Seeing Language as a Tool of Authoritarianism
I’m going to write a series of posts about things we need to do to fight fascism. They’re part of the same conversation that LOLGOP and I have started to have on video.
Start with this, which is fairly obvious but needs to be said: The right and the left use language as a tool differently. Understanding that is, in my opinion, a crucial step for understanding the asymmetry in the polarization of society and attempting to more effectively combat authoritarianism.
In short, liberals and journalists treat language as transparent, whereas right wingers treat language as utilitarian.
By transparent, I mean that liberals and journalists believe language serves as a way to describe and understand reality. This is, after all, built into the definition of small-l liberalism: that one can understand and describe the world, and using that understanding, engage in rational debates about how best to live in it. One can iteratively test descriptions of the world and policy prescriptions and improve our relationship with the world and each others.
Politicians who accept they live in a liberal (small-l) system are adhering to a system where people with competing visions describe, transparently, what they see in reality or believe it to be, and persuade others that that vision of reality is a better description of reality than their opponent, and that if that vision of reality is true, then it counsels certain actions or policies. This is the cornerstone of a successful legislative body: the shared belief that debate and discussion can result in rational persuasion and through that good policy solutions.
Transparent language is an idea at the heart of democracy.
Our current conception of journalism (which most people, including or perhaps especially journalists, forget arose out of a particular conception of politics, technology, and economy) builds from this. A society professionalizes journalism and pays for it because of a belief that that feedback role — the provision of information more accurate and accessible than rumor or diatribe — helps sustain an orderly society. Once upon a time we believed that the mere act of disclosing corruption and scandal played a pivotal role in defeating it, and certainly some journalists still aspire to do that.
By contrast, right wingers approach language differently. For right wingers (a term I’ve adopted, because “in reality,” the MAGAt right is a departure from a Republican tradition that bought into assumptions about rationality and reality), language is instead a means to impose power, to impose a desired order on society. They are not trying to persuade you that living in an authoritarian hellhole will be better than living in a democracy. They are trying to bring about that helhole by disrupting debate, by policing language, by breaking the tie between language and reality. Utterances are valued not for the fidelity with which they describe the world. Rather, they are valued for the degree to which they help to attain a certain end state in which they accrue more power.
Obviously, this exists on a continuum. There are circumstances, perhaps with their family, perhaps when making backroom deals, where right wingers will use language transparently (though for Trump, even those situations involve motivated language). Liberals and journalists realize that you can use language in certain ways to make its use more effective, a concession that language is never entirely transparent.
But if you don’t adhere to that vision at all — if you believe language is always about accruing power — then not only is the effort to debate about reality futile, but language can be used to disrupt and replace rational discussion, which is one reason right wingers have systematically attacked moderation and disinformation scholarship, to make it harder to disrupt the process of accruing power by disrupting the transparency of language.
This is why the battle over pronouns has been so pitched. For right wingers, gender is a means of structuring society, of enforcing order, of reverting back to a prior hierarchy. Of course, gender is a construct, and particularly for non-binary people, the demand that a person adhere to their sex is a form of control, a denial of the reality of their identity. For some years, liberals tried as a matter of courtesy to use pronouns that a person used for themselves. To enforce a rigid order, right wingers understood they needed to destroy this practice as a means to superpose the power of fixed categories over the complexity of gender.
This dynamic underlies what I keep harping on about Trump’s Truth Social posts. Journalists, whose profession is premised on language being transparent, therefore treat these posts as a collection of words that in some way helps them get to a reality about Trump. Journalists really seem to believe that what Trump says is in some way a reflection of his feelings or his understanding of reality — and, to be fair, he has often fired people via tweet, literally changing reality with that tweet. For Trump, however, every single Truth Social post is an act of power, an act of commanding attention, of renewing polarization in society based on the relationship (either blind affirmation or opposition) one has with that Truth Social post, and often of exploiting the journalistic fetish for words to get them to serve as a vehicle for mindless repetition, which journalists’ entire professionalization otherwise would fight.
This extends even to punditry. Certainly, lefty pundits are focused on describing a motivated vision of reality. Their job is to be persuasive, if not always honest. But right wing pundits more often use their words and appearances as a means to impose an order. That is, they wouldn’t so much attempt to use an appearance to make a persuasive argument, true or not; rather, they would use it to repeat certain language, often doing violence to reality in the process.
This plays out in the interactions I call “Cotton Swabs,” where a news host asks right wingers whether they agree or disagree with some outrageous thing Trump says. Some still try to claim they didn’t see it. But in recent years, right wingers in good standing instead used such questions to disrupt the premise of the question — to speak over the journalist, to repeat key buzzwords, to perform loyalty to Trump’s tribe. Not only didn’t such questions shame a politician into breaking from Trump, but they instead served as opportunities to discredit such questions altogether. Journalists were willingly serving as props in a power play.
But this dynamic also extends to how the left and the right use social media, because left and right imagine using social media for different purposes. One thing that drives the feckless left wing habit of non-stop criticism for Democrats (many of whom are indeed feckless) is a belief that you effect change by persuading someone, and once you persuade someone, they will in turn persuade someone. Even as lefty pundits fill lefty discursive space with repeated efforts to alter the speech and behavior of elected pols (thereby creating the repetition the right uses so well), the right wing exploitation of the discursive environment goes uncontested, with the effect that right wing repetition and ordering language holds sway. Or in opposition, democrats might share their own feelings, honestly describing the emotions that Trump’s abuses elicit. By contrast, right wingers might respond to feeling similar or similarly strong emotions by instead asserting power of the language of the person who elicited the emotion. Democrats describe what ideally should happen. Right wingers ensure every utterance furthers an effort to implement their preferred end state.
I’m not, here, suggesting that lefties abandon their faith in the ability to describe a reality. For now, I’m suggesting lefties (and, even more so, journalists) need to be aware of the ways in which their speech makes them easy props for a power play.
When you speak on social media, are you saying or are you doing?