Democrats who think that President Trump may have committed an impeachable offense for apparently trying to extort Ukraine are " human scum." A Republican congresswoman trying to make a political point during said hearing is " lying trash." Just as every person with an "R" next to their name became "racists," and every person with a "D" became "socialists," we have diluted the meaning of every word in the book as it pertains to politics, and now we're reaping the rewards.

Barack Obama was not a socialist, a fact that we can surely all see with his recent demands that Democrats slow down their sprint towards Stalinism. But the Right abandoned all nuance when it came to the former president and his social-democratic ways. Now, legitimately socialist Bolshevik presidential candidates and rising superstars have radically shifted the party's Overton window on policy. And conservatives no longer have the language to describe it.

Mitt Romney was not a racist. His vehement condemnation of Trump shrugging off literal white nationalists in Charlottesville should have made that clear. But just as all Republicans were for the better part of a decade, Romney was effectively smeared as a racist during the most milquetoast Republican presidential campaign of a generation. And now actual alt-right racists have earned the embrace of prominent Republicans, and Stephen Miller sits in the West Wing, firing off V-Dare and American Renaissance articles to journalists.

We should be able to excoriate racists and racism-apologists as such. But when everyone's already been branded a racist, no one is.

Now we've cranked the euphemism treadmill so fast that we're flying off the back end. Democrats and Republicans alike are now happy to get in the gutter and call each other scum and trash, using words we might have once reserved for machete-wielding MS-13 members and torch-bearing neo-Nazis. Words are supposed to mean things, but we've desensitized everyone. When perfectly fine members of Congress are now trash and scum, what do we call actual bigots or authoritarians? What about predators and murderers?

This isn't healthy. It isn't normal. But we can at least say that it's bipartisan.