I read somewhere—Field and Stream, Juggs, I can’t quite remember—that Winston Churchill had a rule: Always resist the temptation to say, “I told you so,” but if you have to, do it only if you can prove you said it before, preferably in writing—or perhaps in a podcast. Man, that guy was prescient.
If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that I’m no Winston Churchill. So I don’t have to resist the temptation too forcefully. But I will try to follow the second part of his advice and stick to stuff I’ve been a broken record about.
A new nationwide poll of Hispanics finds—yet again—that “Latinx” is a very dumb term. From Politico:
Only 2 percent of those polled refer to themselves as Latinx, while 68 percent call themselves “Hispanic” and 21 percent favored “Latino” or “Latina” to describe their ethnic background, according to the survey from Bendixen & Amandi International, a top Democratic firm specializing in Latino outreach.
More problematic for Democrats: 40 percent said Latinx bothers or offends them to some degree and 30 percent said they would be less likely to support a politician or organization that uses the term.
To borrow a phrase from Sheldon Cooper, I have informed you thusly.
Fernand Amandi, a Democratic expert on the Hispanic vote, tells Politico:
“The numbers suggest that using Latinx is a violation of the political Hippocratic Oath, which is to first do no electoral harm,” said Amandi, whose firm advised Barack Obama’s successful Hispanic outreach nationwide in his two presidential campaigns. “Why are we using a word that is preferred by only 2 percent, but offends as many as 40 percent of those voters we want to win?”
It’s a good point, if I do say so myself (again). But it leaves out something else. The term almost surely turns off non-Hispanic voters who aren’t plugged into elite progressive mumbo jumbo. I haven’t found any polling data on this—mostly because I haven’t looked very hard—but I’m quite confident that a lot of normal non-Hispanic voters are turned off by the term as well. In fact, I have never talked to a non-Hispanic person who didn’t have contempt for the term. It’s the kind of effete lingo—sorry, lingx—that makes normal people feel excluded, or condescended to, or manipulated, or maybe even mildly insulted—“Oh, you’re one of those backward types who doesn’t use sophisticated non-bigoted terms.”
This is my suspicion because that’s how I often feel when people bust out “intersectionality,” “herstory,” “womyn,” “heteronormative cisgender goat cheese,” etc.
Priestcraft as soulcraft.
Don’t get me wrong, I love me some fancy words and highfalutin concepts. But I generally prefer old words and concepts with long traditions of existence. For instance, I’m very tempted to write about how what the progressive neologizers are up to is the business of crafting a new gnosis—a special, often secret, knowledge that the knowledge-holders use to elevate themselves from the rest of us.
What the hell, I’ll give in to the temptation.
This is how the Marxists operated. If you disagreed with a dumb Bolshevik policy—collectivization, taco Tuesday at the Politburo, whatever—you’d be buried in verbiage about “scientific socialism,” “praxis,” etc. On some occasions, if your error was profound enough—or if Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot woke up on the wrong side of the bed—you’d be expected to confess your sins or false consciousness, perhaps right before you were shot.
Thanks to John McWhorter, it’s becoming more widely accepted that progressivism—specifically, woke anti-racism—operates like a religion. (This, too, belongs in my “I have informed you thusly” file, as I’ve been writing about various forms of political religion for decades.) McWhorter writes:
“We need the hard left to point us to new ways of thinking. However, we need them to go back to doing this while seated, with the rest of us, rather than standing up and getting their way by calling us moral perverts if we disagree with them and calling this speaking truth to power.”
Now, I’m not sure McWhorter is right about the pressing need for the hard left to point us toward new ways of thinking. I mean, I guess merely pointing is fine, so long as we can opt not to go in that direction. But that’s his deeper insight—the wokesters aren’t content merely to point. They want to bully, scold, and anathematize disagreement. Anti-racists start from the assumption that dissent from their policies is prima facie proof of racism.
But this is just one facet of the larger phenomenon. The same rhetorical and political techniques McWhorter describes in the fights over “anti-racism” are deployed in arguments about everything from gender to climate change to economic redistribution and abortion. Disagreement isn’t just seen as “wrong” or even villainous, it’s heretical. That’s how the Marxists operated, because Marxism often manifested itself as a political religion. Anti-racism has some Marxist roots, but that’s not why it operates like this. All political religions—and many old-fashioned religions—operate this way.
The English political theorist James Harrington coined a good word for this approach to politics and culture a couple centuries before Marx was born: priestcraft. Priestcraft doesn’t describe the proper work of priests; it’s basically a public choice theory critique of priests who use their monopoly on definitions of virtue and divinity to enrich or empower themselves. This was Nietzsche’s argument—or one of them—against Christianity, and it was Rousseau’s against both the Catholic Church and the philosophes alike.
I’d love to go on about this for a while, but let’s let some helium out of this blimp of abstraction. “Latinx” is a term of priestcraft. Using it signals that you’re one of the cognoscenti, and objecting to it signals—to the cognoscenti at least—that you’re not.
Which brings me back to politics. I went into that long, self-indulgent digression to explain that my use of fancy-pants words isn’t analogous to what the wokesters are up to. But I got distracted. So let me put it more plainly. I hate calling myself an “intellectual,” but the proper work of intellectuals (so broadly defined so as to include keyboard tappers like myself) is to argue about ideas, not to use ideas to cudgel the public into embracing our preferred partisan agendas.
“Latinx” began as an obscure academic term. I think it’s dumb on the merits, but I can see how it served some purpose in that world. The problem is that a lot of young, overeducated activists insisted on taking it out of the seminar room and into mainstream politics.
The Democratic Party and mainstream media are bedeviled by the egghead equivalent of the lab leak theory. They refuse to observe the intellectual and academic protocols of good hygiene. If grad schools are going to teach intersectionality, they should at least post signs saying, “Wash Your Hands of This Stuff Before Talking to Normal People.”
“Latinx,” “defund the police,” and “birthing person”—never mind the whole 56 genders stuff —are perfect examples of that observation attributed to George Orwell: “Some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool.” (I don’t think he actually said that, but he did say in “Notes on Nationalism,” “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”)
But rather than take five minutes in the decontamination chamber to wash that crap off their hazmat suits, they turned vast swaths of the Democratic Party and the media into superspreaders of asininity. Again, I think a lot of the stuff that passes for serious intellectual work on campus is wrongheaded and often dumb, but that’s always been true. There was a time when you couldn’t get a degree from German universities—the best in the world for a long time—if you didn’t become entirely fluent in Hegelianism. Say what you will about Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit—memorizing it won’t make you a better chiropodist or candidate for dog catcher.
I love that when Bill Buckley ran for mayor of New York, some of his followers wore buttons that read, “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!” But Buckley wasn’t running to win—he said that if he was declared the winner, he’d demand a recount. I love me some Eric Voegelin—to the extent I understand it—but if I were running the GOP, I would not encourage candidates to say stuff like, “The course of history as a whole is no object of experience; history has no eidos, because the course of history extends into the unknown future. Also, cut the grocery tax!”
I’d tell them to start with “Cut the grocery tax!” Besides, as any Straussian will tell you, the other stuff is implied by the significant silence of not saying it out loud.
In fact, I think I could have just deleted most of this “news”letter and reposted Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego’s tweet:
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