Picture this: you’re at a dinner party, and every guest is armed with an arsenal of buzzwords they’ve picked up on social media. Someone casually drops “psy-op” to describe a viral TikTok video, another confuses “subsidiary” for “subservience,” and by dessert, someone has called the host “far-left” because she serves vegan cheese. Welcome to the modern lexicon, where meanings are alternative facts and ideological spice makes even the most mundane statement taste like political intrigue.
We’ve become linguistic magpies, swiping shiny terms like “Benghazi,” “deep state,” “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion,” and plunking them into conversations without a clue about how they fit. Socialism? Communism? Antifa? Those words are just seasoning to be sprinkled liberally (or conservatively) over any dish we do not like. Privilege? That’s when your phone battery lasts all day. Psy-ops? Sounds scary, let’s label every marketing campaign as one! After all, why let facts get in the way of a good rhetorical flourish? The result? Intellectual heartburn for anyone who knows what these words mean.
So, grab a glass of something strong and settle in as we dissect the linguistic stew that’s being ladled into public discourse. We’ll look beyond the buzzwords and unmask how they’ve been stretched, twisted, and misused to the point of absurdity. Think of this as a detox for your vocabulary, because if society’s going to get a grip on reality, we’ll need to start by giving our language a long-overdue reality check.
People throw around loaded political buzzwords the way teenagers throw around slang: fast, confidently, and often without the faintest idea what they actually mean. “Benghazi,” “psy-op,” “privilege,” “subsidiary,” “far-left extremist,” “socialism,” “communism,” “antifa,” “deep state,” “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” in everyday discourse, these terms function less like precise concepts and more like emotional sound effects. The phenomenon you’re describing isn’t just annoying for intellectuals; it’s well-documented in the cognitive and political psychology literature.
A good starting point is the illusion of explanatory depth (IOED). Rozenblit and Keil (2002), showed that people systematically overestimate how well they understand complex phenomena; they rate their understanding highly, but when forced to explain in detail, their confidence collapses. That bias applies especially to explanatory knowledge, the kind of causal understanding that terms like “socialism” or “psy-op” require. People feel fluent because the words are familiar, not because they can lay out, for example, the institutional structure of a socialist economy or the operational criteria for a psychological operation (Alter, Oppenheimer, & Zemla, 2010). Political psychologists have extended IOED into the political domain. For example, there are some people who sign onto or agree with strong, polarized opinions while holding only sketchy, scripted mental models of the policies or ideologies they name. Layered on top of that is overconfidence and motivated reasoning.
Work on political misperceptions shows that citizens’ factual beliefs are often shaped less by ignorance than by identity-protective cognition. What is identity-protective cognition? These are the facts that humanity bends. These are the agreed upon “facts,” that we utilize to fit into the tribe we belong to. Flynn, Nyhan, and Reifler (2017), review evidence that misperceptions are widespread, stubborn, and closely tied to partisan and ideological identity. Schaffner and Roche’s (2016), experimental work on economic statistics finds that when new information threatens partisan narratives, people don’t simply fail to update; they selectively reinterpret or reject it, which is an example of motivated reasoning.
That same pattern appears in conspiracy thinking. Vranic and colleagues (2022) found that overconfidence in one’s own reasoning, paired with low trust in science, strongly predicts endorsement of COVID-19 conspiracy theories like the faction of individuals who claimed they did their own “research” by regurgitating social media posts or using confirmation bias and selection bias when reviewing articles and information. An example of this is pulling information from meme-driven content posted on social media. Overconfident individuals were worse at an objective reasoning task yet more certain they were right. This is similar to the cognitive profile of people who casually label every uncomfortable news event a “psy-op” or invoke “the deep state” without any operational definition of intelligence services, secrecy, or state capacity (Vranic et al., 2022).
When we look specifically at ideological labels, like socialism and communism, survey data suggest a sharp gap between self-perceived knowledge and definitional accuracy. A large 2020 survey by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation [VCMF] found that 85% of Americans say they know at least “a little” about socialism and 38% say they know “a lot,” yet 68% do not define socialism as government or collective ownership and control of the means of production, the traditional core definition (VCMF & Yougov, 2020). Instead, many respondents treat “socialism” as a vague synonym for “taking everything I have away”, “more welfare programs”, or “what Democrats like.” This is a textbook case of the illusion of explanatory depth combined with motivated reasoning. The motivation comes from the fact that people feel they understand the word, but their “definition” drifts toward whatever matches their political affect.
A similar story plays out with terms tied to harm and injustice. When looking at the terms, “privilege,” “trauma,” “gaslighting,” “abuse,” and “extremism,” this can be seen clearly (Haslam, 2016). Haslam’s work on concept creep (2021), shows that many harm-related concepts in psychology (e.g., trauma, bullying, mental disorder) have expanded over recent decades to cover ever-milder phenomena (Haslam, 2016). He argues that this semantic stretching has moral and political roots. One can look at the fact that societies become more sensitive to harm, so categories widen to capture previously neglected experiences. In later work, Haslam et al., 2020, describe “harm inflation,” where the boundary between serious harm and ordinary discomfort becomes fuzzy (Haslam et al., 2020).
Concept creep helps explain why “privilege” might denote anything from structural, intergenerational advantage to simply owning a smartphone, or why “far-left extremist” can get lobbed at both Marxist revolutionaries and moderately progressive social democrats (Haslam et al., 2020). As these terms expand and detach from clear criteria, they become discursive weapons rather than analytic tools. For scholars and practitioners who rely on those concepts to track meaningful differences in power, risk, and harm, the result really is a kind of intellectual nausea. Categories that once carved reality at the joints now slice everything into mush. The media and information environment amplifies all of this.
Lazer et al. (2018) characterize the current landscape as one of “fake news” and information disorder, where low-quality or deceptive content circulates rapidly and is processed through the same motivated reasoning circuits (Himmelroos & Rapeli, 2020). Anson’s research on epistemic confidence (2022), finds that people who are most certain they are right about politics are also the least responsive to corrections of misinformation. In other words, the more confidently someone throws around “deep state” or “psy-op,” the less likely they are to engage with actual intelligence studies scholarship, legal definitions, or declassified case histories that might refine their understanding.
Can we do anything about this, beyond sighing into our coffee? There is some cautious evidence that structured deliberation and explicit reflection on ignorance can help. Experiments in deliberative democracy suggest that mixed-viewpoint discussion under good conditions can modestly reduce certain factual misperceptions, even without simply handing people the “right answer (Lazer et al., 2018). Rozenblit and Keil’s (2002) IOED work also hints at an intervention. When one examines when people are asked to explain in detail how a policy, ideology, or process works, they often recognize the gap between their confidence and their knowledge. This is a humbling, but potentially productive, shock (Rozenblit & Keil, 2002).
From an intellectual standpoint, the problem is not that non-experts use technical or ideological language; inclusive discourse requires shared concepts. The problem is when those terms are untethered from their definitions, used primarily as an identity marker, and individuals are resistant to being corrected about their misinformation. The triad, illusion of understanding, motivated reasoning, and semantic drift, is what makes misuse of these terms feel so corrosive to serious thinkers. It undermines our ability to distinguish between different systems of government, different levels of harm, or different policy tools. Everything collapses into “vibes” or simply how everyone feels or intuits (Rozenblit & Keil, 2002).
A healthier language politic would normalize three moves: (1) define your terms before weaponizing them, (2) be willing to say “I’m not sure I fully understand this concept,” and (3) treat words like “socialism,” “privilege,” or “psy-op” as hypotheses to be unpacked, not grenades to be thrown. For the working intellectual, that might not cure the headache, but it at least points toward a culture where words are used to think with, not to weaponize ad nauseum.