A movement that fears any name at all for what it proposes to do is, ultimately, trying to smother any sort of democratic debate of its goals.
A movement that fears any name at all for what it proposes to do is, ultimately, trying to smother any sort of democratic debate of its goals.
L anguage has power because words have meaning. The ability to communicate meaning from one person to another is the purpose of language; more than anything else, it is what separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. In politics, communicating meaning is essential to persuasion, to the building of coalitions, and to the defeat of error and wickedness.
One of the most effective ways to prevent criticism of an idea is to deprive people of the language in which to name it. Political propagandists understand this, which is why they are now objecting so loudly to terms such as “critical race theory,” “woke,” “identity politics,” and “cancel culture.” The point is not that these terms are imprecise in what they mean — they can be, as are many other terms in common use in American political discourse. The point is precisely that they are understood to have a distinct meaning. The propagandists of wokeness want to prevent that meaning from being communicated among ordinary citizens who have long lacked the words in which to express things they see and know to be wrong.
Example: Adam Serwer of The Atlantic argues that using the term “woke” “expresses sentiments the people using it would be uncomfortable articulating directly,” which is his code for calling people racists:
Part of the utility of this kind of use of “woke” is that it expresses sentiments the people using it would be uncomfortable articulating directly, which is why anyone getting a question like this should simply respond by asking them to explain what they mean. https://t.co/GVJ0KxYkaF
— Adam Serwer 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) November 8, 2021
Joel Anderson of Slate goes further and just makes the racism accusation out loud — ironically, given the derivation of “woke” in African-American slang:
If you’re not black and started using “woke” pejoratively sometime post-2018 or so (or worse, don’t know anything about the earlier iteration of the term), I think it’s fair to consider it a racial slur.
— Joel D. Anderson 🆓 (@byjoelanderson) November 8, 2021
Now, in one sense, this is a backhanded compliment. If conservatives, moderates, and center-left critics of woke-ism were not having an effect in their criticisms, these guys would be embracing the label rather than running from it and trying to delegitimize its mention. But it is also revealing of how the activist Left thinks about debate.
Naming your target — what you oppose, whom you distinguish yourself from — gives organization to a political movement, as I have argued in the case of radical Islam, the alt-right, and the Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters. To name a thing is to give it form and definition. Our brains are wired for language, so the use of words to delimit ideas, ideologies, and political movements brings those things into focus. Words are the clothing that ideas wear in public. If you disable the words we use to distinguish ideas, you make it harder for people to tell them apart. The result of this is that people lose the ability to say, “Those guys have ideas that are not like my ideas.”
The woke ideology, by any name — “anti-racist,” intersectionality, social-justice warriors, the “successor ideology” — certainly has distinct contours and characteristics that ought to be named. It is obsessed with identity — especially race, but the list of important gender, sexual, and other identities is nearly endless — and frames its analysis of virtually everything around group identities rather than individual humanity. It creates disparate standards based on different identities: If a person is part of an “oppressor” class, they can be criticized for things that are permissible to those given the privileged designation of an “oppressed” class. It is bad to be “cisgender,” rather than recognizing that this is the word for how the human race has reproduced itself throughout its entire evolutionary history.
The ordinary, traditional meaning of existing words are changed, too. Consider the word racism. Racism is very well understood by the typical speaker of English: It means either (1) thinking less of some people because of their race and/or (2) treating some people worse because of their race. This is a simple, functional definition. It neatly combines both bad intentions and bad actions. It required decades of moral suasion to define racism as a thing that was almost universally seen to be bad. But by incanting terms such as “systemic racism,” all sorts of people and things are declared to have the moral consequences of being “racist” under the commonly understood definition, while the speaker is using a different definition that does not require them to satisfy that burden of proof.
This collection of ideas has its own intellectual roots, its own intellectual history, its devotees in academia and the commentariat, its own distinct vocabulary of terms (which has exploded in its usage in journalism and entertainment in the past decade), its own distinct set of social and cultural goals, and its own multibillion-dollar industry of authors, speakers, university administrators, and pedagogical and workplace consultants. It is, among other things, deeply embedded in the education schools that form American teachers.
Note that the critics of using the terms such as “woke” and “critical race theory” never offer a more precise terminology for the ideology these terms describe, because their goal is not clarity but camouflage. That may work in the jargon forest of academia, but it is a deeply anti-democratic way to approach popular discourse on how the governed may supervise the government.
This is an especially contemptible tactic when people engaged in a movement for social change are nonetheless doing battle against naming their own movement. Fredrik deBoer — one of a number of newsletter-writing leftist contrarians who question the woke social orthodoxy — puts it bluntly enough that his language needs to be censored for this publication:
Please Just F***ing Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand
you don’t get to insist that no one talks about your political project and it’s weak and pathetic that you think you do
The same people say there’s no such thing as political correctness, and they also say identity politics is a bigoted term. So I’m kind of at a loss. Also, they propose sweeping changes to K-12 curricula, but you can’t call it CRT, even though the curricular documents specifically reference CRT, and if you do you’re an idiot and also you’re a racist cryptofascist. Also nobody (nobody!) ever advocated for defunding the police, and if they did it didn’t actually mean defunding the police. Seems to be a real resistance to simple, comprehensible terms around here. Serwer is a guy who constantly demands that he and his allies be allowed to do politics on easy mode, but he’s just part of a broader communal rejection of basic self-definition and comprehensible terms for this political tendency. Also if you say things they don’t like they might try to beat you up. Emphasis on try.
If you ask these people, are you part of a social revolution?, they’ll loudly tell you yes! Yes they are! They’re going to shake society at its very foundations. Well, OK then — what do I call your movement? You reject every name that organically develops! I’ll use the name you pick, but you have to actually pick one.
Even some progressives who share broadly the goals of the “woke” recognize that the movement can be prone to excesses that ought to be permissible topics of discussion. Eric Levitz of New York magazine:
When progressives withhold, deflect, or stigmatize criticism of ostensibly left-wing — but objectively inane and/or racist — discourse, we [blur important distinctions]. . . . Positing fundamental cultural distinctions between people with different pigmentations — not different class, regional, national, or religious backgrounds, but merely different concentrations of melanin — is a task better left to white supremacists than equity coaches. . . . There is no inherent connection between acknowledging the inconvenient truths of U.S. history, using public policy to reduce racial inequality, and rebranding a bunch of broadly popular cultural values as “white” or “white supremacist.” Yet when proponents of those first two causes withhold criticism from the latter, we give the impression that they’re all inextricably linked. . . . That’s good for the conservative movement. And it’s also good for accidentally racist equity consultants. But it’s hard to see how it serves our society’s most disadvantaged. So, let’s just call the malarkey what it is and cease paying for it.
The naming and renaming of ideas and movements, whether by their proponents or opponents, always involves a certain amount of spin, of course. Think “pro-life” and “pro-choice” or “Planned Parenthood,” to pick the most obvious example. Focus-grouping the titles of policies is an unfortunate habit that all corners of the political spectrum share. More than a few movements throughout history have either been saddled with names by their opponents (the Know-Nothings) or embraced insults as their own names (the Whigs, the Tories, the Roundheads, the Mugwumps, the neoconservatives, the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, the Reality-Based Community, the Deplorables, etc.).
The American liberal and especially progressive Left, however, have long been especially focused on naming things as a framing device. George Lakoff, the linguist and author of The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic and other tomes on “framing,” enjoined the left side to never “repeat conservative language or ideas, even when arguing against them.” And they have a habit of fleeing the scene once a slogan such as “Defund the Police” or “Green New Deal” gets associated with what it actually proposes to do. Eventually, regardless of the origins of a name, the name becomes the thing named: A connection is formed in the public mind, whereby the term conjures up a sense of the thing. When that thing is too awful to describe, it becomes “reproductive justice” or some other name that then gets discarded again when the name acquires the baggage of the thing.
If your movement finds itself repeatedly changing the names of things and inventing new euphemisms to break the connection between names and things — or, worse, inveighing against names themselves — you really should reconsider whether the things you’re defending are actually defensible in clear, frank, and open language. As George Orwell put it in “Politics and the English Language”:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. . . .
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
Winston Churchill, of course, was so successful in rallying his nation against fascism precisely because the language he used to define the enemy and the stakes was clear, direct, full of short and familiar Anglo-Saxon words, and conjuring up the associations of well-known Shakespearean rhetoric. Abraham Lincoln did much the same, fusing homely metaphors with the words and imagery of both the American founding and the Bible. Even his party’s choice of “Republican” for its name was a callback to Thomas Jefferson’s original name for the Democrats, where the party they replaced (the Whigs) had taken their name from then-current battles in England between Parliament and the last gasps of the throne. When one’s cause is just, clear language is an ally, not an enemy.
One of my favorite bits of fantasy writing comes from Christopher Paolini’s Eragon series, an entertaining but otherwise fairly commonplace pastiche of Tolkien fantasy and Star Wars, which I read aloud to my children. One of the conceits of the series is the power of a character’s “true name,” a sort of Platonic expression of their totality, the knowledge of which gives mastery. The magical dragons in the series discover that 13 of their number, the dragon-steeds of the “Forsworn,” a faction of rogue dragon riders of vaguely Jedi-like function who turned against their own order, have collaborated with a plot to destroy the dragons. The dragons’ magical vengeance is to deprive them of their names, which destroys their identities entirely:
The dragons grew so angry, every dragon not of the Forsworn combined their strength and wrought one of their inexplicable pieces of magic. Together, they stripped the thirteen of their names. . . . All we know is that after the dragons cast their spell, no one could utter the names of the thirteen; those who remembered the names soon forgot them; and while you can read the names in scrolls and letters where they are recorded and even copy them if you look at only one glyph at a time, they are as gibberish. . . .
True names, birth names, nicknames, family names, titles. Everything. And as a result, the thirteen were reduced to little more than animals. No longer could they say, ‘I like this’ or ‘I dislike that’ or ‘I have green scales,’ for to say that would be to name themselves. They could not even call themselves dragons. Word by word, the spell obliterated everything that defined them as thinking creatures, and the Forsworn had no choice but to watch in silent misery as their dragons descended into complete ignorance. The experience was so disturbing, at least five of the thirteen, and several of the Forsworn, went mad as a result.
A political movement is entitled to choose the name that best describes its own ideas and aims, and if the name fits reasonably well with the most sympathetic view of the movement, most people will use it. A movement that fears any name at all for what it proposes to do is, ultimately, trying to smother any sort of democratic debate of its goals, like the darkness itself throwing a blanket over a candle. But this is America. If you won’t offer your own name for your ideas, sooner or later, one will be provided for you.