The culture wars, not content with bending and blocking the words we read, apparently come for the typeface in which authors write those words, too.
Three years ago, President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced, loudly and to great fanfare, a switch from Plantin typeface to the Sans Serif family within his department’s official documents.
Not since President Dwight Eisenhower appointed African American Foreign Service Officer Clifton R. Wharton Sr. as the U.S. minister to Romania has the State Department celebrated such a win for progress as the order to use the Calibri font.
“The new font change will make the Department’s written products and communications more accessible,” a Blinken flunky told the press. “It demonstrates Secretary Blinken’s allyship to those with disabilities and underscores his support for employees with disabilities. Moreover, this change underscores that the values and message of disability inclusion are not restricted to any given month or period, but something that should be pursued all year round.”
Would not a switch to Braille have more fully demonstrated allyship and inclusivity to the disabled than did Calibri?
Curvy and not sharp, warm and not cold, and modern and not old-fashioned, Calibri appears as the typographic equivalent of a hug from Barney the Purple Dinosaur to the soundtrack of the “I Love You” song (this is Helvetica, but close enough to Calibri for government work). At least the Calibrians and their enemies see it that way. Everyone else does not think about fonts all that much.
One can think of Sans Serif in relation to letters what brutalism is to architecture.
Sans Serif, as its name explains, encompasses fonts that lack a serif, i.e., extended lines or strokes. One can think of Sans Serif in relation to letters what brutalism is to architecture. It lacks flair and instead relies on utilitarianism. Serif-type fonts, on the other hand, embrace letters as art — with calligraphy acting as an extreme example of this. (RELATED: Bauhaus and the Cult of Ugliness)
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Wednesday a return to tradition in an eponymous memo. He conceded that Calibri stood “not among the Department’s most illegal, immoral, radical, or wasteful instances of DEIA” (I cannot keep up with the evolving acronyms to tell you what the “A” means). But he explained that replacing it with what it replaced — Times New Roman — “reflect[s] the same dignity, consistency, and formality expected in official government correspondence.”
Really, Times New Roman reflects our humanity. Nobody, save for C3PO or Data, writes in Sans Serif. Everybody, in cursive and even in print, writes in a Serif style to one degree or another. In other words, one is human and the other machine.
Times New Roman, designed nearly a century ago for the Times of London, works so well for newspapers because of its tall letters, large counters (i.e., the enclosed area on a “P” or a “D”), and the reluctance of the lowercase “g,” “q,” and “y” to dip too far beneath the line. Yours truly relies on it for Spectator A.M. and Coca-Cola used it for its “It’s the Real Thing” campaign, but, alas, the Times of London has long since ditched it. It contains style, if a muted one, but really strikes less beautiful than familiar to the eyes.
It turns out Times New Roman, the restored font, deposed an earlier, even less woke font at the State Department. In 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell replaced Courier New with it during the George W. Bush Administration.
Courier New, a Joe Friday, just-the-facts-ma’am style, looks like the typesetting used in any pitched movie script, especially, one imagines, for Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, and Dial M for Murder. If Courier New were any more hardboiled, it would be Courier. Possibly the choice of Courier New over Courier represented a curtsy toward the sensitivities of that age, which makes one wonder if some yet undiscovered font — Crayola Kiss? — replaces Calibri when it screams “get off my lawn” to 22nd Century eyes.
Letters amount to symbols. So, it keeps with that theme that politicians further use them as symbols of their agenda. Times New Roman over Calibri feels very Gulf of America, “Richard Levine” over “Rachel Levine” even.
Like Skittles, it pleases the palate but ultimately leaves the stomach empty. When the substance of an agenda (e.g., abolition of Obamacare and the Legal Services Corporation, building a wall across the Mexican border, compelling other NATO member states to contribute more to their defense, etc.) proves too difficult to implement, then the symbols increasingly appeal.
Still, the Times New Roman symbols appeal more than the Calibri representation of the alphabet. The same (correct) Trump administration mentality that emphasizes classical architecture for government buildings over box-store chic governs this preference for letters with (a slight bit of) panache over artless ones.
READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn:
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, 2025-12-11 18:03:00, 
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