With the victory of Joe Biden and the departure of Donald Trump, the US left appears to have lost its brief moment of unity and returned to its cultural civil war about the nature of language, free speech and the boundaries of acceptable opinion.
It has a generational aspect, but that could be overstated. It is often a raw power struggle, but that too is disguised. And without The Donald raging in The White House as a unifying opponent, it seems set to open up wide again.
The most recent manifestation has been at The New York Times, which has seen a number of sackings for cultural offence, but which has blown up with the resignation of science writer Donald McNeil Jr, who issued a grovelling apology regarding an event two years ago.
McNeil was leading a (rather pricey) student tour of Peru sponsored by the NYT and was, at dinner, discussing the use of what we now call “the n-word” in articles. In doing so he apparently used the word (which I’ll refer to, in US fashion as “n-” from hereon) quotationally.
Subsequently 150 employees of the NYT signed a letter demanding an apology. And he duly went, with a letter that had a light touch of Stalin’s show trials about it.
The issue is murky to say the least. There have been accusations that McNeil had used such words in a non-quotational form at other times, but they formed no part of the case against him. Adjudicating it from the outside is pointless, though it is almost impossible for those of us from a political background which emphasises the importance of free speech to not see it as a massive overreaction.
What is significant is that this, and a half-dozen other such causes, have kicked into life after Trump’s departure.
A sort of truce that was in place to focus on the common enemy has now come down, and the war around language and meaning is on again. That war is no trifle. It is occurring within the left/progressive side of things, largely within the knowledge class section of it, because of the “language effect”.
If you work in language, images and symbols all day, and if such have increasing social power — if they run systems and create selfhoods — then the question of the language effect becomes real. Words do then have a material effect on persons; saying “n-” can be, in some situations, more like hitting someone with a bat than engaging in robust discussion.
One side of the progressive left — those in “knowledge” professions on the road to class power — see that material conception of language as absolute. They have no qualms about leveraging state or corporate power to shape behaviour.
For those of us from a left focused on trying to gain political-economic power for the most powerless, the emphasis on language as free speech exchange has to be uppermost. Not because of any classical liberal style fetishisation of it, but because it is essential to making visible power that exists. Some on the left foolishly went way too far co-operating with “no platforming” demands against far-right groups.
The blanket shutdown of those in the wake of the January 6 US Capitol invasion has swept up hundreds of left groups, websites, Facebook pages, etc — including those which explicitly renounce putschist action while affirming the democratic right to revolt.
The conflict between these two broad formations has the status of a war because many in the progressive-knowledge groups no longer see themselves in alliance with a left, or with the poor and economically powerless.
Gender and race have become the all-but exclusive lines of division. It’s a move which allows the women and POC sections of the knowledge class to claim to represent the interests of all women and POC; they claim to have no conflicts of interest between each group and to share, uniformly, the degree of oppression of the most oppressed within such major formations.
At its worst this is a form of “oppression-cooption”, in which the symbolic and moral capital of oppression is alienated from the actually oppressed by said sections of the rising knowledge class.
This is presented as solidarity, but it’s really a version of what the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto called “the circulation of elites”: the replacement of one clique by another, the latter marshalling a new morality to legitimise their takeover (a morality which might well have real claims of justice).
What was once a strategic debate between sections of the left is now a political/class conflict. There are those who still see themselves as fighting for the oppressed with a premium on defending the sphere of free speech, and those who have now quit that fight entirely and are fighting for their sectional elite interests — often disguised as a more general struggle.
Joe Biden’s accession was a victory for the broadest coalition of those groups. Now that it has been won, you can expect the cultural political war — around language, the state, censorship and, yep, freedom — to become the main game.
Do these self-indulgent, over-educated grandstanders realise how stupid this looks from the outside? Massive economic inequality and inter-generational theft need to be addressed urgently and they’re fighting over language. This sort of obscure internecine squabbling among sections of the chattering classes is why we got Trumpism in the first place. God help us.
Like Morrison, Dutton, BoJo and even soon-to-be-acquitted Trump, they don’t have to care either how it looks from the outside or about economic deprivation. Because no-one (except a mass, organised worker movement) can stop them getting away with it and they will not be the ones to be deprived. A sufficiently pettifogging, zealous anti-racism may be just as effective to divide classes as racism itself.
Just in case your first sentence was not a rhetorical question, the answer is, surely, “NO!”.
They haven’t a clue and wouldn’t even understand the concept, given the farce they perpetrate.
Just here to express my general frustration with parts of the left/liberals’ obsessions with culture, language and opinions.
Of course language matters, but not at the expense of the steady attenuation of political/economic power for the most powerless in Australia.
There are serious material problems facing Australia – jobseeker barely being above poverty rates, epidemic of housing insecurity, encroaching police and state interference in people’s lives, I could go on…
I work with parents in the child protection system, who typically are survivors of intergenerational poverty and all the social problems with come with that – family violence, developmental trauma, substance addiction, state intervention in families.
It is so hard to have any time for these culture wars when I see daily how much the most powerless in Australia would benefit from a real material left social movement around things like public housing, actual universal health care, liveable social security.
“Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.”
The Right have never had to worry about being defeated by the Left; the intellectual Left’s neurotic propensity to disappear up their own anuses in the face of potential victory will always be their undoing.
It really is that simple.
One needn’t even posit agent provocateurs inserting the constant idiocies into leftish discourse as it generates new ones each time another intersectionality proclaims self awareness.
Which occurs with depressing frequency.
After seeing years of these language debates in “progressive” circles, I’ve come to see them as the easy alternative to meaningful change.
In the era of everything being an act of politics, the choice of words each of us use at any given time is a political act, and thus subject to the scrutiny a political act demands. In this view, the failure to address problematic speech is itself a political act – one which perpetuates the injustices embedded in the meaning of the words that our culture bestows on them.
To say it’s a tiresome exercise that doesn’t accomplish much more than letting language choice be an excuse to moralise to others is an understatement. The reaction of how people outside this language game view it suggests it’s downright antithetical to the advancement of a wider progressive political movement.
The only way I’ve even begun to make sense of the exercise was looking at the way fundamentalist Christians talk to each other about sin, sinners, hellfire, repenting, etc, God’s commands, etc. It’s a set of moral language that makes perfect sense to the insiders, but is irrelevant and confusing to anyone outside of those circles. The accusation of being a sinner works well on someone who believes in sin and its badness, but it’s hardly going to win over outsiders or put that brand of Christianity in a sympathetic light.
I ticked a plus on your comment and agree, having been brainwashed as a child I see another aspect of how to make sense of this conundrum from a christian perspective.
if a person makes a statement that contains a phrase or word that is jarring then it doesn’t sum up this persons totality,.. it’s just something on the nose , if other redeeming aspects of this person are of merit then it can be tolerated, If he keeps it up and expands on it in a derogatory way then well dunce him.
But a comment 2 years before.. that was rescinded ,.. sheesh.
For the record I don’t believe in evil or sin and if I did it is out of my league to judge, on a good day I’m not God who apparently can.
Incidently “dog” and “live” are religious emordnilaps I take solace in.
Those old testament whacko’s were whacko’s in the 70’s
Try semordnilap.
It’s a strange language game when you’re an insider compared to being an outsider. An insider can sway and be swayed by the right use of moral language that doesn’t make sense to an outsider. To play the language game is to be a part of that community – the moral one by the rules of the tribe – so break the rules is an act of blasphemy and to disregard them altogether is apostasy.
The irony, I think, in all this is many of those same progressives who have no trouble pointing out the cruelty of the way some Christian communities treat homosexuality and homosexuals have no qualms doing their own puritanical acts on the blasphemers and heretics who don’t pay defence to the new moral authorities. You’d think after decades of fighting against the overt moralism that had far too much influence in our culture, those same people would be wary of attempts from their own side to do the same. Turns out it’s just one group of moralists trying to supplant another for cultural dominance…
All cultures (by definition) have had their moral codes with clear sanctions for transgressions. The codes, in an anthropological sense, provide a good deal of “survival value” for the community as a whole AND ARE indifferent to the perspectives of the individual.
The sense of individualism is very new and only since, roughly, Rousseau, has it been given any credence at all. As an aside, ‘indivudualism’ is NOT to be considered as synonymous with The Enlightenment. To this end nouns such as ‘cruelty’ have no meaning in the context of a cultural code. All are required to conform. Tolerance, however, (see the Acts of Toleration) is quite another matter.
The ‘overt moralism’ was defeated by science or, if one prefers, observation; i.e. empirical verification that could be reproduced anywhere under identical conditions. Thus the priesthood dogmas became deficient. But as you point out, empiricism was displaced in the Humanities thirty odd years ago with variants of post-modernism; merely a supplant of another cultural doctrine.
Ok -n word is bad, although mentioned informally years ago as a description of another’s language …
But JK Rowling was cancelled for suggesting the word “women” be used in a health advice message rather than “people who menstruate” – FFS it’s beyond being about arcane language issues, it’s an ideologically flawed issue that needs to be called out, and politically closer to fascism than anything previously from the left. It dehumanises women as being nothing more than an empty gender choice, denies historical oppression and the numerous physical vulnerabilities women and girls are expected to embrace in the trans acceptance movement. It is far from ‘over there’ – unfortunately I had to stop a 17 yo male family member from following me into a crowded public toilet/shower block at a coastal beach recently, where pre-teen girls were showering naked. He was offended because he considers himself non-binary and free of gender! It seems like a ‘pronoun’ or acceptance issue until you get up close to this thinking. It is very, very concerning.