In 2007, Republican pollster Frank Luntz published a book called “Words that Work.” Luntz had persuaded GOP leaders to use the phrase “death tax” instead of “estate tax” and to substitute “energy exploration” for “oil drilling.” It worked. Borrowing many of Luntz’s terms, George W. Bush won two terms in the White House.
Luntz concluded his book with an appendix of “words and phrases you should never say again,” because they did not work. The seventh item on his list is one you heard a lot during the recent election: “undocumented workers.”
But you only heard it from my fellow Democrats, who suffered a massive defeat on Nov. 5. It’s too early to know why we lost the presidency, the Senate and the House. But here’s one obvious reason: We used the wrong words, starting with “undocumented workers.”
To be sure, we had our own good reasons for using them. Donald Trump spent much of his campaign vilifying “illegal aliens,” as he called them, whom he falsely blamed for crime, long lines at hospitals, and much else. By labeling them undocumented instead of illegal, Democrats signaled that they rejected Trump’s hateful rhetoric and embraced the humanity of everyone who came here.
But in politics, as in Scripture, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear,” Luntz wrote. And when we said “undocumented,” lots of Americans heard something else: We were trying to deny what people could see with their own eyes.
In a survey in March, 62 percent of voters — including 60 percent of independents — said they favored “illegal alien” or “illegal immigrant” to describe the mostly-Latino migrants who cross the border in violation of U.S. law. And many people who prefer those terms are Latino themselves. “It’s the shoe that fits. It’s reality,” wrote Latino columnist Ruben Navarette, Jr. back in 2012, defending the phrase illegal immigrant. “And, as is often the case with reality, it’s hard for some people to accept.”
Note I said “Latino,” not “Latinx.” That’s another term Democrats should drop as soon as possible. Again, we have a good reason for using it — it’s not gendered, like Latino and Latina. (And it also doesn’t refer quite as directly to a painful history of Spanish colonialism, like “Hispanic” does.)
But less than half of so-called “Latinx” people have even heard of the term, three-quarters of them don’t approve of it, and just 4 percent use it to describe themselves. It’s tailor-made to alienate Latino voters, who abandoned the Democrats in droves on Nov. 5.
And don’t get me started about “people of color,” which pretends that non-whites in the United States share common attributes and beliefs. If nothing else, the last election should shatter that myth forever. To win back non-white voters, we should call them by their names instead of imagining that they are all the same.
Finally, there’s the awkward acronym “LGBTQ” and its even clumsier cousins, “LGBTQIA” and “LGBTQIAPK+.” Don’t know what they stand for? Join the crowd. In a 2018 survey, only 5 percent of respondents said they could decipher the last term. And about two-thirds agreed with the statement, “Adding more letters to the term we use to identify different gender and sexual identities is unnecessarily confusing.”
Like people of color, these acronyms imagine a false unity between distinct groups. They signal that if you endorse, say, same-sex marriage, you’ll also approve of transgender athletes playing on sports teams that accord with their gender identity. That denies reality, too. Americans strongly support gay marriage but are divided about trans issues, including whether schools should tell parents if their kids are using new pronouns. And there’s no umbrella acronym that can hide those differences.
Let me be clear: I think people should call themselves what they want, and that the rest of us should try to accommodate them. As I tell my students, you do you. And I’ll refer to you in whatever terms you choose.
But that’s different from saying that everyone must embrace the new nomenclature, or else there’s something wrong with them. That’s the vibe that the Democrats have put out, and it’s off-putting, to put it mildly. Nobody likes a scold. And if you tell people to change the way they talk, they will push back.
George Orwell put it best: Political jargon “is designed to make lies sound truthful.” All of our new terms try to disguise something that is in plain sight, and the voters noticed it. We don’t have to abandon our principles to win them back. We just have to tell the truth, with words that work.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools” and eight other books.
