Us-Versus-Them: The Pronouns of Populism

In 1939, a 15-year-old Jewish Berliner, Peter Fröhlich, and his family fled their homeland, fearing the virulent antisemitism taking over their country. After a brief stay in Cuba, he safely arrived in the United States in 1941. Upon becoming an American citizen and changing his name, Peter Gay dedicated his life to understanding the violent aggression that forced him to leave his home.

In his magnum opus, The Cultivation of Hatred, Gay writes about how seemingly innocuous Victorian cultural activities, such as the German tradition of mensur (competitive fencing), normalize violence by crafting “alibis” that divert “free-floating pugilistic impulses into socially profitable energies.” 

One such alibi is the “Convenient Other.” As “an immensely serviceable alibi for aggression,” the Convenient Other grants “permission to think angry thoughts and commit hostile acts.” These seemingly harmless alibis, Gay argues, systematized the bellicosity that inspired World War I and World War II. He continues: 

The animus was always the same: whether nation, province, or city, whether religion, class, or culture—the more one loved one’s own, the more one was entitled to hate the Other. 

 As it did in 20th century Europe, this lethal combination of diametrically opposed emotions—love of us and hatred of them—fuels today’s culture war. 

As I wrote recently, opportunistic politicians often abuse plural pronouns for political purposes. But while some politicians abuse first-person plural pronouns (we and us) to insincerely build a collective identity, others use their third-person counterparts (they and them) to divide and conquer. 

Few political trends leverage this love of us and hatred of them more than populism. 

The Populist They/Them

Populism is, at best, a loosely defined term—more impulsive than principled. Its practitioners find solace in both the political left (Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and right (Donald Trump). For better or worse, populism is on the rise internationally, achieving significant electoral success in dozens of countries. 

Populism thrives in an us-versus-them dichotomy. The us is typically “the people”—the disempowered everyday folk with whom the populist seeks solidarity. 

However, the antecedent to them isn’t always clear—and this ambiguity is a feature, not a bug.

A vague third person is a convenient strawman for the deceitful. In The Secret Life of Pronouns, James Pennebaker shares findings from a study comparing the court transcripts of convicted felons and those later exonerated of their crimes. The exonerated used more first-person singular pronouns (I and me). Meanwhile, the “truly guilty,” Pennebaker notes, used third-person pronouns (they, them, he, she, etc.) more than the exonerated, “trying to shift the blame away from themselves onto others.” 

The imprecision of the populist they/them enables its flexibility, making it malleable and applicable to an ever-changing array of targets. Researchers from Germany’s Friedrich Schiller University Jena closely examined pronoun usage in populist rhetoric. According to their study, populists favor impersonal pronouns, such as they, to avoid specificity, absolve responsibility, and reduce complexity. 

Traditionally, this reductionist worldview rails against a wealthy and powerful “elite”—greedy corporations exploiting the poor on the left and a globalist cabal undermining cultural homogeneity and national sovereignty on the right. 

However, populism also sets its sights on other groups—and few are better at hitting these moving targets than Donald Trump. 

“They Will Never Make America Great Again”

On June 16, 2015, Trump iconicly descended his tower’s escalators to announce his presidential ambitions. For nearly an hour, then-candidate Trump did what he does best: scapegoat. With weaponized nostalgia, he lamented how we were once a great nation, but now the “American Dream is dead.” 

Who killed the American Dream? As always, Trump had a few suspects. 

According to Trump, foreigners, especially those from Mexico, were a likely culprit (emphasis added): 

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

“They will never make America great again,” Trump concluded. 

During this 45-minute address, Trump used the word they 158 times. Comparatively, Trump’s next most-used pronouns were you (73 times), it (57), and I (55). 

Trump’s repeated tirades against immigrants infamously reappeared during the most recent debate. Citing the now-debunked story of Haitian immigrants eating household pets in Ohio, Trump shouted:

They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets.

Trump’s audacious claim about pet-eating Haitians was demonstrably false, but that didn’t stop him from fanning the flames of moral outrage toward other marginalized groups. 

Trump’s campaign has dumped millions into attack ads with not-so-subtle transphobia. One ad proclaimed, “Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you”—an obvious wag of his moralistic finger at the transgender and nonbinary communities. 

In the closing days of the election, Trump has leaned into this divisive rhetoric by setting his crosshairs on another amorphous target: the “deep state.” “These are bad people,” the former president said when referring to his political opponents. “We have a lot of bad people…They are, to me, the enemy from within.”

Trump’s ambiguous they/them can aptly scapegoat and dehumanize multiple targets—the “deep state,” the LGBTQ community, immigrants, etc. Despite this ambiguity, Trump sends a clear message: They are who’s destroying our country, and we must stop them at all costs. Trump’s pronoun usage is, at best, an electioneering tactic and, at worst, a virulent dog whistle.

But Trump didn’t invent this us-versus-them mentality. (Though, if given the opportunity, he’d probably take credit for it.) Instead, populist pronouns tap into humanity’s worst tribalistic impulses and nativist instincts.

They are Us

If populism is so dangerous, why is it so appealing? This question doesn’t have an easy answer. However, research suggests that human beings come about the us-versus-them dichotomy quite naturally.

The us-versus-them worldview once served a vital evolutionary purpose. Skepticism of the unknown is a natural defense mechanism. If premodern humans continuously paused and pondered whether that thing over there giving them the stink eye was a predator, humanity would have been extinct long ago. 

Our body’s natural chemistry also compels this binary thinking. Oxytocin—also known as the “love hormone”—is a natural human hormone that simulates uterine contractions during childbirth, enhancing our feelings of human bonding. However, oxytocin also intensifies our suspicions of others. This hormonal cocktail of antithetical emotions—again, the love for us and hatred of them—literally courses through our veins.

Moreover, the human brain rewards this contradictory behavior, too. Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University studied the brain activity of college students competing against other students from rival schools. They found that students demonstrating aggression against their rivals exhibited significant activity in their nucleus accumbens and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the brain’s core reward circuitry. This research suggests that this neural pathway—which anticipates, seeks, and evaluates incentives—plays a “significant role in motivating aggression” toward out-group members. 

Though social animals, humans are tragically hardwired for the anti-social binaries propelling today’s toxic political culture.

So, before we condemn a convenient whipping boy (neither a Haitian nor Trump), a little bit of self-reflection will go a long way. Understanding the driving forces behind the us-versus-them paradox—be it manipulative pronouns or human biology—starts with looking in a mirror to find the true enemy within. 

Though Adolph Hitler drove his family to flee Germany, Peter Gay also recognized that an aggressive populace—or, in the words of Daniel Goldhagen, “Hitler’s willing executioners“—enabled and empowered the tyrant. “Hysteria defied self-control,” Gay writes. “Obsessional neurosis mimicked it.”

In this us-versus-them world, we have met the enemy—and they are us.

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Source: https://reason.com/2024/11/02/us-versus-them-the-pronouns-of-populism/