Throughout the American experiment in democracy, good, old-fashioned plain-speaking has always been the coin of the realm. 

Even when they were delivering difficult messages or advancing controversial ideas, the best political leaders strove to communicate clearly, speak frankly, and use simple language likely to be understood by the widest swath of people possible. From “Honest Abe” to the “Great Communicator,” some of our best presidents were even given nicknames that referred to their gift for “telling it like it is.” 

By contrast, politicians who earned a reputation for obfuscation or sheer inarticulateness were rightly taken to task: To his eternal shame, Bill Clinton insisted on defining “what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” while poor George W. Bush gave the impression of knowing what he wanted to say but being perpetually unable to summon the syntax to say it.

In our present moment, however, the modern Left has shown itself more committed to speaking to confuse and deflect than to illuminate and clarify. The political class remains nominally committed to the outward projection of plain-speaking — that is why even an age-diminished but reliably unvarnished Joe Biden is a stronger candidate than many Democrats who pine to be the presidential candidate — but throughout the institutions it dominates, the Left has come to regard language not as a tool for expression but as a means of manipulation. Donald Trump was wrong: He does not have, as he famously said during his first presidential campaign, “the best words.” To the contrary, the liberal elite has developed a lexicon far vaster, more confusing, and more insidious than any conservative could muster today. 

Nowhere is this more evident than in the abortion debate. The terms widely used in the past to define opposing views on the practice have always been unintentionally revealing: “Pro-life” says what it means — its adherents argue for the protection of life from its earliest stages — while “pro-choice” refers not to the consequences of abortion, the death of the unborn child, but to the freedom to make a choice in the matter. Seen this way, the pro-life movement has always been far clearer in its aims than the pro-choice movement, which conceals the outcome of the practice it advocates in the language of freedom and autonomy, both immensely desirable things but, for those of us who regard abortion as an evil, utterly irrelevant to the topic at hand. 

Today, many in the pro-life movement still define themselves with their traditional moniker, but those advancing the abortion cause increasingly cloak themselves in the therapeutic terminology of modern medicine. There is a movement afoot to subsume abortion within the larger category of “healthcare.” “If people need healthcare, they will find ways to get the healthcare they need,” said Amy Friedrich-Karnik, the director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute, an organization “committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights,” in a March Wall Street Journal story about the rise in use of abortion pills. This is far from an isolated example. In fact, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists even has a page on its website that insists on the correlation: “The fact is, abortion is an essential component of women’s health care.” The World Health Organization defines abortion as “a common health intervention.” “Abortion care” is another commonly encountered term.

Let us now pause to ponder the definition of “healthcare.” According to Merriam-Webster, the term can refer to “efforts made to maintain, restore, or promote someone’s physical, mental or emotional well-being especially when performed by trained and licensed professionals.” Granting that abortions are sometimes performed to save the life of the mother, abortions undertaken for elective reasons are, by definition, health-destroying, not health-maintaining, -restoring, or -promoting: They terminate the life, and therefore the “health,” of the unborn. To insist that “healthcare” is advanced through the destruction of life is either to make a mockery of the word or to admit, tacitly, that the only “healthcare” being administered is to the mother, not her unborn child. 

Sometimes, the direct use of the word “abortion” is itself a form of mystification. Some years back, the Associated Press Stylebook issued revisions that frowned on the use of “pro-life” and “pro-choice” as modifiers in favor of the terms “anti-abortion” and “abortion-rights.” The pro-life movement is the clear loser in this modification. In addition to removing the positive associations that come with the prefix “pro” in “pro-life,” the revision conveniently removed any reference to “life,” the very thing that hangs in the balance in the abortion debate and that the pro-life movement wishes to preserve. By the same token, the shift from “pro-choice” to “abortion-rights” hardly represents a change at all: The pro-choice movement has retained its historical association with liberty — whether called “choice” or “rights,” it’s all the same thing. 

Whether supporters of abortion use the word “abortion” or not, few will state the truth as bluntly as comedian Bill Maher recently did on his HBO program: “[Pro-lifers] think it’s murder, and it kind of is. I’m just OK with that. I am. I mean, there’s 8 billion people in the world. I’m sorry. We won’t miss you.” If more abortion proponents would speak as candidly as Maher, there would be fewer abortion proponents. 

Even when the Left imagines it is speaking forthrightly, then, it is often speaking euphemistically and evasively. The Left leans on “healthcare”-like language to provide cover for policies that would otherwise find few enthusiastic supporters among rank-and-file Democrats. “Overdose prevention centers,” “supervised consumption rooms,” “safe injection sites,” and the like refer to places where illegal drug use is encouraged and sanctioned, but describing them with words like “prevention,” “supervised,” and “safe,” the verbiage of care and wellness, makes them sound like innocuous places where desperate people receive help rather than an inducement to continue their habit.

Similarly, the transgender movement overwhelms the public with a constellation of terms (“cisgender,” “nonbinary,” “sex assigned at birth”) that work to confer the patina of science on its erroneous conception of gender and sex as separate, and changeable, categories. No honest physician, or human being with two eyes, would have said such a thing until 10 minutes ago. Yet those struggling with gender issues receive validation of their troubles when sex-change procedures are described as “gender-affirming surgeries,” as though whatever confusion they are experiencing has a ready-made surgical cure. This is especially pernicious when it comes to young people being presented with a menu of so-called gender-affirming procedures. In the instant-classic book she wrote with Karol Markowicz, Stolen Youth, Bethany Mandel argued, “It’s like handing a knife to a girl who is cutting and telling her it’s a healthy way to express her feelings, or telling a girl struggling with an eating disorder that she does, indeed, look fat in those jeans and should purge to try to lose a few pounds.”

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Those are severe words, but a measure of severity is needed when the Left so often disguises its agenda with gentle language. What’s worse: telling it like it is or talking in circles? Even the now-ubiquitous term “preferred pronouns” sounds innocent enough — after all, “preferred” could be understood merely as its speaker’s request to be called by one set of pronouns over another — but, in practice, it’s used as a cudgel. Email signatures that contain the eye-rolling “he/him,” “she/her,” “she/they,” and so on do not ask but inform the recipient to address the sender in a particular way. The damage done by such language to civil society is real and lasting. Is it appropriate for a waiter or a store clerk or the kid next door to assume the identity of someone by using honorifics such as “Mr.,” “Ms.,” or “Mrs.”? “Preferred pronouns” seem to be a plea for politeness, a request that someone’s pronouns are respected, but they achieve the opposite.  

When, all those years ago, Trump boasted of having “the best words,” he also admitted that sometimes something less than the best words is called for: “But there’s no better word than ‘stupid,’ right?” he said back then. Indeed, the 45th president had it right: Sometimes, blunt words that tell us the truth are better than the best words that conceal it. 

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.