Relax. Biden didn’t call anyone a ‘fascist.’
Many were apoplectic following Biden’s recent remarks, but his language is surprisingly soft, as the multiple qualifiers and incomplete sentences lessen the impact. It’s almost, dare we say, sleepy.
All it took was one offhand utterance for “Sleepy Joe” to magically transform from questionable-acuity-in-chief to a guns-blazing, hard-charging, slanderous maligner who hates half of all Americans.
“What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of extreme MAGA philosophy,” President Joe Biden said last week. “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.”
Feigning the same outrage that they mustered for Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” and Barack Obama’s “cling[ing] to guns or religion” comments, Republicans — from moderate to MAGA — were apoplectic.
» READ MORE: Biden drops the (semi) F-bomb — fascism — as GOP scurries like scared ants
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, for example, said the remarks were “horribly insulting”; an RNC spokesperson called Biden’s comments “despicable”; Mercedes Schlapp, who worked in both the Trump and Bush II White Houses, said, “That is a complete insult and something that I think is anti-American and really he is no longer the one that is a unifier in this country.” (This from the same person whose Conservative Political Action Conference just weeks earlier hosted hyper-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who’s frequently aligned with fascism himself.)
But Biden’s language is surprisingly soft. He uses multiple qualifiers, couched in incomplete sentences, to lessen the impact. It’s almost, dare we say, sleepy.
Not that you’d sense that from the breathless coverage that followed. This “newly aggressive Biden strategy” (Washington Post) was “his harshest rebuke of Trumpism yet” (Vanity Fair). At least 17 national and international publications featured headlines saying “Biden slams [semi-fascism/MAGA Republicans/etc.].”
Headline writers love action verbs.
Biden’s qualifiers bear examination. He called it not “fascism” but “semi-fascism,” which — despite the doubts of folks like Brookings senior fellow Shadi Hamid and Lincoln Project cofounder Steve Schmidt — is definitely a word; the Oxford English Dictionary dates it to 1938. As a prefix, semi- sometimes means exactly half, as in semicircle (a circle divided in half), and sometimes means just “partly.” Fascists are pretty good at dividing — especially dividing people — but let’s assume the latter semi- definition, as even Mussolini would be hard-pressed to define half a fascist.
“Biden’s qualifiers bear examination.”
Even Biden’s use of like is a softener. Like has long been a controversial word, and not just because of its, like, supposed informality. It’s versatile, at times functioning as six parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, preposition, adverb, and conjunction). Because Biden’s remarks were spoken, not written down, we don’t know whether he had a comma on either side of like. There’s a structural difference between “It’s like semi-fascism” and “It’s, like, semi-fascism,” but little definitional difference. In both cases, the statement is weaker than if he had omitted the like.
And if Biden intended the commas, the MAGA pearl-clutchers would probably go after him for his informal use of like too.
Meanwhile, plenty on the left, from Keith Olbermann on down, thought semi-fascist was inaccurate as well — because Biden should have just said fascist. The word fascism has trended for days on Merriam-Webster.com, which defines it as “a political philosophy, movement, or regime … that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.” Sound like anyone you know?
Hyperventilate though the right might, Biden’s words were milder and snoozier than they could have been — not the kind of thing that should jolt awake a complacent populace.
Where’s that “Sleepy Joe” story line when you need it?
The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and quotative compartmentalizers to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.