truth even as he must have simultaneously realized that he was telling a lie.

Later, as this scandal progressed, Clinton, when attempting to evade a question before a grand jury, brought this technique into the open. He answered, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” If we have to parse the meaning of “is” to arrive at truth, we have entered a dystopian world where we no longer share a common language. Words have become so unmoored from material and historical reality that they have little or no meaning. We have moved from political dialogue to propaganda.

This is an odd kind of semantic slippage. Clinton made up his own definitions and didn’t tell anyone.

Recently, on March 24, 2025, Jeffery Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic, reported on how Pete Hegseth and other key members of the Trump administration discussed “war plans” on Signal, a phone app. Goldberg had been unintentionally invited to join the discussion. The Trump administration responded to public outrage by saying the participants did not release “war plans.” They only discussed “battle plans.” Nothing discussed, they continued, was “top secret.” I think, in their minds, this was true, to them, in their private definition of “top secret.” The information had not yet made its way into a folder labeled “Top Secret.”

What they did not acknowledge is that the information discussed on the Signal group, if it were hacked or leaked, could have cost the lives of United States pilots. That is the kernel of truth being obscured by word choice and semantic slippage.

Before going further, I want to make my position clear, at the risk of stating the obvious: Language and how it is used in political discourse—rhetoric in general, even style specifically—is crucial to the health of a democracy. Language and rhetoric shape not just how we view our world; they shape the health of our communities, how we relate to each other, which means they shape how we view reality. In short, words matter. How we use words matters. And how we interpret the words of others matters.

There is no such thing as “mere rhetoric.” And “style” is in itself a message and an argument. It is not just the shiny surface of a message. It is part of the message. Sometimes, it is the entire message.

Reality can be reframed through seemingly innocent shifts in word choice. This happens to some degree with all political discourse. The mild term to describe this is “spin.” Politicians spin the truth, which is why most Americans believe that all politicians lie. Spin might seem innocent, but it is a clear step toward propaganda.

To explain this slow slide into propaganda, I will need a few bits of theory. I will keep it short.

In Attitudes toward History (1937), Kenneth Burke wrote about “the stealing back and forth of symbols.” By “symbols,” he meant more than just material symbols like a flag; he also meant words like “freedom.”

Much of this process happens outside of our awareness. Ronald Reagan was famous for wearing red neckties. In the early 1980s, this was unusual, and it soon became a symbol that Republicans used to announce that they were Reagan conservatives. As a response, many Democrats started wearing blue neckties. To win independent soft Reagan voters, some Democrats showed up to debates wearing red ties.

This whole process can be rather silly, but it seems to have some effect. When Trump was on trial in New York, several members of congress, including the Speaker, showed up to support him. They were all dressed like Trump.

In A Grammar of Motives (1945), Burke wrote about the power of God terms (freedom, democracy, justice, equality, meritocracy, fairness, etc.) and Devil terms (communism, socialism, slavery, racism, etc.). These words are the symbols that are stolen “back and forth.” Part of political rhetoric is aligning your goals with God terms and the goals of the opposition with Devil terms. This is binary thinking. It’s about as binary as it gets.

As I wrote earlier in this series on propaganda, binary thinking splits the body politic into two camps—the “good” people who describe themselves and their actions with God terms and the “bad” people who are described with Devil terms. This damages democratic dialogue because the “good” people have no reason to discuss anything with “bad” people. The only appropriate response to “bad” people is a rant.

The “God” and “Devil” terms are never defined. Their meaning comes from a vague associate with primal emotions. They are powerful because they release fear, anger, hatred, and resentment.

As another way of looking at our slide into propaganda, I need to explain how symbols work. The semiotic theory of C.S. Peirce, one of the founders of American pragmatism, relies on an expanding triad: The symbol, the object, and the interpretant. The American flag is generally regarded as a symbol for democracy and freedom. The object of this symbol, what it refers to, is the American system of government, its constitution, and its history. All symbols, Peirce says, are interpreted over and over. In short, symbols do not have a static meaning. This is what he means by the interpretant.

For example, Palestinians in Gaza might interpret the American flag to be a symbol of oppression. In the 1960s, protestors against the Vietnam War turned the flag upside down, a sign of distress. Some MAGA supporters, including one justice on the Supreme Court, people who would never align themselves with 1960s hippies, have recently started to fly the flag upside down. This is what Burke means by the stealing “back and forth” of symbols. Each time that someone uses a symbol in a new context for a new purpose, it means something new. It has, in effect, become a new symbol.

However, as words (symbols) are repeatedly placed into novel contexts, as they are reinterpreted for political ends (as new interpretants evolve), the words can lose their connection to material reality (the object). The words have lost their original meaning, but, they still, as I will explain later can have emotional force. This is an early stage of the distortion of language.

As this development continues, as propaganda progresses, our response to these words becomes habitual and mechanical. When a dictator like Kim Jong-Un speaks to his people, usually a carefully selected group of loyalists, the audience applauds at all of the appropriate places—often without facial expressions. The propaganda, which once triggered intense emotions, now follows a script. Within a totalitarian state, propaganda no longer tries to change minds. Through years of terror and control, propaganda becomes an opportunity to display compliance. It has become spectacle.

In “Politics and the English Language” (1946), George Orwell wrote about how vague political and bureaucratic language hides horrifying events:

Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Here, Orwell is writing about how a political and bureaucratic style can obscure the material reality of a historical event. The language allows us to look away.

As I will say repeatedly in this series, propaganda has its own developmental path. It begins with “spin,” a recognition of what actually happened while attempting to make it seem benign. It moves on to stealing God terms and Devil terms and placing them into new contexts to distort what actually happened. Eventually, propaganda not only creates a new view of reality; it also uses force to gaslight us into denying our own experience. It eventually uses force to change reality to fit the world that propaganda created.

As propaganda progresses, something interesting and subtle happens: Democratic values are replaced with memories of trauma.

The release of divisive emotions during a Trump rally is inexplicable to those who are not true believers because they are looking for meaning. What they do not understand is that the meaning of the words has long been lost. What remains is a tenuous but clear connection between the words and personal trauma.

Because the terms are connected with trauma, often at the personal level, they are still a trigger that releases intense emotions, but these are not emotions that are arguably positive, like patriotism or national pride, emotions that create bonds between Americans. The emotions are the product of trauma; they evoke anger, fear, hatred, envy, and resentment.

We need to view words as artifacts. We need to learn what they meant in their original context. We need to discuss what the words say about our values. We need to track how their meaning is constantly changing. We need to understand how they can be used against us.

Let’s look at the ultimate God term—freedom. All politicians try to claim words like freedom, but they rarely explain what the terms mean. They waive “freedom” like a banner. After 9/11, George W. Bush said that they (unspecified) hate us for our freedom (undefined). This is what Aristotle called an enthymeme, a condensed argument with part of the logical chain left unsaid. I have tried to uncover the missing logical chain behind this statement, but it is beyond me. Nevertheless, it seems to have worked for most Americans. (An enthymeme might be better defined as an argument that is completed by the audience, often simply because it makes emotional sense.) Despite what your high school English teacher said, vagueness can be rhetorically effective. Vagueness allows a statement without logic to seem logical.

Those who use a term like freedom want to coop its emotional force, and oddly the term has force even when it is used in ways that our founders would find horrifying.

But what is the source of its emotional force? We have all learned in history and civics classes that freedom means the right to express our views, no matter how controversial, the right to gather in a public space and protest, and the right the vote. Many of us know the value of these freedoms and want to defend them. But this is not the source of its emotional force. The emotional force is more experiential. It is embedded in our attempts—often our failure—to find personal autonomy.

Imagine that you grew up in a hierarchical family with a domineering and abusive father. (In this family structure, it is more often the father who is dominating and controlling, but it could be the mother or even a sibling.) Whenever you expressed an opinion, the father called you stupid. Whenever you tried to learn a new skill and, as a natural part of the learning process, failed, the father called you a loser. Whenever you did not follow a command, the father hit you. As you matured and moved beyond the family, the anger you feel toward authority grows. You continue to hear “no” from teachers, bosses, and bureaucracies. The entire world seems against you. You feel like a victim—the opposite of a free person. With every “no,” the anger builds. For you, freedom is asserting your wishes and desires, fighting against the “no,” even when resisting a law or policy, even when it might be in your benefit to obey. You might, for example, refuse to take a vaccine. You might refuse to wear a mask during a pandemic. To outsiders, this seems irrational, but it makes sense emotionally.

If we want to understand people who seem, from our perspective, to act irrationally, we need to unearth their meaning, slowly and carefully, as if doing an archaeological dig. We need to think beyond dictionary definitions. We will find the archeology of words is life stories. Instead of judging others for being irrational, from our perspective, we need to listen to their personal history.

The phrase our perspective is crucial. We need to understand that our views, our words, also have their own history, their own time and place, maybe even their own trauma. If we are willing to reflect on our perspective, we will better understand both the values and the limits of our views.

Thinking Tip: When we hear God terms, words like democracy, we should not assume that the speaker is acting from democratic values. In the last few weeks, Elon Musk has been saying that he is trying to save democracy as he is buying votes in the Wisconsin election for a member of the state’s Supreme Court. He might be using his own special definition of “democracy,” so he might have convinced himself that he is telling the truth, that his motives are good, even purely good. If we know what democracy is, if we understand its values, how our founders conceptualized it, we will see the absurdity of a man giving a Nazi salute and then claiming to save democracy.

As our language becomes unmoored, we lose touch with our basic values. We need to reconnect our words with our experience and actions. We need to understand the implications of every word and how we use it. We need to make words mean again, not in an unconscious way, not as connected to our personal trauma, but as part of a democratic dialogue in a safe communal space. The meaning needs to come out of dialogue and reinforce our bonds with one another.

To move beyond reacting instinctively to words, to be less triggered by words, we need to explore both the historical and personal meaning of our language. In the archeology of words, we can begin to understand others and bridge the divide in our country—a divide that has split families and ended friendships. As Orwell might say, we can find—in words and style—either the end of democracy or its salvation.

At the end of each post about propaganda, I will outline a range of political rhetoric related to the topic of that post. This should serve as a summary that can be reviewed. I also hope that it will help us to be more aware of how we might promote democratic dialogue and resist the slow slip into propaganda and totalitarianism.

Democratic Dialogue: Discussing the meaning of words is an important part of dialogue. This goes beyond dictionary definitions to the history of the word and our personal experiences with the word.

Propaganda Lite: Words are stolen “back and forth” to distort the material reality of events. Words tend to come in stark binaries—God terms and Devil terms. People react to words reflexively. The words do not mean. They only evoke memories of trauma.

Propaganda Complete: Words become so unmoored and detached from material reality and community values that they have lost all meaning. Through years of witnessing terror exerted on those who disobey, people learn when to clap and cheer, even when to shed tears. People become robotic.

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