Words do matter

6 min readJan 21, 2021

Insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021. (photo by Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket)

Waking my 11-year-old daughter for school the morning of November 9th, 2016, I knew she’d be disappointed but her response still surprised me. She hadn’t been able to see the entire evening unfold, but she had an understanding that things weren’t looking good for Hillary Clinton. When I broke the news, at first she didn’t believe me. Then, she cried.

Trying to talk through her feelings, I asked what upset her more, that Clinton had lost or that a woman wouldn’t be president. She immediately said, “That someone could be president after all the things he’s said and done.” That Donald Trump’s behavior wasn’t disqualifying was antithetical to everything she’d been taught and understood about the world. She believed words matter.

Perhaps she was thinking about the infamous Access Hollywood tape, where Trump brags, “And when you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything…grab them by the pussy.”[1]

Or his interview for Maxim Golf when he told the writer, “there is nothing in the world like first-rate pussy.”[2] Or when he mimicked the physical disability of a reporter from The New York Times. Or the numerous times on the campaign trail that he referred to women as “fat” or “ugly” or “dog” or “horseface.” About Carly Fiorina, “Look at that face!”[3] About Alicia Machado, “Miss Piggy.”[4]

If the 2016 presidential election was a major win for bullying and toxic masculinity, the insurrection at the Capitol was evidence of the absolute destructive nature of this force in society when left unchecked and brought to its natural conclusion.

Trump reportedly said to Pence, “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy,” as he departed for the Capitol to certify the electoral college results.[5]

In this context, modern liberalism is the “pussy” of contemporary politics. Issues of concern to liberals, like social justice, human welfare, civil rights, labor protections, environmental regulation, and healthcare access, are portrayed as weak, even feminine. Republicans and Fox News openly mock the optimism and idealism of Democrats. Remember Sarah Palin asking Tea Party supporters in 2010, “How’s that hopey-changey stuff working out for ya?”[6] In a 2016 poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, 68% of Trump supporters said the U.S. had grown too “soft and feminine.”[7] “Snowflakes,” a fresh taunt in the emasculation of liberals, became the latest target in the conservatives’ culture war.

But the reality of “that hopey-changey stuff” is anything but a joke. In Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World, Fareed Zakaria credits the liberal international order, despite its many faults and unfulfilled promises, with “having bettered the lives of more people than any previous system humans have lived with.” This is demonstrably true. “The idealism underlying liberalism is simple and practical,” he goes on. “If people cooperate, they will achieve better outcomes and more durable solutions than they could acting alone.”[8]

By comparison, while Trump’s America First flex may, in some cases, yield limited parochial short-term benefits, it appears certain to lead to worse outcomes in the long-term — worse outcomes for trade, worse outcomes for climate, and worse outcomes for peace. Game theory predicted it, and four years of Trump has born this out. The strong man, go-it-alone approach, in fact, succeeds in doing little more than stroking our national ego.

“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol. You’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” Trump told the crowd.[9]

The irony, of course, is that after years of this weaponized masculinity, angry male Trump supporters are now unashamed to play the victims. The Proud Boys want to convince us that men and Western culture are under siege, declaring their loyalty as “proud Western chauvinists” and embracing violence to make their point. [10] The movement has even drawn women and non-whites to the cause. “Bring back manly men,” Candace Owens tweeted in response to Harry Styles’ Vogue cover, in which he wears a Gucci gown. “The steady feminization of our men, at the same time that Marxism is being taught to our children is not a coincidence. It is an outright attack,” she wrote.[11]

But this is just another post-truth grievance. Democracy in our republic is, in fact, rigged — but for the benefit of minority rule by conservative whites. Lindsey Graham admitted as much when he claimed, “If Republicans don’t challenge and change the US election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again.”[12] Aside from his contempt for measures making it easier to vote, which helped propel record voter turnout in the 2020 election, the basis for his claims aren’t entirely clear.

Trump was speaking the apocalyptic language of the Proud Boys when he predicted at a rally in Georgia, if the Democrats take the Senate, “America as you know it will be over, and it will never — I believe — be able to come back again.”[13]

Alexander Theodoridis and a group of political scientists have been studying the effects of hyper-polarization. Between 2017 and 2020, they observed the proportion of partisans who agreed with the statement that their opponents “lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals” rose from 18% to 35%. And in February 2020, 24% of partisans who believe the other party “behaves like animals” were significantly more supportive of immediate partisan violence.[14]

The good news is that we can mitigate these attitudes, simply by speaking out against them. To test the effects of pacifying messages, the political scientists asked a randomly selected set of respondents to read a message from either Joe Biden or Trump, either disavowing violence or reminding us of our common American identity. They found that both types of messages, when coming from Biden, significantly reduced endorsements of partisan dehumanization and violence, even among Republicans. Coming from Trump, however, at this point, the messages failed to have the same effect.[15]

Toxic masculinity remains a lightning rod in our culture wars, but the fact is, we can no longer pretend that words don’t matter. Trump is being held accountable for his words like never before. The first president to be impeached twice, Trump is leaving office with an approval rating of 29% and his personal brand in shambles.[16] He has been banned from most social media platforms. And he may ultimately face criminal charges for inciting the riot at the Capitol.

We’ve seen the escalation and normalization of dehumanizing and hateful speech, and we’ve seen the damage it’s wrought. Whether the Capitol riots are the desperate last gasps of an ugly period in our history or just the beginning of something more sinister is up to us.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html

[2] https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-bragged-nothing-in-the-world-like-first-rate-psy

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-fiorina/trump-slights-rival-fiorinas-looks-look-at-that-face-idUSKCN0RA05820150910

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/us/politics/alicia-machado-donald-trump.html

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/us/politics/mike-pence-trump.html

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/weekinreview/19word.html

[7] https://www.prri.org/research/prri-atlantic-poll-republican-democratic-primary-trump-supporters/

[8] Zakaria, Fareed, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), page 232.

[9] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/us/trump-speech-riot.html

[10] https://www.wired.com/2017/05/field-guide-far-right/

[11] https://twitter.com/realcandaceo/status/1327691891303976961?lang=en

[12] https://www.businessinsider.com/us-republican-president-mail-in-voting-lindsey-graham-warns-2020-11