Political word games

“It’s toasted!” This simple phrase represents one of the most succinct and successful marketing campaigns in both history and fictional television. The phrase, likely coined to sell Lucky Strike cigarettes in the early 20th century by Percival Hill, former president of the American Tobacco Company, gets a dramatic retelling in AMC’s hit show Mad Men. In the opening episode of the series, Don Draper’s marketing genius is tapped to craft an ad campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes amid the growing national consciousness of the carcinogenic consequences of such products. Rather than attempt to engage at the level of facts and evidence, the tagline “It’s toasted” deliberately bypasses uncomfortable questions about death. It replaces serious life-or-death realities with a warm, lighthearted, sentimental buzzword phrase.

Stephen Leacock famously defined advertising as “the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.” Similarly, politics in the United States in 2024 may be defined as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get a vote from it.

Consider the Harris-Walz 2024 campaign, one that markets itself on “joy” and “good vibes.” The happy-clappy optimism brings to memory the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his infamous 1978 Harvard commencement speech: “There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. … But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?”

Yes, “What is the joy about?” is precisely the correct question when, as the Democratic Party platform states, we face “the worst public health crisis in a century, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the worst period of global upheaval in a generation.” Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz’s campaign of “joy” and celebrating “good vibes” have become the “It’s toasted!” of our political moment.

Then we have what is perhaps the ultimate “It’s toasted!” rhetorical sleight of hand, now voiced by both presidential candidates. Harris spoke of “reproductive freedom” at her Democratic National Convention acceptance speech last month to predictably overwhelming applause. The next day, former President Donald Trump posted, to the chagrin of much of his pro-life base, that his “administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”

The political playbook has become predictable: Take command of a culture by commandeering its words and their meanings. Thomas Sowell carefully traces how words like “diversity,” “privilege,” “violence,” and “change” have been hijacked by an ideology by which “the hardest facts can be made to vanish into thin air by a clever catchword or soaring rhetoric.” What should we call injecting hormones, blocking the natural and highly sex-specific process of puberty, and resorting to the surgical mutilation and rearrangement of genital tissue to make it appear like its biological opposite? How about “gender-affirming care”?

What label should we attach to an ideology that divides everyone into racial subgroups, trains us to prejudge based on pigmentation, and assigns praise or blame, the right to speak or the expectation of silence, or credibility or incredulity on racial grounds? How about we call it “anti-racism”?

What should we call the choice to deliberately end the natural course of human reproduction, to poison and dismember our offspring in utero? How about “reproduction freedom and rights”?

The ad men, sloganeers, and public opinion strategists chose such terms because most people won’t think beneath the bumper sticker–thin appeal to what they actually convey. Let’s be crystal clear: Reproductive freedom and rights are Orwellian doublespeak for the right to abortion. Abortion is the termination, the ending, the intentional destruction of the natural flow of the reproductive process. Abortion is the literal antithesis of reproduction. It would be like passing severe speech codes aimed at terminating a wide array of speech that some view as unwanted and then advertising such speech-eliminating codes as “freedom of speech.”

Someone unfamiliar with our political word games might well hear reproductive freedom or rights and assume women are having their ability to reproduce, to mate and make babies, threatened by some oppressive regime that looks like The Handmaid’s Tale. What law says women are not free to reproduce? None. When Harris or Trump speak of reproductive freedom or rights we must ask the commonsense question: the freedom or right to do what exactly? The answer is obvious: to terminate reproduction. We must expose the “It’s toasted” appeal of words like “freedom” and “rights” to clarify the deadly realities they obfuscate—the murder of millions of precious unborn human beings.