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This is Tangles Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, here to talk about some of our new editorial policies around language use. We'll get started with our new policies about using the terms fascist and authoritarian. From the start of President Donald Trump's campaign for president in 2015 up to the present, some scholars, writers and critics have labeled Trump and his policies as fascist or authoritarian. We want to offer some clarity on these terms and our usage of them going forward. For our purposes, we're focusing specifically on fascist and authoritarian political figures and governments rather than say, fascist art or authoritarian parenting. In this context, fascism is a far right form of governance that expresses hard power through the state. Fascist ideas originated in 19th century European writings in response to rising progressivism and secular liberalism, but it wasn't until the interwar period that paradigmatic fascist governments we think of today like Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, came into power. Encyclopedia Britannica is one of the sources we like to use most for definitions like these, and Britannica notes that there is no universally agreed upon definition of fascism, but it does find several shared characteristics among fascist figures and fascist governments. Those are extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy, and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and subordinating individual interests to the good of the nation. Arguments promoting Trump as a fascist figure center on his reinstatement of Schedule F for federal workers, his targeting of immigrants and DEI programs, his attempted removal of birthright citizenship and his domestic deployment of federal troops and masked DHS agents. Since the start of Trump's second term, many readers have asked us whether we think these actions amount to fascism. We don't. For a few reasons. The United States under Trump remains a healthy democracy with free and fair elections and a working judiciary. And although Trump is amassing executive power, he's largely doing so through existing legal avenues, such as executive orders, which can be overturned by the next president. Encyclopedia Britannica also defines authoritarianism as a form of government that has no mechanism for transferring executive power power and that affords its citizens no rights. In authoritarian governments, all power lies in the hands of a single person or a small group of people. Modern authoritarian governments persist across the globe in North Korea, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, among other places. In earlier editions, we've defined our own markers of a shift towards authoritarianism in the United States. Those are prosecution of political enemies, using the military against peaceful protesters, the erosion of free and fair elections, the collapse of a legitimate opposition party, and genuinely restricted free speech. In previous writing, Executive Editor Isaac Saul has argued Trump is checking the first two of these five boxes. Next up is our usage of the word America or American. We refer to the United States of America as United States or US for short and typically use us as an adjective. However, we find it to be an awkward usage in many cases, as in US Citizen instead of American. Not only is that wordier, but it's inexact. Nationality is not the exact same thing as citizenship, and we should have a general word to refer to someone who is a legal and long term resident of the United States of America. As such, we've adjusted our policy to allow for the use of the word American to refer to U.S. citizens or as an adjective describing U.S. governance or culture. A common criticism of this term is that American can refer to a resident of any number of countries in North America or South America. However, in practice this criticism is pretty unconvincing for three reasons. First, we rarely if ever hear people say American when they mean North American or South American. Usually, we'll hear one of those two terms. Second, it's similarly rare to hear anyone use the word American when to refer to residents of both continents all at once. Lastly, nobody would refer to a Canadian or a Guianan as an American when that person could just be referred to by their nationality. Meanwhile, without the word American, the United States of America would have no such easy demonym. This usage of American has a history dating back to the pre revolutionary British colonies. To use one particularly beautiful example. In Rob Chernow's biography, A Life, Chernow quote quotes a British soldier watching how Americans behave once the British officially withdrew from New York City. Here's that quote. Here in the city we have had an army for more than seven years and yet could not keep the peace of it. Now that we are gone, everything is in quietness and safety. The Americans are a curious, original people. They know how to govern themselves, but nobody else can govern them. Indeed, that brings us next to our usage around governmental nomenclature and speaking of America, we have made the editorial decision to not use new names for geographical places or governmental entities that a presidential administration has decided to use unless or until an act of Congress officially acknowledges those changes. That means in our coverage, the Gulf of America will remain the Gulf of Mexico, the Arabian Gulf will remain the Persian Gulf, and the Department of War will remain the Department of Defense. This is not intended as an oppositional stance against the Trump administration, but as a general precedent that would apply to any president unilaterally renaming geographical places independent of Congress. And again, if Congress authorizes these name changes, we will adjust accordingly. Next, that brings us to the particularly sensitive topic of language around suicide as a general guideline. If our word choices can theoretically decrease the odds of terrible behaviors being repeated, we will make those choices. That contagion effect drives our decision not to reprint the names of perpetrators of mass shootings, which is something we say every time we cover such an event in Tangle. We also refer to recommendations from professional groups to help guide our choices. On the flip side, we have a policy against using terms that feel or sound nicer just to protect the sensitivities of language users, as we've written about before, and we do not follow recommendations from policy groups dogmatically. If a suggested guideline is not supported with sound reasoning and evidence, we won't reflexively follow it over other alternatives. We very deeply want to make choices that could prevent suicides, and coming from that position, we want to commit to two important editorial choices. First, following the recommendations from the nonprofit reporting on suicide or ros, we are going to avoid describing suicide attempts as successful, failed, or completed. As the nonprofit describes, the contagion effects of suicides is real, and referring to the act of taking one's life as something that can be done successfully could arguably contribute to copycats. Deciding to follow that guideline is a relatively easy and straightforward decision for us to make. Our second decision is to use the phrase kill themself when describing an act of suicide, a phrase which is also recommended by ROS we considered other possible alternatives but ruled them out for different reasons. Ros also recommended the phrase died by suicide, but we believe that phrase goes against a common journalistic standard of avoiding passive language. The group also recommends against the term committed suicide, saying that it uses language consistent with crime or sin, as in committed murder or committed adultery, and that connotation can create a stigma that makes it less likely for suicidal people to seek help. However, several members of our staff found that justification unconvincing, and after coming through the research reporting on suicide has compiled, we found the data to be inconclusive that avoiding the term committed suicide would be prevented, meaning this phrase is unlikely to influence behavior in either direction. The best study we could find on this term is a survey of adults affected by suicide about what terms they prefer. As shown below, the study found no association on the acceptability of the term among this group whatsoever, meaning there is no demonstrated reason to avoid it. At the same time, the data also shows no relationship with the phrase kill themself, and since several members of our staff also felt that the stigmatization theory provide a good reason to avoid the term committed suicide on its own, even if the data is inconclusive, the available reasonable alternative of kill themself made it an acceptable solution. We know this is a particularly sensitive and difficult area, and we don't consider ourselves to be the sole arbiters of what is right and what is wrong. These guidelines only represent the decisions that we've come to for our own writing, and for now we are always very willing to hear other arguments from readers, and we will never enforce our preferred wording choices to others in the comments section. Next Usage of words that Denote somebody's Political Orientation We've recently been paying closer attention to how we describe the political orientation of politicians, pundits, and public figures. While this impacts our word choices in a variety of ways, we're making a particular effort to differentiate between conservatives, right wingers and Republicans, as well as between liberals, left wingers and Democrats. It has already been our practice to use Republican and Democrat only to refer to active or former U.S. party members or party specific policies. The parties are a formal aspect of the American political system, and each party has represented a shifting variety of political ideologies over time. Republican is not interchangeable with conservative, nor is Democrat interchangeable with liberal. Moving forward, we will also be more specific in referring to ideologies across the political spectrum using the definition from Encyclopedia Britannica. Conservatism is a political doctrine that emphasizes the value of traditional institutions and practices. More specifically, American conservatism has long been defined by commitments to free market policies and opposition to government expansion. Liberalism is defined by Britannica as taking protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics in the U.S. liberalism is also associated with the use of government programs to address broader societal restrictions on individual freedoms such as poverty and inequality. However, traditional American conservatism is not the only right wing ideological position, and traditional American liberalism is not the sole ideology on the political left. Furthermore, ascendant figures on the left and the right increasingly represent ideologies that break from traditionally conservative and liberal ideals. Going forward, we will use liberal and conservative to describe figures and ideas in line with the traditional American understanding of these terms, and we will use left and right as umbrella terms to discuss other relevant political ideas and figures when they come up. And lastly, our usage of the word Unauthorized migrant in our 2023 guidelines, we wrote about our decision to use unauthorized migrant in place of illegal alien or undocumented immigrant. It was a straightforward compromise, avoiding two terms that felt politically loaded for another that adequately described what we were talking about at the time, people who cross the border without authorization. However, over time we've discovered a few reasons why this term wasn't the catch all solution we had thought and hoped it could be when we landed on the phrase. Initially, border crossings were at an all time high. Now they've shrunk to their lowest levels in recent history. Many of the people who crossed over during that elevated period of migration are now living in the country legally or illegally. As such, we're going to start using unauthorized immigrant as a default to describe people who crossed into the United States illegally, or residents who were not in compliance with their legal restrictions. This term is also imperfect because immigrant implies a person who has moved with the intention to repatriate to another country, which is an implication that isn't true in every case, but it's as close as we can get without being too wordy. Lastly, we will always be as precise as possible when describing a person or group. So if we're talking about residents or H1B visa holders, or asylum seekers, or even the original term unauthorized migrants in the appropriate context, then we will use those words. And if we are talking more generally about people not from the United States, we will use the words non citizen or foreign national. But again, and for clarity, when discussing people who crossed into the United States illegally, or residents who are not in compliance with their legal restrictions, we will be using the term unauthorized immigrant. And we may also use the term immigrants here illegally or describe someone as in the country illegally. That's it for our section on our updated language choices. Foreign
