Writers always see the perceived misuse of words in apocalyptic terms, and
The Atlantic is itself invested in a kind of elite moral panic over "woke culture," so I tend to look at articles like this with some skepticism.
One thing is that Packer himself fails to analyze the language under consideration with precision; the examples he lays out all fall, roughly, under a few different categories, which should be considered separately:
- Branding and inclusivity: Much of what he proffers as examples are not unfamiliar to anyone who's had to work with corporate style guides, where terms are favored or disfavored partially in relation to branding tone and voice, and partially to maximize clarity (idiosyncratic style being a frequent source of confusion). No one's harmed by a press release avoiding terms like "blind to" in favor of "refusing to see what's happening;" as a personal matter I prefer the concision of the former, but the latter is more plainspoken if also somewhat dull. Plodding and dull is often exactly what you're looking for in official communiques.
- Specificity and Precision: Again, while using "Americans" to refer to US residents is reasonable in casual contexts, or where American citizens are under discussion (e.g., political contexts), it's also reasonable to refer to "US residents" or the like. The biggest problem is that there isn't a concise term that covers "US citizens and legal permanent residents" that doesn't make you sound like a DHS circular or a legal opinion. (An additional complication is when you're working with Mexican and LATAM entities, where "American" is strongly disfavored unless you're literally talking about the Americas broadly. Same problem when people use "North American" to refer to US-Candada exclusively.) Slicing your terms finely to clearly delineate what you're discussing, and what you're not discussing, is again a perfectly reasonable goal in organizational communications, if anathema to a talented writer who is used to bending words to the context, rather than straightjacketing terms within specific contexts.
Both inclusivity and specificity are goals of most guides, particularly in journalism. (I'm not sure what style guide The Atlantic hews to, but rest assured their editors adhere to something.) Packer can argue that the Sierra Club's guide tends towards creating uninspired, workmanlike prose, but making a moral panic of that seems unwarranted.
- Instrumentalism: Instrumental terms are the ones that do have a real-world impact, because they're designed to either defuse or infuse a term with emotional valence. Instrumental terms contain arguments within themselves: using the term "slave" robs the person in question of their agency, which distances policy or analytic questions from those very people; "enslaved person" changes the context to slavery as an imposition on an agentive person; likewise, my preferred term (for Black slaves in US history), "enslaved American" goes evern further, being a deliberate and implicit argument against the legality of slavery even prior to the 13th Amendment. The term "justice-involved person" instead of "felon" is risible even to me, but the negative emotional valence of the latter term has a real effect on policy and the perception of policy, which is why terms like "ex-offender" are becoming more commonly used. Instrumentalist terms can be used for good or for evil; to make arguments, defuse emotional responses, or to invoke high dudgeon (Gingrich's famed GOPAC memo is a masterclass on using instrumentalist terms to whip up public emotion).
Whereas the worst you can say about branding and precision terms is that they're frequently clumsy and bland, instrumentalist language can affect the real world in often direct ways, and it's well worth interrogating the use of those terms to make their impact clear. Unfortunately, Packer fails to distinguish between the context of different kinds of language (it should be unsurprising that a policy paper uses clear if clumsy language, while a literary nonfiction book uses poetic and impactful imagery), and lumps all kinds of language style requirements under a general "equity language" heading, which is unhelpful and arguably misleading.