On Getting to Say It

Or, Why political correctness did not "cause" the right-wing reaction

There is a debate raging on the center-left lately about the degree to which left-wing censoriousness and general wet-blanketry (formerly known as “political correctness” and recently rebranded as “wokeness”) has contributed to the rise of Trump. A central figure in what we strain to call this “discussion” has been Ezra Klein, who since the death of Charlie Kirk has been on an apparent suicide run to destroy his own credibility and reputation. The nadir of his contribution to public discourse was surely this absolutely humiliating podcast with Ta-Nehisi Coates, which I can’t believe he consented to publish.

The key presupposition behind this debate is that liberal Democrats are the primary drivers of all political events. The default state is Democratic success; any failure must be explained by mistakes on Democrats’ part. This position is obviously narcissistic and absurd. There is a whole other political coalition struggling with the Democrats for power, with their own set of values, priorities, and strategies. These people are known as Republicans—you may have heard of them. Like Democrats, Republicans are autonomous human actors who make their own choices about what to do, whom to support, how to behave, and many other important matters. Given that both of these coalitions command a similar plurality of the voting population, power is bound to go back and forth periodically. As Coates says in the disastrous interview, “We’re losing because there are always moments when we lose.” Or as Captain Picard once said: “It’s possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.”

None of this is to say that the Democrats committed no mistakes in the most recent election. The drama surrounding Biden and his replacement with the empty suit Kamala Harris was surely suboptimal. But in an electoral party system, power alternates. The crucial “swing voters” who, by dint of their ignorance and cynicism, get to decide our nation’s fate, tend to blindly vote against the incumbent party when things are not going well. Biden presided over an inflation crisis that was not his fault and that was probably managed about as well as it possibly could be—but people hate inflation and he was president, so they expressed their discontent by voting for the other team. It’s also the case that the economic success Biden and Harris were campaigning on was partly illusory, as shown by the huge revisions to the unemployment numbers for 2024. Trusting the most recent available data was not obviously the wrong thing to do, but it bit them in the ass.

So it’s a matter of some obvious tactical mistakes and then just some straight up bad luck. Oh well! Better luck next time—except that the semi-random alternation of power happened to land on a deranged lunatic who’s determined to undo our constitutional system of government, so there may not be a next time. That’s a pretty disproportionately bad outcome, so it’s natural that people are seeking “deeper” explanations—especially explanations that center one’s own agency. Better to think that we missed our chance than that we have no control over the course of events!

Of all the narratives, though, the notion that political correctness “caused” the swing to Trump is most self-serving and absurd—as though we could have altered the flow of history by… talking slightly differently. But left-wing scolding does not cause racism. What causes racism is that racism is a source of power and identity. What causes racism to be worse in the US than in many other Western countries is that the power generated by racial oppression was more direct, more extensive, and more long-lasting than in those countries. They had overseas colonies that they ruthlessly exploited. We maintained race-based chattel slavery for life on our home soil for decades longer than the rest of the world, and when we finally abolished it, we replaced it with a nearly century-long campaign of discrimination and state-sponsored terrorism against the emancipated slaves and their descendants.

Slavery gave plantation owners disproportionate sway over the economic and political life of our young nation. Jim Crow gave Southern whites a similar privilege, allowing them to “count” disenfranchised Black citizens and use them as vote-multipliers. And racism famously pays white people a “social wage”—not just a notional status, but the right to lord it over another group of people, to demean them, to demand their submission, to vent their cruelty at them, even to join up with their local community and visciously murder them. All of these things are a source of profound enjoyment. (People took group photos at lynchings! They sent the images as postcards to their relatives, to commemorate the occasion!) It’s ugly to say and disturbing to think about, but surely we’re all aware of it. The left has been reading Nietzsche for the better part of a generation!

As the man points out, there is a delight in cruelty. We’ve all felt it, every one of us, every human being who’s ever lived. We all know that it feels good to be mean, to hurt people, to humiliate them. We know we shouldn’t give in to that temptation, but the thing about temptation is—it has to be appealing to be tempting. Committing acts of cruelty is pleasurable. We have to unlearn that pleasure, but we never do it fully. And anyone who has ever engaged in a social media “debate” knows that liberals and leftists have not automatically unlearned it. Think of the joyful way Bluesky denizens talk about blocking people! Think of how harshly people give themselves permission to respond to people they have not even bothered to understand!

The leftist explanation for the appeal of racism to the working class is that it’s a bait and switch. The owners divide the workers against themselves, and the workers trade their inheritance of proletarian revolution for a mess of pottage. What we often elide, though, is that the pottage is at least real and immediate. The libidinal satisfaction of having permission to dominate and humiliate is something.

It is at this point that we should recontextualize the issue of language. I am haunted by the repeated refrain of white people who ask, “Why do they get to say it?” We all recognize what they’re asking about immediately—why do white people have to refrain from saying the N-word when Black people are allowed to? The phrasing gives the game away: there is a libidinal satisfaction to using the word. Being able to call someone the N-word inscribes you in an entire history of power and hierarchy—that’s why it’s such a terrible thing to say, and that’s why people want to say it. It’s the same with all the insults that are suddenly “allowed.” Politically correct euphemisms and polite prohibitions may have exacerbated the problem by creating pent-up demand—but the demand is endogenous. People want to use insulting and demeaning terms based on traditional power hierarchies because it’s a way of exercising power. It feels good.

There is no direct equivalent of this on the left. It is a permanent, inherent advantage of the right—they will always have “transgressive” cruelty available to them as a weapon in a way we simply cannot. We may be able to use shaming and social sanctioning to lower the degree to which such slurs and insults are deployed, but only when and where we are more powerful. Giving the voters a little bigotry, as a treat, will never work, because it only increases the appetite for the real thing. All we can do is offer people more meaningful and durable satisfactions and hope that they recognize and opt for those satisfactions enough of the time to make life livable.