Interesting.

It may be a radical tangent to your argument, but I wonder, here, at how the right employs this sort of doublethink/double speak in their "Lincoln was a Republican" argument. They argue that Abraham Lincoln was, perhaps, the most consequential progressive in American history. (This proceeds from the "Lincoln freed the slaves" tale; in actuality, the slaves freed themselves by fighting for the Union during the Civil War, and Lincoln was an astute enough a politician to get ahead of this event by supporting the 13th Amendment.) But, they ignore the subsequent history of the 20th century, in which the Democratic and Republican parties changed places. As the Civil War generation died out in the first half of the century, the Democratic Party moved from racist segregation (racist slavery "lite") to a center-left, but definitely more progressive position in the second half of that century. (Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, even Clinton, to a lesser extent.) The Republican Party, in a mirror-image movement, went from the progressive positions of a Teddy Roosevelt to the centrism of a Dwight Eisenhower, to the class warfare (war of Republicans as a class against Americans as a class) of a Ronald Reagan, to the blatantly autocratic and totalitarian positions of the Trumpists, in the early 21st century.

But, through all this change, the two parties kept their names, teams that wore the same colors or jerseys, as they switched goals. The Cartesian argument is that language determines thought, then action. Yet, here, we have a case of thought and actions changing (inverting), while the names, the words, remain the same. How does this square with the Cartesian argument that the word, the name, defines the thought?