4
Crybabies and Snowflakes
Janet McIntosh
When Barack Obama won the 2008 election, he attracted unprecedented
venom from the American political right, not only on grounds of his political
orientation and race, but also because of gender anxiety. Even in 2019, googling “Obama gay rumors” yields more than twenty-eight million hits – just
one element of what Neal Gabler (2012) has identified as a persistent
Republican pattern of hyper-masculine “posturing” against Democrats. The
notion that Obama was “weak” and “wimpy” when it came to the military and
national security was a recurrent trope. His detractors framed him as a “buttkissing liberal” (Chapman 2018) wearing “mom jeans” (Bump 2014) – this, in
spite of his dictator-toppling maneuvers, military escalations, and numerous
ethically dubious drone strikes in the Middle East. Bound up with their military
critiques, Republicans also saw Obama as encouraging a kind of verbal femininity by way of so-called “politically correct” (or PC) language. Over the last
decade, the right has excoriated Democrats for stoking gender- and race-based
grievances among “coastal elites” and on college campuses, where the socalled “speech police” enforce new norms of verbal sensitivity. These new
norms see moral inferiority in what many consider ordinary designations. They
also come across to their critics as problematically feminine and childishly
sensitive (McQuillan 2017).
Donald Trump’s election on November 9, 2016 initiated one of the most
dramatic campaigns of verbal backlash America has ever seen. While millions
of Trump’s critics mobilized to march against him, conservative websites,
meme creators, and public figures – Rudy Giuliani, Fox News host Sean
Hannity, and political commentator Tomi Lahren, to name just a few – flooded
the airwaves and Internet to lambast these protesters as “liberal crybabies” and
“snowflakes.” Trump’s former Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway was
a particular fan of these insults. A few days after the election she appeared on
Hannity’s show dismissing protesters and politicians who “whine and cry over
Donald Trump’s election” (Lima 2016), and arguing that student demonstrations on university campuses were staged by “precious snowflakes” (Flood
2016). A couple of weeks later, Conway appeared on “Meet the Press” to poohpooh the vote recounts Democrats had requested, saying Dems were
74
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Crybabies and Snowflakes
75
“interfering” like “a bunch of crybabies” (NBC News 2016). It wouldn’t be long
before White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon would mock those protesting Trump’s travel ban against citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries,
deeming them laughable “snowflakes” (Wolff 2018: 65).
The Google Trends website, which tracks “interest” (i.e. volume of web
searches) over time, confirms that the phrases “liberal crybabies” and “liberal
snowflakes” spiked sharply around the time of Trump’s election and inauguration (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2). Trump protesters, meanwhile, were sometimes
bewildered by the mismatch between the right’s insults and their own understanding of what they were up to. Trump’s detractors shed tears, to be sure, but
from law professors to workaday Americans alarmed by his bigotry, they were
also mustering a wide array of stances and strategies: erudite argumentation
about his politics, anger inflected by shades of wit, strategic mobilization in
well-organized marches, and so forth. Why would the right converge again and
again on words and phrases so implacable and so dramatically mismatched to
the actions and experiences of the left? And just what were they trying to
achieve with them?
The crybaby/snowflake discourse serves as a stark reminder of a linguisticanthropological truism: people don’t just use language to communicate information about the world. In fact, sometimes language is of only incidental
referential value. Language does things, and it can be mobilized to reshape
Figure 4.1 “Liberal crybabies.” Screenshot of google trends, showing
“interest over time” in the phrase “liberal crybabies” from April 2014 to
April 2018. The highest spike dates to November 6–November 12, 2016, the
week after the election, when Trump’s detractors wrung their hands and his
supporters went on the verbal attack. The second highest spike dates to
January 22–January 28, 2017, the week after the inauguration. (Precise dates
are only visible when the user interacts with the chart online.) Source: Google
Trends, https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2014–04-01%
202018–04-01&geo=US&q=%22liberal%20crybabies%22.
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76
Janet McIntosh
Figure 4.2 “Liberal snowflakes.” Screenshot of Google Trends, tracking
“interest over time” of the phrase “liberal snowflakes” from April 2014 to
April 2018. The flat line first shows signs of life on November 5, 2016, the eve
of the election, followed immediately by a cluster of spikes, with the two
highest points of interest taking place over a three-week window surrounding
Trump’s inauguration. (The related phrase “special snowflake” also peaks in
January 2017.) Source: Google Trends, https://trends.google.com/trends/exp
lore?date=2014–04-01%202018–04-01&geo=US&q=%22liberal%20snow
flakes%22.
social relations. Understanding how words can have this world-shaping significance requires looking to broader context. The crybaby/snowflake discourse obtains some of its meaning through what linguistic anthropologists
call “interdiscursive” (sometimes called “intertextual”) effects. When we talk
about interdiscursivity, we mean that the significance of words and utterances
doesn’t just come from inherent word meaning or the immediate situation, but
also from a history of use and from relationships with speech events in other
contexts (Agha 2005: 2). Put another way, words have a social life, and carry
baggage with them from one context to another (Bakhtin 1983).
In the case of the crybaby and snowflake insults, for instance, their significance played on a long-standing cleavage in “language ideology” – that is, in
value-laden ideas about language. The main ideological gap concerns PC
language, a gap that widened during the Obama years. After conservatives’
electoral defeat to Obama, lashing out verbally against sensitive liberals who
claimed to be on the moral high ground seemed like satisfying retribution. But
in this chapter, I also suggest that with their linguistic grenades, the right has
borrowed a semiotic weapon from a context where a regime of overt linguistic
insensitivity has long flourished; namely, the United States military. Based on
my recent fieldwork among Army and Marine Corps veterans and Marine
Corps Drill Instructors (both active duty and retired), I suggest the most potent
interdiscursive resonance for the right wing’s current crybaby/snowflake
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Crybabies and Snowflakes
77
discourse – and what pushes it in the direction of social action more than
reference – can be found in the rites of passage that take place during basic
training, or “boot camp.”
By looking at this interdiscursivity, we can see that the crybaby/snowflake
discourse is more complex in its agenda than mere “trolling,” in the sense of
“comment[ing] and debat[ing] for the sole purpose of agitation” (Smith 2019:
132). I suggest that once we grasp the loose resonance between pro-Trump
insults and boot camp insults, we are better poised to understand why the
crybaby/snowflake discourse has had such appeal to the right; what broader
ideological visions it brings with it; and what, exactly, these utterances are
supposed to do in the world, in terms of their social effects. I should be clear,
too, that the interdiscursive resonance is not just a matter of similar words such
as “crybaby” and “snowflake,” but also the similar stances that accompany
those words. “Stance,” a concept in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics (Jaffe 2009), describes the relational attitude a speaker takes up, including
the speaker’s relationship to their interlocutors and, sometimes, to their utterance itself. When we recognize the military cousins of the crybaby/snowflake
discourse, it is easier to understand that the stance it carves out is hierarchical,
gendered, and ritualistic (the ritual part will become clearer below), designed to
rebuke and possibly even school the interlocutor.
Below, I discuss four kinds of social action implied by the crybaby/snowflake discourse. First, although right-wingers indulging in the crybaby/snowflake discourse probably wouldn’t imagine themselves to be staging a rite of
passage, they adopt a stance with uncanny resemblance to the structural role of
a Drill Instructor – or, in terms of ritual theory, a “ritual elder” who will school
their interlocutor. Second, the crybaby/snowflake discourse tries to shut down
the back-and-forth of standard conventions for political discussion, framing
Trump’s detractors as callow neophytes whose protestations are unworthy of
deliberative verbal exchange. Third, the discourse sends the message that the
left’s empathy – the emotional root of some leftist policy preferences – is
misplaced and that part of “growing up” means setting it aside. And finally,
more subtly, the crybaby/snowflake discourse may be asserting a message (a
meta-message, perhaps) that Trump’s critics are too sensitive to language itself.
All of these effects, in military contexts and Trumpian ones, are tied to the
ostensible goal of making the nation stronger and harder, in a pugilistic, zerosum model of the political world.
4.1
Crybabies and Semiotic Callousing in Boot Camp
So how does the crybaby/snowflake stance play out in military contexts?
As many people know, basic military training – perhaps most famously
in the Marine Corps, where most of my examples come from – consists of
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Janet McIntosh
a multi-week rite of passage that breaks down the recruit (roughly 90 percent of
whom are male in the Marines, so I opt for male pronouns, here) and builds him
back up in line with an ideal of military masculinity. Drill Instructors, or DIs,
assume the role of the “ritual elder” and subjugate their initiates (recruits) to
physical demands and psychological stress. Language is crucial to the process,
by way of a dynamic I call “semiotic callousing.” In semiotic callousing, the DI
deploys signs, especially terms of address, designed to berate and wound and,
in so doing, to habituate the recruit to such wounding, dulling the recruit’s
interpretive sensitivity. (One could say that the process involves numbing by
way of words, but also numbing the interlocutor to words.)
Exactly how semiotic callousing shakes out varies from one branch and unit
to the next. In the post-Vietnam era, for instance, the Recruit Training Order at
Parris Island, SC (one of two Marine Corps Training Depots), has stated that
DIs are not supposed to use profanity or disrespectful language, but my own
interviews with post-9/11 veterans suggest this official dictum is variably
applied. Plenty of DIs have a florid vocabulary of lacerating put-downs.
Collecting these, I’ve come across “crybabies,” “snowflakes,” “whiners,”
“weaklings,” “wusses,” “lazy bastards,” “maggots,” “hogs,” “crayon-eaters,”
“clowns,” “retards,” “shit-bags,” “shit-birds,” and a raft of gender-troubled
insults, including “ladies,” “little girls,” “faggots,” “pussies,” “pansies,” “buttercups,” “cupcakes,” and “sweethearts.” One former Marine Corps Drill
Instructor (in an unpublished interview; I withhold his name for
confidentiality)1 told me that during his service in the 1980s, he would first
allow a seemingly level-headed DI to address recruits before he would “charge
in, yelling and screaming, and spit’s foaming out of [my] mouth. Actually,
I used to put an Alka-Seltzer tab in my mouth so that when I was yelling and
screaming, the foam would come out.” This is not talk-as-usual. Initiates are
startled as they realize that rationality, and certainly the possibility of a retort,
have gone out the window. Already we might begin to see some similarities
with the tidal wave of insults aimed at Trump’s detractors after the election,
when conventional political discussion and debate seemed to be impossible.
Of course, the daunting insults listed above do not accurately describe
groups of young people striving and sometimes struggling to meet the exhausting and bewildering demands made of them during boot camp, any more than
the word “crybaby” neatly characterizes a legal scholar mobilizing an argument
for a vote recount. Insults like these aren’t meant to function with referential
accuracy. Rather, in the military context – and, just maybe, in the context of
a shocking political turnaround – they function in the way that so many rites of
passage do: in the words of anthropologist Victor Turner ([1969]2017: 95), they
“[grind] down [the initiate] to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew.” In the
case of the Marine Corps, the tender young person is being made into a Marine
who will function well in a combat situation and obey orders at all cost. Drill
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Crybabies and Snowflakes
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Instructors and veterans alike tell me that the berating of basic training helps
accustom recruits to stress, while shucking off the self-centered quality they
were raised with and habituating them to the notion that sensitivity is unwelcome in this hardened context. Complaints are not tolerated. When anyone
feels upset or defeated, such soldiers or vets are often met with the military
catchphrase, “Suck it up.”
Plenty of veterans vociferously defend this mode of training when it comes
under attack, as it occasionally does when, for instance, recruits report being
abused or even take their own life. A number of veterans have told me of the
importance of learning to “let the words roll off you.”2 In the comments section
of an article about a recruit who complained about his treatment, one veteran
likened (anti-PC) military language directly to the importance of strict parenting: “As a parent when raising kids I used a few words to my kids that perhaps
were not politically correct and smacked them when the need was there and
their little egos did not get damaged and they have gone on to become
responsible adults. This little crybaby should be sent home to his Mama so
she can cut his meat for him” (Dodd 2004). What Marines and service members
from other branches learn over time is the fundamental military axiom that if
you are going to be considered not merely a responsible adult, but what
anthropologist Catherine Lutz (2002) calls a “super-citizen,” a person armed
to save the very nation, your language ideology should align with the old
maxim: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt
me.” If you can’t handle verbal slights, how can you handle the rigors of
combat? Semiotic callousing is thus construed by military insiders as
a positive moral act of salvation or re-education; it’s for the recruit’s own
good, and in turn, good for the strength of the nation.
4.2
Interdiscursive Influence: From Boot Camp to Trumpist
Triumphalism
The notion that boot camp dynamics have some alignment with conservative
attitudes toward left-leaning Americans may sound far-fetched, but occasionally one can witness the connections being drawn. Take my 2019 conversation
with a retired Drill Instructor while we ate breakfast at a mess hall at the Parris
Island Recruit Training Depot. He was griping that the current generation of
young recruits are overly sensitive compared to those in generations past, and
that the winds of change during the Obama era had pressured some DIs to be
more careful with their insults. “What are they going to give these Marines at
graduation,” he asked with a rhetorical flourish. “A dress? But then,” he went
on, “It’s a whole generation of entitled liberal snowflakes.” Such words and
concepts – snowflakes, crybabies, whiners, and any number of slurs depicting
hapless childishness or femininity – circulate among DIs and Republicans
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Janet McIntosh
alike; a grab bag of signifiers that call up a raft of ideological assumptions about
those who are problematically weak, be they recruits, sensitive young people,
or liberals.
Some of the clearest interdiscursive bridges can be found in the internet
memes that draw direct lines between Trump’s rise, military authority, and the
crybaby/snowflake discourse. Consider, for instance, one meme that appeared
online shortly after the election, when Trump announced that he would nominate career Marine General James Mattis for Secretary of Defense. In the image
(Figure 4.3), Mattis stares implacably in uniform, framed by words that would
seem to address Obama’s supporters or the left more broadly: “IT’S OVER
SNOWFLAKES . . . THE ADULTS ARE BACK IN CHARGE.”
Another meme (Figure 4.4) features R. Lee Ermey, the Parris Island Drill
Instructor who was famously hired to play a Marine Corps Drill Instructor in
Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film Full Metal Jacket. In the meme, Ermey confronts
the viewer as if they were ambiguously suspended between being a Marine
Corps recruit and a Trump critic. Some of the following phrases are lifted
directly from his Drill Instructor lines in the film: “LISTEN HERE
SNOWFLAKE . . . YOU BETTER FLUSH THAT LIBERAL SEPTIC
TANK THAT SITS BETWEEN YOUR TWO SHOULDER BLADES. AND
SAY TRUMP IS MY PRESIDENT, OR I WILL GOUGE OUT YOUR EYES
AND SKULL FU*K YOU!”
Figure 4.3 “IT’S OVER SNOWFLAKES.” Digital Image. Twitter Page.
February 7, 2017. https://bit.ly/2qU8rVh.
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Crybabies and Snowflakes
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Figure 4.4 “LISTEN HERE SNOWFLAKE.” Digital Image. Meme.
January 26, 2017. https://bit.ly/2rLHG5a.
Another Ermey meme (Figure 4.5) features a different image of him pointing
aggressively at the camera. It reads: “SUCK IT UP BUTTERCUP! IT’S
TRUMP TIME AND WE DON’T GIVE A SHITABOUT YOUR FEELINGS!”
Consider, too, the connections drawn by an Air Force Veteran in his video
response to the protests after Trump’s election. On November 14, 2016, Fox
News posted his clip under the title “You Crybabies Are Why Donald Trump
Won” (Fox News Insider 2016; the clip now has over twenty-four million
views).3 As the veteran faces the camera to address Trump’s detractors, he
rants: “That’s the problem with this country. You can’t always get your way!
Everybody wants to be politically correct! . . . We’re tired of you crybabies! . . .
None of you put on a uniform, but you’re quick to disrespect the flag . . . you
didn’t fight for anything, but you want it! . . . This ain’t your damn country!
Leave!” Trump’s critics, he suggests, are “crybaby” military avoiders and PCenthusiasts, who between their softness and failure to sacrifice haven’t earned
the right to be full citizens.
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Figure 4.5 “SUCK IT UP BUTTERCUP!” Digital image. Pinterest. n.d.
www.pinterest.com/pin/471118811012099164/.
4.3
Trumpist Insults as Social Action
To be sure, many Trump supporters who have used the crybaby/snowflake
discourse may not be consciously aware of its interdiscursive resonance in the
United States military. But in spite of any individual’s intentions, words circulate
within and take their meaning from broader ideological fields that some speakers
will recognize, however dimly; interdiscursivity often works through loose
understanding and partial recognition. Of course, the aims of the crybaby/
snowflake discourse in the military are rigidly goal-oriented, intended to bring
the majority of recruits into the club (as it were) of combat-ready service
members, while the discourse of Trump supporters is not as clear in its aims.
Nevertheless, I suggest the overlap furnishes an instructive framework. The
vaguely military stances of the crybaby/snowflake discourse steep these
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Crybabies and Snowflakes
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communicative acts, these kinds of insults, in meaning, giving them more force
as a kind of social action.
First, in both the military and the political cases, Victor Turner’s ([1969]
2017) insights about the structure of rites of passage seem relevant, for the
insulter adopts the role of masculinized ritual elder who is in a position to
pummel and school the initiates through what I’ve called semiotic callousing.
Surely being in a position to adopt such a role has been gratifying for the part of
Trump’s base that have framed themselves as long-silenced underdogs vis-àvis the hypereducated “liberal elites” feared to be winning the “culture war.”
The crybaby/snowflake discourse allows the right to frame liberals as infantilized and spoiled, requiring maturation. After all, “crybabies” whine, fuss, and
go into the fetal position when they don’t get what they want, while “snowflakes” insist on their delicate uniqueness (a common complaint about leftists
from the right), and shrivel and melt the instant things get heated. (The earliest
documented appearance of the term “snowflake” as an insult – an origin that
underscores its pugilism and nihilism – comes from Chuck Palahniuk’s [2005[1996]: 134] novel Fight Club: “You are not special. You’re not a beautiful and
unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
We’re all part of the same compost heap.”) The stance of the doctrinaire ritual
elder meshes well, incidentally, with what George Lakoff (1996) has long said
about conservative politics; namely, that it is underpinned by what he calls
a “strict father” model, emphasizing authoritarian masculinity, punitive discipline, and personal responsibility in contrast to a progressive “nurturant parent”
model of the state. If those on the right have been feeling threatened, even
fearful, of the influence of the left, they have their moment now in which to
adopt a paternalist and punitive stance. It’s worth noting that Trump himself
lacks strong military masculine credentials – although he attended the
New York Military Academy in his teens, he famously dodged the Vietnam
draft by way of his supposed “bone spurs” – but even so, his supporters’ insults
seem to give them a grip on masculine power over Democrats.
Second, the stance adopted by the speaker (or yeller) – the proverbial ritual
elder – is one of domination, denigration, and de-ratification that shuts down
communication, in the sense that the recruit or the protester is not able to speak
back or respond in any way. Protesters may mobilize a carefully reasoned
objection to some aspect of Trump’s political stances, but they are met with
a semiotic punch. In her discussion of insulting speech acts, Judith Butler
(1997: 4) notes how socially disorienting they can be: “[When] addressed
injuriously,” she writes, “one can be ‘put in one’s place’ by such speech, but
such a place may be no place.” Injurious speech can strip the target of
recognition, rendering them not an interlocutor so much as a non-entity.
Accordingly, many of the right-wing “snowflake” memes concern the idea
that the left has had difficulty accepting a world in which they “lost” and Trump
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and supporters “won,” as if “losing” an election means losing a voice. Again,
this stance makes sense if one considers that the repetitive cudgeling of the
crybaby/snowflake discourse has no resemblance to a communicative
exchange, but instead the whiff of rite-of-passage dynamics. Not only are
Trump supporters in the role of ritual elder, but Trump’s detractors are placed
into the role of what Victor Turner calls the “liminal” neophyte, who is often
symbolically denigrated to the point of being a social non-entity, a person inbetween their former social role and their future one. And when their objections
are reduced to childish whining, they don’t deserve to be heard (they deserve to
be spanked, in fact, if one goes with a retrograde model of the strict father). The
crybaby/snowflake discourse thus clarifies the stance of the speakers toward
their targets: We are not in conversation, and unless and until you change you
are not worth listening to.
Third, like Drill Instructors’ insults, and arguably beyond typical internet
trolling, the right-wing’s crybaby/snowflake discourse has a hint of
a pedagogical dimension. In many rites of passage, when the initiates are at
their most vulnerable, they are presented with teaching tools (Turner calls them
sacra) that instruct neophytes explicitly or implicitly in what their new social
role ought to be as they “grow up.” In military basic training, the semiotic
callousing of insults functions simultaneously to grind down the recruits and, as
sacra, to inculcate the vital lesson that military strength, “national security,” is
contingent on attenuating both personal sensitivity and empathy for the vulnerable (cf. Cohn and Ruddick 2004). This is a lesson many Trump supporters
would approve of; indeed, the United States is in the midst of a major ideological disagreement when it comes to the question of whether it is morally
appropriate to extend empathic feeling far and wide. The “crybabies” at antiTrump rallies have expressed their dismay on behalf of the many historically
vulnerable groups Trump’s rise imperils. Yet, as part of their “anti-PC” stance,
many Trump supporters feel that women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights imperil
a strong traditional patriarchy; that Muslims and immigrants threaten both
national security (supposedly via terrorism and crime) and Christian hegemony; and that ethnic and racial minorities have weakened a strong economy
by “cutting in line” for “handouts” (see Hochschild 2016 for ethnographic
discussion of the political predecessors of this stance, the “tea partiers”).
Blasting away at the hand-wringers who object to Trump, an unofficial campaign slogan started appearing on T-shirts at Trump rallies in 2015 reading:
“TRUMP ***2016*** FUCK YOUR FEELINGS.”4 Perhaps a hidden script in
the “crybaby/snowflake” discourse is that the right wing wishes its own
callousness could serve as a model of “growing up,” and the left would follow
suit, hardening their own stance toward the huddled masses. If they did, the
right seems to believe, the nation would be better off – no coddling or “handouts” for minorities, no sympathy for those locked out of the gates, no tears for
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Crybabies and Snowflakes
85
those who feel oppressed by Trump’s patriarchal White nationalist
agenda. Just “America” – narrowly defined, patently racialized, and
patriarchally heteronormative – “first.”
Finally, perhaps another element of the sacra in the verbal cudgeling from
the right is the message that liberals shouldn’t be so sensitive about language
itself. We know Trump and many of his supporters have refused the liberal
language ideology that sensitivity in word choice is morally right and good.
After all, Trump was elected partly by dint of his identity as a “straight talker”
who doesn’t care who he offends – a gratifying stance for supporters who feel
the “PC” language movement has gone too far. Many on the right have
expressed their disgust at being told they are ignorant, immoral, or both for
the way they use language. The stance adopted in their crybaby/snowflake
discourse includes a relational attitude toward these very utterances, one that
resonates with military insults. The attitude seems to be: If you can’t handle an
insult, if you’re going to wither whenever someone hurts your feelings, how
will you handle the harsh realities of the world, or get anything done in politics,
for that matter? This message is an extension of the right’s attack on political
correctness. It cleverly turns the left’s put-down (“you Republicans are ignorant and immoral in your verbal disregard for others”) into something no one
wanted to be associated with; namely, being pathetically sensitive to language,
and out of touch as a result. The messaging further aggravates the split in
politics between overly educated elites (Obama, Hillary Clinton, and beyond)
with their painstaking parsing of word meaning, and the voters who see them as
snobbish and distant compared to Republican candidates such as Trump who
try to frame themselves as “straight shooters” and “everyday guys.”
The discourse has also helped clear a path for a president who excels at
insults, and exacerbates a political climate that, instead of being centered
around democratic discussion and mutuality, divides the nation into winners
and losers. Unlike military recruits, however, those on the left don’t “learn to let
the words roll off,” accept their silencing, or curtail their empathy. What
they’ve done, sometimes, is to try to flip the script against their would-be ritual
elders, with protest signs and memes reading: “Damn right we’re snowflakes.
WINTER IS COMING” (which happens to be an interdiscursive reference to
the popular 2011–2019 HBO series about succession wars, Game of Thrones).
And in a proliferating discourse, many have decided to lob the crybaby
discourse right back in the direction of the (ironically, notoriously) thinskinned president himself. The Internet and news media are teeming with
caricatures and memes of Trump in a onesie, Trump having a tantrum, Trump
sucking on a binkie. The diapered “Trump blimp” has made appearances at
demonstrations across the world, while broadcasters and journalists have taken
to calling Trump “President Snowflake.”5 It’s fun, a bit gratifying, but boomeranging the right’s insults back in their direction also smacks of the
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86
Janet McIntosh
schoolyard, when there are so many difficult but constructive political conversations that need to be had (and that indeed many of Trump’s critics are
striving for). In order to create a space for such conversation, we will need
a national communicative framework that resists the temptation of the silencing
maneuvers I have described.
Notes
1. I engaged in personal conversation with retired and active duty Marine Corps Drill
Instructors over the course of several months in 2018–2019, both remotely and in
person. Due to the ethical requirement to protect the identities of those I spoke to, I do
not furnish their names, and in some cases opt to withhold details of when or where
a conversation took place. Some conversations took place on Parris Island, and
others via Skype with far-flung respondents.
2. Over the course of 2018–2019 I interviewed several dozen American veterans who
served in the Marine Corps or Army during the Vietnam War or the Global War on
Terror. The particular statement quoted here, or variations of it, encapsulates
a language-ideological stance I heard from at least ten veterans.
3. It is tempting to imagine that Fox News was capitalizing not only on the “crybabies”
title, but also on the fact that the veteran is Black, a tokenism that they may have
hoped gives support to the argument that Trump has legitimate appeal to minorities.
4. The sentiment has been echoed in various other memes, such as the bumper sticker
I have seen around Massachusetts reading “TRUMP 2020: MAKE LIBERALS CRY
AGAIN.”
5. In Van Jones’ case, it was based on Trump’s response to the FBI’s Russia probe in
May 2017 (CNN 2017; see also Schneider 2017).
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