‘Regime Cleavage’: How the ‘Language of Humiliation’ is Engineering a Second American Civil War |
A January 2026 Gallup poll showed that 89 percent of all Americans expect high levels of political conflict this year, as the country heads toward one of its most decisive midterm elections ever.
Gallup, however, was stating the obvious. It is a surprise that not all Americans feel this way, judging by the coarse, often outright racist discourse currently being normalized by top American officials. Some call this new rhetoric the “language of humiliation,” where officials refer to entire social and racial groups as ‘vermin’, ‘garbage’, or ‘invaders’.
The aim of this language is not simply to insult, but to feed the “Rage Bait Cycle” – tellingly, Oxford’s 2025 Word of the Year: a high-ranking official attacks a whole community or ‘the other side’, waits for a response, escalates the attacks, and then presents himself as a protector of traditions, values, and America itself. This does more than simply “hollow out” democracy, as suggested in a Human Rights Watch report last January; it prepares the country for “affective polarization”, where people no longer just disagree on political matters, but actively dislike each other for who they are and what they supposedly represent.
How else can we explain the statements of US President Donald Trump, who declared last December: “Somalia… is barely a country… Their country stinks and we don’t want them in our country… We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.” This is........