The first sentence of my intellectual biography of National Review’s co-founder read: “James Burnham began his intellectual career in the 1930s as one of Leon Trotsky’s leading American exponents and ended it as a senior editor for America’s preeminent conservative magazine, National Review.” At least it did until an editor changed “American exponents” to “U.S. exponents.” The clearest explanation for the change comes from an Atlantic journalist who decries using the term “America” as a synonym for the United States of America. Her article declares, “America is a region, not a country.” It even notes that people from Latin America — presumably the “real” America — associate the term with U.S. imperialism.

As a logician who was steeped in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, Burnham would have recognized the fallacies in all of this. For example, most nations have a formal name that is used in treaties and an informal popular name. The first three nations in alphabetical order reveal this: Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Republic of Albania, and People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria. United States of America can be added to this list.

And even if it is granted that there is no formal country named America, there is no formal region of the world called America either. If people from Latin American countries can call themselves American, then why can’t people from the United States of America do the same? Finally, the fact that some people from Latin America associate the term with imperialism is irrelevant; that is about their ideology, not the term.

I was baffled by another editorial adjustment to my manuscript. There has been a recent trend to capitalize Black as a racial identity. I complied since Asian and Hispanic are capitalized. Naturally, White got capitalized too … until the editor parried me again. Although Black remained capitalized, White became miniscule, so now one portion read: “The careers, homes, possessions, and even the lives of whites in Africa existed tenuously. Burnham theorized that maybe some economic benefits could emerge if a Black-run Africa became integrated into the Western economy.”

The Associated Press uses this rationale for the inconsistency: “White people generally do not share the same history and culture, or the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color.” But how do history, culture, and discrimination relate to the capitalization of a letter? This is akin to arguing that White should be capitalized and not Black because Whites wrote the Constitution, or because Whites generally pay more taxes. These opinions are all based on an unrelated arbitrary fact.

The AP’s logic continues: “Capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.” This is no different than arguing that investing heavily in infrastructure, as was done by Nazis, subtlety risks convey legitimacy to such beliefs. Everything needs to be contextualized. Yes, White supremacists prefer the capitalization of White, yet so do lots of non-White supremacists. And if everything is equal, White supremacy gets foiled.

Burnham would have recognized one source of the illogical thinking: too much ideology. His Suicide of the West (1964) dedicated a chapter to “ideological thinking.” It emphasized the psychological and even the non-rational ways that liberalism satisfies the minds of adherents by infusing ideology into everything, in this case even words and capitalizing letters. Decades before “woke” and DEI, the National Review senior editor wrote how neo-Marxist ideologues manipulate minds by dividing the world into an oppressor-oppressed binary, and they always punish the oppressor. In this case, since Whites and Americans are the dominant group, they get weakened. Ways include lowercasing their racial identity and prohibiting Americans from using their preferred proper pronoun — restricting their freedom. Rational and critical thought get thrown to the wayside. Everything succumbs to ideology.

An even more fundamental concept binds these liberal ideas together. And it was the primary concept of Burnham’s writings for decades: Power. In The Machiavellians (1943), Burnham darkly reduces politics to a struggle for power. And he understood the ways that words can be used in political discourse to exercise power; The Machiavellians teaches people to distrust the words that elites profess because the rulers seek to “confuse and hide.” They are duplicitous power-seekers. In this case, limiting the words that Americans may use when describing their homeland exercises power.

Capitalizing Black but not White is another demonstration of power. Even the timing of the idea suggests so because the AP decision was announced after pressure in July 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd protests, when even leftists were feeling overwhelmed by lockdowns. Left-wing groups such as Black Lives Matter were desperate for ways to exercise power — whether it be through protests or regulating the words (and letters) that we use.”

One figure inspired by Burnham’s ideas about words and power was George Orwell. Orwell did scold Burnham for his seeming obsession with power. In his “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” (1946), the future author of 1984 (1948) argued that Burnham’s power worshipping led him to misinterpret events (Burnham did predict that the Nazis would win WWII).

Despite this critique, Orwell’s biographers agree that Burnham’s fingerprints are all over 1984. In fact, power was the central theme of 1984: Newspeak was a way for the party to exercise power by manipulating words. Critical thought disappears in this far-left dystopia, leading to the slogans WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. In the 21st century, unequally capitalizing racial identities by those who clamor for equality leads to the slogan INEQUALITY IS EQUALITY. Irrational statements become ways to exercise and maintain power.

Burnham’s ideas remain relevant today. They provide the reader with tools that can be used to understand current American political discourse, and maybe even thwart some irrational liberal ideas.

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David Byrne earned his Ph.D. in intellectual history from Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography. @David_Byrne