The Alt-Right Playbook: Compendium [script]

[this is the final Alt-Right Playbook before the conclusions, which I am writing now; this is where I put everything I wanted to cover that didn't require a video of its own]

THE SLOW BREAKUP

Say, for the sake of argument, there’s this guy, this just real abomination, total scum-sucking garbage hole, who’s running for President. And conservative politicians, pundits, and voters have been laughing their asses off about him. “Oh my god, he’s such a disaster, he’ll never get the nomination, and, if he were to get the nomination, no one would ever elect him.” They trot him out as a punchline. But November 8th draws near and he’s still not out of the game, and the Left is banging on the walls, like, hey, that “joke” you’re giving free press to is saying some pretty scary stuff, and the Right is like, “Look, don’t waste your breath. We’ve already accepted that we lost this one, we’re certainly not going to bat for this guy, he’s going to lose.” And then, at the last second, when they do go to bat for him, and he does win, and the Left is like, what the absolute heck my dudes? they go, “Can’t do anything about it now, he’s the President.”

And when, four years later, you finally get his ass out of office, the Left turns to the Right and says, “Okay, now that he’s not President, are you gonna acknowledge all the stuff he did? You know, the stuff he said he was gonna do, and we warned you he was gonna do, and you said we were delusional for thinking he would do, that he did?”

And they’re like, “Oh my gawd, Heather, he’s not even President anymore! How are you still talking about this?”

I call this one The Slow Breakup. It’s like when your partner starts canceling date night, and then starts getting home really late, and then starts sleeping on the couch, and you keep asking, “Hey, is there something wrong?” And they just say, “Oh, sweetie, of course not, work is just running me ragged lately and I when I have time off I’m too tired to go out, and I get home so late these days I don’t want to wake you up by coming to bed.” And then one day you get home and their bags are packed and they’re like, “Look, we both saw this coming.”

(You know that thing. This- this happens to everybody, right?)

It’s always not happening until it’s already happened. The moment is skipped over where they would acknowledge they misled you, take responsibility for what’s happened, or, critically, where you could still do something about it.

Peel your eyes for this one, you’ll see it a lot. This is how conservatives jumped straight from “climate change isn’t happening” to “climate change isn’t man-made” (and now some are trying to jump to “maybe it’s a good thing”). Rhetorically, all these arguments mean the same thing: “We decided long ago what we were going to do. Nothing you say will change our course. This conversation is over.”

YOU CAN’T GET SNAKES FROM CHICKEN EGGS

Say, for the sake of argument, you’re twelve or thirteen, it’s the mid-90’s, you’re sitting across the table from your conservative aunt at a family reunion. (This aunt will, a decade from now, become a Tea Partier.) You have - you sweet, innocent child - brought up the subject of evolution, being too young to know it’s politicized, and your aunt has not taken well to it. She goes on one of her classic tirades, dismissing the very concept of evolution as patently ridiculous, dropping a quote that will stick with you for ages: “You can’t get snakes from chicken eggs.” And you do your best to explain, with your limited knowledge-base, that, yeah, you can only get a snake from a snake egg, but that snake is going to be a little different from its parents, and the next snake will be a little different from its parents, and you multiply that by a few million generations and you might have something very different from that original snake. Maybe something with legs, or that can breath underwater, or see better in the dark!

And your aunt stares you dead in the eye and repeats, “You Can’t Get Snakes From Chicken Eggs.”

This is an ego-saving maneuver in which a complex truth is rejected in favor of simplicity. Your aunt has a statement that is true, though non sequitur to the argument at hand. And, after your explanation of how genetics work on long timelines, she repeats her original statement to herself and it still feels true. It’s the belief that the truth is easily recognized, and that it’s always simple, because the world is simple, and, if you can’t explain it to me like I’m five, then you’re probably wrong or making things up.

This heuristic very hard to argue with. You’ve heard that same aunt claim the hole in the ozone layer is caused by sunspots. Now, we’ve talked about the memetic power of statements that are short, quippy, and wrong, and this is a fine example. You might feel the correct response is a statement that is short, quippy, and correct, but here’s the conundrum: the truth is “the hole in the ozone layer is caused by chlorofluorocarbons.” Not only is that a more complex sentence, it’s a more complex idea. If the ozone hole is caused by sunspots, then it’s probably been happening for billions of years, it’s not caused by humans, and we don’t have to do anything about it. It’s reassuring, and tells folks all they care to know without further questions. But the truth of how aerosols deplete ozone is more complex, not least because, even without knowing the science of it, it implies it’s a problem we should do something about.

Ultraviolet light makes CFCs release chlorine into the stratosphere, where it bonds with ozone, converting it into oxygen and chlorine monoxide, neither of which do what ozone does to protect us from the sun. There may be people who can explain that more simply than I just did, but there’s a floor to how simple the truth can be and still be the truth. Falsehoods don’t have that. There is no limit on how simple an idea can be when it doesn’t have to conform to reality.

You play the game of “who’s got the simplest argument,” liars tend to win. You can’t get much simpler than “sunspots.” But if you can convince people that the world is complex, then simplistic explanations, across the board, become suspect. It might be too late to do that with your aunt, but maybe there’s still hope for your cousins.

(If you’re wondering what they do when confronted with something they cannot deny is complicated: well, that’s your fault. You, or someone like you, took their simple world and overcomplicated it. All the conspiracy theories and fingerpointing and screenshots they’ve squiggled over in MS Paint, all of that is the story of how you overcomplicated the world; it fills in the gap between the simplicity of the world they believe in and the unambiguous complexity of the one in which we live. And, yes, that story is at least as complex as the truth you’re trying to tell them, and, no, it doesn’t make any sense, but that’s a detail. Because the moral of that story is incredibly simple: it is this way because some people made it this way, and all they have to do is take the power back from those people and things can be simple again. This is their version of “a wizard did it.”)

NEGGING AND LOVE-BOMBING

Say, for the sake of argument, you’ve been having a knock-down-drag-out online with a reactionary for weeks. It’s been going long enough that you don’t remember how it started and you’re not entirely sure what you’re talking about, but the argument seems to center mostly around the nation of Israel. You’re fuzzy on what his position on Israel is - he seems to think of it as a religious ethnostate and he likes that, wants to use it as a model for the US, but he has a lot of awful things to say about Jews. He also has a lot of awful things to say about you! He’s been giving you every incivility you can imagine - and a few you’ve never heard of - since this began. It’s not helped by the fact that, while you know your position on ethnostates and antisemitism - they’re bad! - you don’t actually know a lot about the history, founding, or government of Israel, so he often catches you out by infodumping you and then mocking your ignorance.

He’s just so rude and conceited and you’re absolutely desperate to show the guy up, trying to bulk up on Wikipedia every day before logging on, but then something unexpected happens. All of a sudden, he stops insulting you. He’s still saying awful things about everything you’ve ever claimed to believe, but now it’s directed at a “them.” Liberals, commies, SJWs, what have you. But he’s not calling you any of those things anymore. He’s treating you like you’re smarter than all those limp-wristed leftoids, smart like him. Better than them. It’s like he sees potential in you. And after all these weeks of trying to one-up this guy, suddenly having his respect is actually kind of cool.

This is a recruitment technique. This is the outer edge of the onion. It centers around treating a person badly so they fixate their attention on you, seek some kind of recognition, and maybe have their confidence undermined, and then turning around and treating them very well. The nearest analogue is actually pick-up artist methods like Negging and Love-Bombing.

If you ever see someone do this to you, understand: you are being groomed.

DIDOING

Say, for the sake of argument, you and some other folks have gotten embroiled in a debate about the use of content warnings. One side has put forth the usual case: some people have trauma or anxiety disorders, and giving them a heads up about a small handful of common triggers lets the make informed decisions about how to engage with a piece of media. They often aren’t even looking to disengage, just to avoid a panic attack by having a few moments to prepare themselves. And this is often better for everyone as more people can engage with the work itself and the discourse doesn’t derail into another discussion about how it should’ve had a content warning.

And then someone from the other side of the debate says, in all seriousness (and I remind you this is about whether or not people should put a single sentence at the beginning of a video or outside the door of a theatre), “Can’t you just, like, have your panic attack? I mean, this isn’t life and death.”

The discussion quickly and predictably devolves into people trying to explain how miserable a panic attack can be, and how comparatively simple putting up a content warning is, and you realize far too late how this misses the point. Because that argument didn’t claim a content warning is a greater inconvenience than a panic attack! They made no attempt to frame this tradeoff as fair or justified. Only that, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not so bad.

I call this Didoing.

You see Didoing everywhere. Be as gay as you want, just don’t tell your commanding officer. Be trans if you must, but pee at home. Being a woman on the internet isn’t hard if you’re willing to block seventy thousand people. And you can criticize conservatives on YouTube if you just use this service to scrub all your private information from the internet so they have a harder time finding your home address. What, you can’t afford eleven bucks a month?!

And, yes, all of this is minimizing the problem, and that can get you onto the debate about, I dunno, what it’s like to get a Twitter DM from someone you haven’t blocked yet where he threatens to murder your entire family using a quote from Mission: Impossible 3. Yeah, he’s probably not gonna do it! Still not something you should have to deal with! And, in order to understand that, the people minimizing it would need a degree of empathy they’re clearly not extending you.

But minimization is how they control the conversation. They’ve gotten you talking about degrees of iniquity and skipped over the part where they admitted that, yes, they believe some amount of unfairness is acceptable so long as it’s within a certain tolerance. That some people do and should take extra precaution just to exist in the world alongside the people who don’t have to. Just suffer a little for our convenience.

THE REVERSE GISH GALLOP

Say, for the sake of argument, you’re watching a political debate on TV. The conservative candidate has used their opening arguments to dump a truckload of dubious claims on their opponent. You recognize this maneuver: it’s the Gish Gallop. The debater makes point after point and, if the other debater doesn’t rebut every single one, they will appear to have lost the argument. These points don’t have to be good or hard to disprove, there just has to be a lot of them.

But, hey, the liberal candidate seems to have come prepared for once! They succinctly and efficiently dismantle each of their opponent’s arguments, offering a clear rebuttal to every single one. It’s obviously not the first time they’ve heard this particular gallop. So, the conservative’s just been bested by their own logic, right? They will have to go on the defensive?

Not remotely! The conservative points to a minor error - a bill the liberal said would cost $40 million is actually estimated to cost 42 - and treats them as an ignorant sap who can’t even count correctly.

Wait, you exclaim, how does this work?! The liberal has to rebut each and every point but the conservative only has to take issue with one to stay in the driver’s seat? Are audiences fooled by this? Are liberals that easily snookered?

The answer is yes! You’ve just borne witness to The Reverse Gish Gallop, where an entire argument falls apart if literally any of it can be disputed. These disputes, again, don’t have to be good, they just have to call the airtightness of the argument into question.

Your mistake was assuming that dishonest people abide by the same rules they impose on others. Understand that a dishonest argument is like Lego - it isn’t dismantled until you’ve separated every single brick. But an honest rebuttal? An honest rebuttal is Jenga.

If it sounds to you like this is a game the rules of which were designed to deliver victory onto the amoral, congratulations.

WHY DON’T YOU RESPOND TO CRITICISM

Say, for the sake of argument, you are the kind of progressive leftist with a platform who gets a share of harassment - seasonal or perennial - from reactionaries. In this position, you will, inevitably, hear one who positions themself as a reasonable moderate ask, “Why Don’t You Respond To Criticism?”

There’s a lot going on in that question, more than is obvious, and it’s worth understanding.

First is that the question is not only directed at you. It exists as a marker, showing up in your Q&A’s, comment sections, or Twitter threads, to imply to anyone paying attention to you that there is some wealth of legitimate criticism you have long ignored. There may well be some specific point this person is referring to, but it’s often left unspecified, so that the content - and the quantity - of the criticism can be left to the audience’s imagination. It is meant to publicly undermine your legitimacy.

Second, it’s meant to make you question whether there is some legitimate criticism somewhere in the din of people screaming at you. You’re not perfect, and a knock-on effect of being harassed is you get numbed out, unable to discern good faith from bad, often shutting off the streams by which your peers used to correct you because of the endless flow of garbage coming through those channels now. But the only way to verify the ambiguous claim that there is criticism worth responding to is to once again strap on waders and climb back in, which is often what your critic really wants.

Third, the question isn’t really “why don’t you respond to criticism?” Odds are, you have responded to criticism. People in your position are often addressing or pre-empting criticism all the time, arguably too much. No, what this nonspecific question is really asking is, “Why don’t you respond to my criticism?” They are going to insist you owe them a response, that their critique, regardless of your opinion of it, is valid, and demands immediate attention. Odds are there are dozens of people saying the same, all at once.

Fourth, odds are good that you have, in fact, addressed their specific criticism, but not in a manner they feel validated by. This one person’s criticism is likely not unique, you have probably covered it somewhere in your output purely because you know what kind of arguments are getting thrown at you and you want to cover your bases. There’s a decent chance your critic doesn’t actually consume enough of your work to have seen it. But it’s maybe even more likely that they are aware of your counter-argument - possibly one of your fans directed them to it - but don’t consider a response legitimate unless it is directed at the critic. Covering it in a different context on a different platform doesn’t count. They are owed a statement they can respond to directly, so that the argument can continue. Really, the question is, “Why don’t you respond to my criticism on my terms?”

Finally, even if you did respond to them by name, it’s unlikely your response would be acceptable. If you were to summarize their argument in any way, they would claim you are building a straw man. If you isolated any specific critique, or pointed to the cruelty that accompanied it, they would claim you’re cherry-picking. You must, it seems, first present the criticism, full and unabridged, before you may respond to it. Which is to say: the only “correct” way to respond to criticism is to platform your critic.

And there are dozens who expect this of you. Who will tear into you for not addressing, in meticulous detail, every single critique they’ve ever tossed your way, and, in the same breath, mock you for talking too long.

If the way you did things before you were harassed was only to respond to what you felt worth responding to, you might want to return to that.

USEFUL ENEMIES

Say, for the sake of argument, you’ve noticed an odd relationship between reactionaries and a member of one of the communities they ostensibly hate: a Jew the Neo-Nazis like, an outspoken woman the anti-feminists support, an NB that TERFs like to quote. And the relationship seems weirdly mutualistic: this individual welcomes the attention, maybe hosting friendly debates with people who theoretically represent everything they stand against, even adopting some of their language and behaviors.

Why would the Alt-Right show kindness the very type of person they seek to oppress, and why would such a person accept it?

What you are seeing is one of the Alt-Right’s periodic Useful Enemies. These are folks they don’t respect but keep around for strategic purposes. A progressive who holds friendly debates means a free platform and audience to spread ideas to, and it’s good PR to be seen playing nice with people you’re known for mistreating. It’s also, often enough, free press; journalists love an “unlikely friendship” thinkpiece. Any backlash from the Useful Enemy’s community is also free press; the longer people debate whether the Useful Enemy should be consorting with you, the longer you trend on Twitter. All in all, it’s a pretty sweet deal: you get equal attention, but they get all the criticism. And, the moment they feel you’ve hung them out to dry, or comment on the toxicity that, let’s be honest, part of your community is still directing at them, is the moment they stop being useful, and can be discarded. Now their community is mad at them and yours is let off the leash to harass them.

So why would anyone sign up to be a Useful Enemy? Well, sometimes it’s unwitting. The Useful Enemy, for whatever reason, gains the attention of reactionaries, who start floating things their way. Maybe it’s a screenshot of a tweet that looks really embarrassing. They say, “Hey, isn’t this funny? You should share this!” The Useful Enemy doesn’t necessarily know that the tweet is from one of their usual targets, that it’s been taken out of context to misrepresent the target’s words, that screenshotting tweets instead of quote-tweeting them is a common harassment tactic (it makes it harder to pinpoint where a dogpile is coming from since you’re not actually tagged in the tweet, and it stays up even if you delete the original). All the Useful Enemy sees is a screenshot of what appears to be a bad take, so they share it, and the reactionaries get to work, with the Useful Enemy serving as their plausible deniability. Why would a progressive harass one of their own? Clearly this is legitimate critique! The Useful Enemy is obviously innocent, they barely even know who the original poster is!

This is how the Far Right launders harassment.

But not always so innocent! The Alt-Right is not a big audience, but they’re a dedicated one, so people with small followings can get a bunch of followers and a lot of engagement very quickly by courting them. And the controversy, and the debates, and even the criticism from peers all raise their profile. Whole careers have been built on being “one of the good ones.”

This position is always conditional. Useful Enemies are treated badly by a portion of the community they’re appealing to, and will be cast out by the rest the moment their usefulness is exhausted.

THE THIN END OF THE WEDGE

Say, for the sake of argument, you’ve been watching the debate play out about confederate statues. Race activists first want to take down statues of people like Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson - the President of the Confederacy and one of the top generals. Then they go after statues of Robert E. Lee, the head of the Confederate army, who’s stance on slavery was (purportedly) more complicated. Then they go after Vice President John C. Calhoun, who, though an ardent defender of slavery, was never a confederate because he died before the Civil War began.

At this point, Southern Republicans start asking, “Who’s next? If we’re taking down Calhoun, why not George Washington? He had slaves as well! Where does it end?” This argument causes something of a scramble on the Left, as some folks back off and say, “No, of course not Washington,” and try to define what makes Washington categorically different from Calhoun. Others dodge the question by saying, “We don’t need to worry about how far is too far while Jefferson Fucking Davis is still standing in many places.” And a handful even say, “Go ahead and tear Washington down, statues don’t get a vote” which Republicans eat up, claiming they represent the entire Left.

What Republicans are doing - or trying to do, at least - is turn Confederate statues, and the attendant conversation around America’s idealization of its historical figures and how it butts up against the history of slavery, into a wedge issue. And Washington is being held up as The Thin End of the Wedge.

Along any political axis, a wedge issue is the point at which society says “this far and no further.” It is the outer boundary of the Overton Window. Anyone with the wrong stance on the wedge issue will be considered “too extreme” and their own party will strive to look moderate by comparison. Hence Republicans acting like the entire Left wants to tear down Washington - it gets a lot of liberals to back up and say, “Okay, maybe Calhoun stays up.”

Now, so far as wedges go, Washington is pretty tame. More often than not the thin end of the wedge is not an inanimate object, but a group of people it’s socially acceptable to hate. This exists in every part of the culture war. Along the axis of religion, the current wedge is Islam, and the thin end is a suite of jihadist imagery: women in burkas, beheadings, anything from 9/11. Along the axis of class, the wedge is communism, and the thin end is currently Venezuela, though they never tire of the old show ponies, Cuba and the Soviet Union. Along the axis of sexuality, the wedge is transsexuals and the thin end is a trans woman in a public ladies room. Abortion held an interesting position on the axis of women’s rights, being that, for a long time, it was a wedge on both ends of the spectrum; it was considered radical to be too in favor [“want it safe and rare”] or too opposed [“ok if rape or incest”]. (That, ah, isn’t really the case anymore [Texas abortion bill].) The thin end for liberals was the image of a woman having to carry her rapist’s baby to term, and, for conservatives, it was the stuff they put on signs outside Planned Parenthood.

(Outside of abortion, it is very rare for there to be a wedge on the right end of the spectrum. Liberals are always supposed to have an agreed-upon point that is “too far left,” but, for modern conservatives, “too far right” mostly doesn’t exist.)

Wedge issues are worth looking at because they tell you what can and cannot be discussed. The thin end is always emotionally-charged - they rely heavily on affective override. The fabled “single-issue voter”? Their single issue is never, like, sanitation or cancer research; it’s always a wedge issue. You can talk about religious tolerance all you want, but, sooner or later, someone’s going to bring up Al Qaeda, and the conversation is over. And so liberal politicians who claim to defend religious tolerance have to make a big show of being tough in the Middle East, lest they be accused of sitting on the wrong side of the wedge. You find the same appeals to conservative biases among some of the people most oppressed by them: gay conservatives who make a show of hating trans people, Black conservatives who make a show of hating queer people. They offer the Right a bargain: if you grant me admittance to the in-group, I will help you keep them out. (But we’ve already talked about how that usually goes.)

But once a wedge has been placed, the goal is always to drag it rightward. The Left takes one step away, and the Right drags the wedge two steps closer: first they ban trans women from sporting events, now it’s Black cis women they’ve deemed “too manly.” This is why, sometimes, ignoring the wedge entirely, while not necessarily great political strategy, is liberating. To say, “You know what? Washington can go, too. While we’re at it, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison. There’s no such thing as hating slavery too much, and anyone who says otherwise thinks Game of Thrones had a good ending.”

ONE DROP BIGOTRY

Say, for the sake of argument, you’re reading a retrospective about a popular TV show from decades past, once which got praised for being quite progressive at the time, but, from the the current vantage point, the article argues, is in fact meanspirited and more than a little homophobic. This leads to much debate in the comments, and several links to a different article written in response. This second article insists that, no, there were a couple of gay characters in the third season whose arcs both ended happily. This was at a time when TV shows relied heavily on the Bury Your Gays trope; having two gay characters not only live but live happily isn’t even that common now. This leads to further debate in the comments, where people repeat the original article’s statements, about how both gay characters were often used as punchlines, how they were kept completely chaste and never had love interests, and how often they were contrasted with more flamboyant gay villains. But people just keep dismissing the observations, because homophobic showrunners would never write queer characters like the ones in season three.

This is a very troubling tendency in discussing social issues that we could call One Drop Bigotry.

The “one drop” theory of race is the historical (and horrible, and irrational) idea that, if you have a single drop of non-white blood in you, then you are not white. By a similar logic, a “one drop” theory of racism would be that, if you have ever said or done a non-racist thing, then you definitionally cannot be racist. Similar if you have every done anything feminist, or shown religious tolerance, or quoted Karl Marx. One drop of progressivism and you’re clearly not #problematic.

This is predicated on totalizing idea of bigotry, where the only real homophobia is when you’re homophobic 24/7. Now, some people will agree with that statement, but most people, you say it out loud like that, they’re like, “that’s obviously ridiculous.” But a lot of them will slip into this exact logic if they have a person or piece of media they want to defend. And, while it’s often employed on the Right as a means of dismissing arguments and derailing conversations, it is also used sincerely and unthinkingly by a lot of the Right and far too much of the Left.

I find this thinking insidious for a few reasons.

First, like a lot of conservative rhetoric, it takes an ideological statement contained within a piece of media, an essay, or a public comment that is worthy of criticism and turns it into a debate about author intent. This habit of transmogrifying a sociological conversation into a conversation about individuals is one of the biggest hurdles we’re facing; it makes it nigh-impossible to talk about systems.

Second, it’s built on the idea that there are types of people who are simply immune to bigoted ideas. Injustice is baked into our society, everyone has blind spots, we get to grapple with it our entire lives. It would be nice if it were an on/off switch, but that’s just not the way ideas work.

Finally, any time a person claims that an idea cannot be a problem because the author is not #problematic, they incorporate that idea as part of their worldview. The syllogism goes like this: a TV show treats its queer characters as punchlines; but the showrunners are not homophobes; therefore treating queer characters as punchlines is not homophobic. It distresses me that people will come to that conclusion, even unconsciously, rather than admit that a video game or podcast or politician they like is flawed. It’s especially concerning because, for all we know, it wasn’t even the author’s intent! It may have been a compromise with the studio, or, hell, they may not have even noticed the implications of what they were saying, and, had somebody pointed it out, they might have said something else, but they can’t state this publicly because they’re under contract.

And we all do this. We undermine our own principles to protect our love of people we’ve never met and art that will never love us back. We are all almost certainly doing this with something we care about right now. All we can do is stay on the lookout, and course-correct as needed.

WHY CAN’T WE JUST BE PEOPLE?

Say, for the sake of argument, you’re explaining social justice to someone new to the subject. You’re running them through the basics - the identities, the initialisms, the umbrella terms. Now, maybe the person is green but curious, or maybe they’re somewhat hostile to these ideas. But, in either case, you will, sooner or later, come up against the question: Why Can’t We Just Be People?

A lot of us have to go through this phase, especially if we’re not part of the communities being described to us. Where, before this conversation, a person was just, you know, themself, now maybe they’re a cisgender, heterosexual, white, able-bodied AMAB. They can’t help but feel these labels are not being adopted so much as they are imposed. And imposing labels on people feels divisive. They might even argue that, maybe, to create a stronger sense of unity with each other, this fixation with labels should be set aside.

Now, again, if you’ve already been through this, the logical flaw here is obvious, but let’s lay it out for posterity.

The idea here is that labels create division. The reality is that, if you are not transgender, then you are treated differently from a trans woman. If you are not deaf, then you are treated differently from someone who is. If a man walks down the street arm-in-arm with another man, he can call himself whatever he wants, but he’s going to be treated as gay. All the labels do is acknowledge divisions that already exist. It’s understandable that some of us might resent the labels for making us think about these divisions when we’d rather not, but acting like it’s the fault of the labels themselves or the people who came up with them is playing “you smelt it, you dealt it” with identity.

“Why can’t we just be people?” is often a sign of confusion, but it is, at least as often, a rhetorical weapon, especially in the age of “anti-wokeism.” It is a refusal to engage with segregations in our society, and to hold the people trying to address those segregations responsible for their existence. An attempt to clear identity politics off the table and, if necessary, the identities themselves as well.

MURDER OF WORDS

Say, for the sake of argument, you’re trying to write an essay post, and you keep reaching for the right words about social issues but none of them seem to work. Maybe you want to talk about the experience of having an unexpected PTSD flare-up due to outside stimulus, but the word “trigger” has been so overused to mean “thing sensitive people don’t like” that it doesn’t feel as helpful as it once did. Or maybe you want to talk about the way abusers can make people doubt their own memories, but the word “gaslighting” is so often used to refer to any time a person lies, or is wrong, or merely says something someone else disagrees with, that it feels emptied of meaning. Or perhaps you want to talk about a movie that makes light of a number of social issues, never quite crossing the line into being outright bigoted but pervasive enough to be worth mentioning, but the only term you can think of is “problematic” and that’s been memed into oblivion.

What you’re butting up against is dead language. Terms that have outworn their usefulness. A lot of words go this way, and, by and large, it’s nothing to worry about. It’s the circle of life, man. But you’ve noticed that terms certain populations use to describe phenomena unique to their experience tend to have very short lifespans. Most especially when those populations are on the Left.

And while, yes, it is sometimes necessary to retire a term that no longer serves its function, it is worth noting that, in these instances, the words do not die natural deaths. This is a Murder of Words.

The process of euthanizing language has three principle stages:

First, the word is used honestly by people on the Left. Then, the word is used mockingly by people on the Right. Finally, through overuse it enters common language, being picked up by centrists and the apolitical.

To make this a little more concrete, let’s look at the journey of “social justice warrior.” Once upon a time, this was a term progressives used. If, for instance, a particular feminist seemed to over-focus on correcting and criticizing ignorant men? If they turned mistakes from well-meaning allies into long, repetitive lectures? If their feminism seemed to be begin and end with dunking on people? That was a social justice warrior: someone who, even when they had a valid argument, even when they had a right to be angry, seemed to relish their anger, and rarely ask whether anger was the most constructive tool for that moment. Many a conversation would get derailed by these folks. (If we’re being honest, more often than not this was a male ally whose allyship looked a lot like soapboxing.)

It was a term for self-policing, asking the progressive Left not to confuse activism and grandstanding. Saying the right things but only to feed one’s ego can still be toxic.

But, once the Right got their hands on it, “social justice warrior” came to mean “anyone who talks about social justice, ever.” The implication being the only reason anyone discusses something like feminism is to grandstand; that social justice is innately dishonest. This was used to mock progressives, sure, but it was also, once again, a term for self-policing. But now it was employed on chanboards and subreddits to hammer down progressive rhetoric. Anyone who seemed to even allude to feminism was immediately labeled an SJW and ridiculed until they dropped the subject.

And, while mainstream culture has never adopted the term “social justice warrior,” and really only says it when pointing to how the Right uses it as an insult, because it entered public consciousness through the Right, the very idea of “social justice” now carries a connotation of preachiness. Much of the Left has had to back off using those two words in sequence. It’s been so thoroughly misused that there’s an impulse on the Left to reclaim it: progressives will sometimes refer to themselves, half-jokingly, as “social justice infantry” or “social justice bard,” or, even unironically, as “social justice warrior.” The fact that it started as a term for self-critique and is now sometimes used as a badge of honor is kinda weird.

The tragedy here is not just the loss of a word, but of a tool. The idea of the “social justice warrior” has been tainted to the extent that, often enough, if you criticize a feminist for being too quick on the draw with angry rants, they will quite reasonably assume they are being tone-policed by a conservative, or by a normie who’s swallowed a conservative argument. Whether or not you use the actual words, the idea no longer functions as internal critique, because using it brands you an outsider. The tendency for the Left to eat its own has been vastly overstated, but it happens, and it gets harder and harder to talk about. The constant attacks from the Right and dismissals from the center put everyone’s armor up.

(And we should keep in mind that this is not always the Right’s doing. The evolution of “woke” from referring to “Black vigilance towards the ever-evolving threats posed by white supremacy” to just “anything to do with social justice” may have passed through the Right, but it started with white liberals.)

I would like to tell you the solution is to ignore bastardizations and keep using words the way they were meant. Unfortunately, that’s by and large not how language words. A murdered word is still dead. My point is that the problem is not the word itself. The Right will tell you your language is too aggressive or confusing, but, if you pick different words, they’ll try and kill those as well. Their issue is what the words signify. They are trying to silence our ideas and empty out our toolsheds. And there are times where we can ignore them and speak our own language amongst ourselves; there are also times we have to adjust our language on the fly to stay ahead of them. But, when a word expires on you, just remember: it was never your fault for using it.

THE SOUTH BANK OF THE RUBICON

The Rubicon is a river in Italy. The story goes that, at the end of the governorship of Julius Caesar, he was ordered to disband his army and stay north of the Rubicon. When, instead, Caesar marched his army across the river and towards Rome, it was considered an act of treason, and the beginning of the Roman Civil War, at the end of which Caesar would reign victorious. It is said, as he forded the Rubicon, Caesar declared, “The die is cast.”

In today’s vernacular, we refer to a metaphoric Rubicon as the point of no return. Children cross this Rubicon into adulthood, isolationist governments cross this Rubicon to international politics. Each of us will cast the die several times in our own lives. But we say also that movements, that people, cross the Rubicon when they become irredeemable.

When times are bad, we wonder anxiously how far from the Rubicon we are. When does an insurgency become a war, a demonstration a riot? When is the moment an economy in danger becomes one in collapse? We scan the horizon for the riverbank, hoping we didn’t cross it some ways back without noticing.

The thing about points of no return, the reason we worry over them so much, is it’s rare to know where they are until they are some ways behind you.

In the United States, we are increasingly comfortable saying that our democracy is “under threat” from the Far Right. That we are “at risk” of descending into authoritarianism. Few are ready to say that the threat has arrived. And I’m referring to myself as I say that: I’m not ready to say it’s arrived. No one wants to call it prematurely. The Right screams that “the Left” - Black Lives Matter or Antifa or some thinly-veiled caricature of The Jews - are ready to kick in your door and bash your teeth in. And I talk about why they say this, the need to exaggerate the threat from the Left, so that, when they aggress against us, it seems like self-defense. So that we are to blame for any violence against us. I talk about the danger of this thinking being accepted. I say the way mainstream conservative politicians and media legitimize these arguments is “worrying.” But I don’t say “they are preparing to kick in your door and bash in your teeth.” I want people to listen to me. I don’t want to sound irrational, and I don’t want to sound like them. And… I don’t want it to be true yet.

Say, for the sake of argument, you’re standing in the dead of night, ankle-deep in the water, desperately wondering how many paces you are from The South Bank of the Rubicon.

There was a time when any number of things would have been the moment. If you could go back to 2015 and ask, “Is a candidate promising to jail his political opponents, or building concentration camps at the border, or provoking an insurrection to overturn a vote, the moment where you could unequivocally call him a fascist?” We would have said, “No question.” But those moments came, and they went, and we called them troubling, we called them dangerous, but it still seemed hyperbolic to call them fascist. Journalists and policy wonks still reacted with surprise if you came anywhere near it. You could still run a campaign on “reasoning with the Right.” Republicans have made great strides by being so blatantly horrible that accurately describing their behavior sounds like hyperbole.

It seems we are always approaching the other side of the Rubicon, never arriving. We can turn back. The north is still the nearer bank.

There is a trick to this. Everyone expects it to happen all at once. That one day there will swastikas and kids in cages and unmarked vans disappearing people off the street. But those happened on different days. And the swastikas were a natural extension of the barely-coded language of the Administration’s supporters, the cages were the next step after their family separation policy, and the vans were not a surprise after years of police militarization. You don’t have to cross the river quickly, just steadily. So that every step makes the last one seem inevitable and the next one obvious. Your opposition is so adamant that this will not happen on their watch that they will divert the river south rather than watch you cross it.

It’s losing a little ground on a dozen fronts every day. It’s seeing so many lines crossed you can’t even remember where you used to draw them. It’s the readiness to give up on things being better and just wanting them to be quiet again.

I can’t tell you if the moment has come. I don’t know how to call it any better than you. So, instead, I’m going to ask you to do something: I want you to decide, at this moment, what the Rubicon is for you. What is that undeniable instant where, if something does not happen immediately, American democracy is forfeit. And don’t show up in my comments saying it happened years or centuries ago - you’re not wrong, but cynicism is acceptance. I’m asking when would be the time to act. Write it down. Put it on your phone or your dry erase board or a post-it on your bathroom mirror. So when that moment comes you will remember that this was your Rubicon, because it won’t feel like it anymore. It will feel like the next logical step.

And ask yourself, when that moment comes, what is the right thing to do? You don’t have to have an answer yet. But think on it.

As a leftist, the futures I envision are full of possibility. I am fond of saying “there are a hundred ways forward and only one way back.” So many things we could try if we allow ourselves to let go of white supremacy, of capitalism, of patriarchy. Imagining the future as a kind of world-building. To be on the Left, at least the way I try to do it, is to desire a spreading out, a pluralizing, an abandonment of hierarchy and a sharing of power between us all. I don’t know if that future is likely, but I know it’s possible.

That’s not how things look on the Right. For the Right, left to its own devices?

All roads lead to Rome.