Yesterday, I posted a critical analysis of the word “democratic” in elite discourse, pointing out that its meaning has been effectively reversed, so that elite-preferred policies are “democratic,” but dissent “anti-democracy.” As though to make my point, The Globe and Mail carries this weekend a long piece by Doug Saunders on looming dangers to democracy. You can see it coming: a Trump victory in 2024 would “have the ominous potential of cementing a worldwide far-right authoritarian bloc.”

This is hysterical, and dangerous too, almost calling for rioting, terrorism, civil unrest and bureaucratic sabotage in the event of a Trump victory.

Saunders’ article is long, and I won’t rehearse it in detail, but its tactics are worth naming.

1. Smearing: Democratic leaders like Georgia Meloni, Victor Orban, Mateusz Milowieki, Geert Wilders and of course Donald Trump are lumped into the same “anti-democratic”, “far-right”, “authoritarian” category as (inevitably) the dictator Putin. The tactic smears by association.

2. Jargon: Considerable use is made of a polysyllabic vocabulary of “democratic backsliding” and “de-democratization,” certified by academics and think tanks. Most of the big words serve to hide their premises, but the appearance of learning can be a tactical advantage.

3. Emotive Abstraction: Concrete policy choices are hidden under hyperbolic but emotive abstractions remote from any direct meaning.

The rest of this brief post looks at this last tactic. It conceals real policy alternatives behind vague but loaded language, thereby smearing the policy alternative while obscuring, even denying, the possibility of democratic choice. Rather than saying “Party X opposes mass immigration,” which would name mass immigration as a choice and imply that other choices were possible, we are instead told merely that, “Party X is anti-democratic and intolerant.” Specificity disappears, and with it democratic choice.

Here are five examples of The Globe’s rhetoric of loaded abstraction, from its accounts of the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, Hungary’s Victor Orban, Italy’s Georgia Meloni, Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS) under Mateusz Morawiecki, and Germany’s Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD):

1. Geert Wilders of the Netherlands is said to campaign, “almost exclusively on policies of racial intolerance and withdrawal from democratic institutions including the EU.” In other words Wilders wants to limit Islamic immigration, and to end the policy of closing farms to meet EU emissions standards. Thus described concretely, neither policy is inherently undemocratic.

2. Victor Orban’s signature policy is immigration control and the preservation of Hungary’s Christian culture, and he has clashed with the EU on this. The Hungarian people have chosen those policies, repeatedly.

3. Georgia Meloni is said to have a, “platform of opposition to racial and sexual minorities,” and her party “is often considered neo-fascist.” In fact, she opposes mass immigration and also the transexual agenda. Obviously Saunders wanted to get in the ‘F’ word, “fascist,” and it is true that left uses it often, but that merely demonstrates the circular character of established leftwing discourse: it reports on itself.

4. Mateusz Morawiecki’s Law and Justice Party in Poland is said to have “severely curtailed the rights of women, minorities and homosexuals,” when a more specific description would say the PiS opposes mass immigration, abortion and gay marriage. This involved conflict with the courts and as usual the EU.

5. The Alternative for Germany is said to be “devoted almost entirely to intolerance and opposition to democratic institutions,” when in fact the AfD wants to limit immigration and reduce EU control of German policy, and also to end security state persecution of themselves. Once again, the concrete realities are mundane, and far less shocking than hyperbolic abstractions about “democratic institutions.”

A line runs through these examples: mass immigration and multiculturalism on the one hand, and social liberalism on the other, are obligatory to the elite mind. Dissent on these issues attracts the rote pejoratives — far-right, authoritarian, anti-democratic, extremist, a danger to democracy, don’t you know — but the issues themselves are named only obliquely, through opaque generalities. It is almost as if the aim was to limit democratic choice.

Four of the above cases involve opposition to the notoriously undemocratic behemoth known as the European Union. The view that farm or social policy or anything else should be controlled by elected national governments, and not by the the opaque processes of a supra-national bureaucracy, is the opposite of undemocratic. Words have lost all concrete and direct meaning.

Beneath the abstract rhetoric of democracy and democratic institutions lies its opposite: an elite multiculturalist left-liberalism that wants to restrict the range of democratic debate. Policy choices outside a very narrow spectrum are denounced as a threat to democracy.

Finally, let’s come back to a country mentioned only in passing by The Globe: if it’s authoritarianism you seek, how did Canada do during the Freedom Convoy, by far the largest popular protest in our history? The Globe itself, while it caviled about the Emergencies Act (effectively martial law) and bank account seizures, participated enthusiastically in the state’s propaganda attack on the supposedly “far-right” Freedom Convoy, giving us months of phony swastikas and confederate flags. But it has nothing to say about the discriminatory and ongoing use of the criminal law against Freedom protesters. How many of Orban’s political enemies are on trial, or held for years in remand?

In our society, the real authoritarianism comes from above, and preaches in the establishment press about democracy in danger, while steadily reducing the range of democratic choice.

As I have argued of other key terms in current discourse, “insurrection,” “terrorism”, “conspiracy theory,” and “white supremacy” among them, the word “democratic” has undergone a large semantic change, losing sight of its original denotation. In more direct language, elite voices are changing its meaning for their own often undemocratic purposes.

A couple of weeks ago, the Southern Poverty Law Centre warned that Tucker Carlson is “anti-democracy,” notwithstanding Carlson’s blistering criticism of authoritarian government overreach, and of elites that ignore and despise the popular will. Tucker Carlson, that estimable preppy, by turns morally serious and wickedly funny, can look after himself. His response to the SPLC will be much more devastating than anything I can write, and likely good for a belly-laugh too. My purpose here is to get at the semantic reversal that elite opinion is imposing on the term “democratic.”

In the SPLC’s rhetoric, the word “democracy” has lost contact with its original meaning, while retaining its strongly positive connotations, so that “anti-democracy” can function as an anathema, a word of exclusion. Democracy is everything good, anti-democracy everything bad, and apparently suspicion of elites is “anti-democracy.” In the SPLC’s universe, policies preferred by elites are democratic, those with no elite support are anti-democratic: the world is upside-down.

A Hegemonic Agenda: Telling You What You May Think

The Southern Poverty Law Center used to fight actual racists, in the old, pre-woke sense of that term. More recently, the SPLC has set itself up as a guardian of the political and moral health of America, branding everything it doesn’t like as “hate.” The old burning-crosses type of racism being thankfully difficult to find, and the very real problems of the black population not admitting of simple or easy solutions, the SPLC has decided instead to label mainstream conservatives from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to the Family Research Council, to Moms for Liberty and James Lindsay, and now Tucker Carlson, as purveyors of “hate,” and opponents of democracy. This is not at all democratic.

The project is consciously hegemonic: the SPLC intends to designate the boundaries of acceptable thought, thereby restricting the range of democratic choice. If they cannot directly control what people think, they want to control what may be said in public fora, indirectly accomplishing the same end. The SPLC is an influential organization, at the center of a large network of often self-referential expert factories and mainstream venues, and their propaganda will have some effect, though over the long term it will come at a cost to their credibility.

The SPLC is not alone in seeing dangers to democracy under every bed. Here, we have George Wallace’s old friend Joe Biden, or whoever tweets for him:

If President Trump is the enemy of democracy, what of the half of the country that supports him? Are they MAGA extremist “semi-fascists,” to borrow Biden’s term? To loudly support democracy while calling half the country illegitimate is inherently problematic. It implies the need for some kind of escape clause or state of emergency that would disenfranchise or override the illegitimate half of the population, likely in the name of “democracy.” The standard talking point is to call the January 6 riot an “insurrection,” thereby criminalizing the opposition party. This move itself illustrates the power and the danger of mis-defining words.

What does “Democratic” mean?

“Democracy” is in its basic sense a system of government, or even more precisely a way of electing governments and choosing policies. Its adjectival cognate, “democratic,” also carries a meaning close to “egalitarian.” These meanings are now reversed: to be a supporter of democracy (newspeak) is to support one party, while denying the legitimacy of the other, making democracy impossible.

Which brings us back to Tucker Carlson, who opposed the January 6 riot, has never denied the legitimacy of half the population, and has never called for the abolition of elections, or the institution of a one-party state, or state control over the media, or anything else that might be meant by “anti-democracy,” in the old pre-newspeak sense. “Anti-democracy” means something else entirely, and that other meaning is almost directly opposed to the normal meaning of free elections, honest officials, an independent media, and popular decision-making.

Here is a partial list of controversial topics on which Tucker Carlson takes strong positions, though not always positions with which I agree:

• Border Security;

• Gender Ideology, especially as it involves children;

• DEI racial ideology;

• Law and order in the streets;

• Foreign wars;

• Internet censorship and social media manipulation;

• Election security

The last two are directly related to the institutions of government, and so are directly related to democracy in its original and widely understood sense. In a democracy, the state does not use censorship as a political tool, and in a democracy elections are honest and above-board and seen to be so. One would have to turn the meaning of “democratic” upside down to hold Carlson’s positions to be “anti-democracy.”

The first five topics do not directly touch political decision-making, so any one position is not inherently more “democratic” than any other. A democracy may choose via popular vote or representative institutions to secure its border or not, to push queer theory or racial ideology or not, to fund the police or not, to get involved in this or that war or not, but those choices are not in themselves essentially democratic or undemocratic.

“Democratic” may mean “Preferred by the Majority”

One might intelligibly say that the “democratic” position on one or other of these issues is that preferred by a majority of the people. On the first five positions above, while polls will show varying results, it is easy to argue that in this second empirical meaning of the term “democratic”, Carlson’s positions are on the “democratic” side of the debate. You have to invert language to call Tucker Carlson’s positions on any of them “anti-democracy,” or (a near-synonym) “authoritarian.”

There is therefore no essential or inherent matter-of-definition sense in which any of Carlson’s positions are undemocratic, while there is an empirical popular-preference sense in which Carlson's positions are in a commonly-understood way very democratic.

“Democratic” may indicate a Non-Elite Social Position

There is a third sense in which Carlson’s positions are democratic, and the SPLC/elite sense undemocratic. The SPLC’s view of what is “democracy” is the view of an elite intelligentsia, highly credentialled, well-paid, well placed, writing in the elite mainstream media, teaching in Ivy League universities, infesting the offices of corporations and of the bureaucratic state. In this third, social-position sense of the term “democratic,” Carlson speaks for the popular side, the SPLC for the ruling class.

It might be argued that a favoured policy choice will make democracy more secure or more complete, but to leap to calling the preferred policy “democratic,” let alone to calling dissenters “anti-democracy,” involves inserting not merely a chain of reasoning but a conclusion into the definition of the word. This thereby makes analysis more difficult, which may be intentional, and in that it obstructs debate, it is itself undemocratic.

It might similarly be asserted that the people don’t understand the complexities of some issue, and therefore need to be kept out of it: experts should decide. That is an intelligible position, but not a particularly democratic one. It also makes some audacious assumptions about the character of our experts, who often provide Tucker with objects for his mockery.

There is something decidedly undemocratic in constructing novel definitions understood only by an elite cognoscenti. As I wrote recently in reference to conspiracy theories, it takes a certain kind of institutional power to change the meanings of words so as to retain valued connotations while emptying them of all direct meaning. The ability to do that depends upon a certain status within a permissive environment. Simply to announce that Tucker Carlson’s views on immigration or war or what-have-you are “anti-democratic” would be instantly ridiculous, especially when popular opinion tends to support him. The claim must be surrounded by a certain amount of abstraction, given an appearance of empirical support, obscured by big words, enunciated from high-status platforms, and welcomed by a convincing number of well-placed allies. In order to make false statements without sounding ridiculous, a lot of influential people have to play along. Some would call this hegemonic power.

This, then, is a third way in which the claim that Tucker Carlson is “anti-democratic” is ridiculous: language has been inverted, and those pulling off the inversion are themselves a part of a permanent elite living in and around the bureaucratic state. This is an elite whose fulsome rhetoric of disdain for “low-information,” “conspiracy theory”, “deplorable” voters explains its anti-democratic (old sense) character. Newspeak comes from above, and is the opposite of democracy.

The good news is that the hegemonic authorities can only play these definitional games for so long. Like the SPLC, their power will over the long term tend to beclown itself. In the short term, however, they will harm real people, and we’ll need Tucker and others to expose their anti-democratic tactics.

If you don’t want insects on your canapes, you’re a conspiracy theorist!

A recent Canadian Press story listed conspiracy theories said to be believed by conservatives, which I itemized here. Of the 13 ostensible theories named by the CP, only five even posited a conspiracy; a number were true, and one was dislike of the mainstream media. As with the CP, there is a definite ideological colour to the professors’ list: conspiracy theories are ideas they disagree with propounded by people they dislike, in other words by conservatives and populists.

I went into the meaning of the term “conspiracy theory” in considerable analytical (and arguably pedantic) detail here. The term necessarily postulates a conspiracy, which is to say a secret plot or plan, as an explanation or theory of something. While the CP listed 13 purported conspiracy theories, the professors limit themselves to five, aside from passing references. In this case, not one actually includes a conspiracy; all are inconvenient to power.

In brief, the professors’ five “conspiracy theories” are:

• The Great Replacement Theory: obviously neither secret nor a theory, but rather, as Vivek Ramaswamy points out, (and on which they quote him) a policy;

• “The ‘Groomer’ Panic”: their term for opposition to gender ideology, such opposition being called “anti-LGBTQ”. Gender ideology is not a secret, it being taught in schools as a matter of policy, and opposition to it does not imply belief in a conspiracy.

• Fifteen Minute Cities: as the authors admit, this is a real policy idea, and it has already been used to restrict citizens’ movement in Oxford, not normally considered a home to know-nothings. Once again, there is nothing secret, and the policy direction is obvious. Googling “15 minutes cities” will produce a screenful of the MSM protesting too much.

• “Bug Eating Conspiracy Theory”: As the authors concede, using insects as a protein source is a real policy, so there is nothing secret here. And with campaigns against beef (cows emit methane), it is linked inevitably to global warming, another favoured elite cause.

• Agenda 2030: the UN Agenda 2030 is again not a secret. The UN describes it at great length and with much jargon here. With all its diversity-and-inclusion talk, it is obviously aiming in a statist direction.

The good professors have presented us with five “conspiracy theories”, none of which posit a conspiracy. Worse, none are even theories, in the sense that none seek to explain some other phenomenon. As Ramaswamy saw of the great replacement, these are policies, not theories, and elite-supported policies at that.

If a conspiracy theory requires two things — a conspiracy and a theory — these authors present five examples that contain zero of what would be a required ten desiderata.

One has a sense that the professors know this, their full title referring to “conspiracies and bad ideas that caught on or gained momentum in 2023.” A certain amount of base-covering is going on in that title: as none of their five “conspiracies” contain either a conspiracy or a theory, they must all be “bad ideas,” a term of laudable directness. “Conspiracy theory” is there for polemical effect.

The term “conspiracy theory” has lost its direct meaning — its specific denotation of explanation by secret plot — but retains it strong connotation of crankiness, weirdness, even craziness. It partakes in and works from a discourse of sanity: you are a tinfoil hat-wearing extremist if you take the wrong position on demographic change, gender ideology, dietary regulation, fifteen minute cities, or the UN 2030 agenda.

And as well as crazy, you are probably stupid too. Sophisticated, intelligent and well-informed people will take the required line in support of the five favoured causes. Foucault had half a point when he argued that the discourse of sanity, like the discourse of knowledge, is a discourse of power. Here, it is the first gambit of power, coming not to debate but to exclude.

The discourse of conspiracism functions as a kind of social signal (as I argued here), communicating that good people who wish to be taken seriously and invited to the right parties, or indeed to job interviews, will not talk about certain things, and if they do will speak in the desired way, deploring the designated deplorables.

The emptying of a term of its positive meaning while retaining its strongly pejorative connotations is a move available to those who exercise a kind of verbal or discursive power. It is a move open to those who have the power to certify some opinions as reputable, reasonable, and intelligent, and other opinions as weird or insane conspiracy theories, while discouraging too close an analysis of what exactly a conspiracy theory might be.

In this case, it is a move (to repeat the chess metaphor) open to members of a state-funded and institutionally certified intellectual elite, which is to say to members of a bureaucratic intelligentsia. It is not a coincidence that all of the five “conspiracy theories” under attack here are matters of state policy, pushed organically by state bureaucracies. The professors conclude that the ideas they dislike “eat away at the heart of democratic discourse,” which puts many large topics outside the range of democratic discourse, a move not democratic at all. Like “conspiracy theory”, the adjective “democratic” has lost contact with any concrete meaning.

The discourse of conspiracism is a way of speaking and writing that operates in the interests of bureaucratic power. It is well captured by the author biographies here, long on academic jobs and mainstream media publications, and containing many mentions of institutes, centres and projects on bad but urgent things, including “disinformation”, “extremism”, “radicalization,” and of course “conspiracy theories.” And for two professors of religion, it’s pretty clear that they don’t much like Christianity (“Christian Nationalism") either.

https://religiondispatches.org/author/celestini_amarasingam/

The social position of these grandly titled institutes is relevant: in common with their host universities all are taxpayer-funded, without being formally or directly a part of the state, and without being responsible to democratically elected politicians. The discourse of conspiracism has become the weapon of an autonomous bureaucracy. The semantic loss — the loss of specific meaning — is not noticed because the discourse serves a desired polemical purpose, enhancing the power of those who use it.

The discourse around the term “conspiracy theory” comes from above, and it comes to tell you what you may (not) think.

The documents made available by the Rouleau or Public Order Emergency Commission — the inquiry into the government’s use of the Emergencies Act — illustrate this debasement: the label of “terrorism” is used cynically and for purely instrumental reasons, and not because anyone seriously apprehends terrorist attack. As with my comments on the language of “insurrection,” the Rouleau documents offer a window into official language in unguarded moments, and therefore into how our rulers really think.

In the United States, the estimable Julie Kelly, the journalist covering the ongoing civil rights travesty of the January 6 trials, notes the outrageous sentences given, even to non-violent demonstrators, with the aid of “terrorism enhancements.”1 There is a riot, at which there is violence, and anyone present convicted of anything is then deemed guilty of “terrorism,” and thrown in prison for many years: this is an obvious abuse, and also a symptom of the instrumental debasement of the emotive language of “terrorism.”

In a legal context, the term “terrorism” is used to make sentences more severe, and also to support or create the narrative that the offences in question were not a normal crime resulting from a normal protest. The administration’s legal flunkies, both prosecutors and judges, apply terrorism penalties so that the administration can then claim that its critics are terrorists. This will be at some cost to the reputation of the legal system, but costs are long term, and this administration is not renowned for long term thought. The Biden administration has a supervening desire to label the opposition as terrorist, language that flows easily into an adjacent rhetoric of fascism, authoritarianism, and insurrection. The post-modernists were not wrong to speak of the interdependence and also the circularity of discursive and police power.

Here in Canada, the Emergencies Inquiry documents contain internal cabinet-level discussions intended to remain private. They show a similar misuse of the term “terrorism” to attack the government’s opponents, or more precisely to construct legalistic arguments for the use of extraordinary or extra-legal powers against the government’s opponents among the citizenry.

On 13 February 2022, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and the CEOs of the “big six” chartered banks met concerning the Freedom Convoy protests. The protests had at that point been going on for two weeks, and become embarrassing to the government and the banks alike. One of the bank CEOs suggested:

If you list them as people subject to sanctions (i.e. as if they are terrorists), we could act swiftly.

On the next page, and therefore perhaps 10 minutes later, another CEO referred to his colleague’s suggestion, saying:

“The problem is AML is focused on finding bad money turning to good.  This is about good money turning to bad.  As [redacted] said, if we listed them as terrorists we could move fast.

“AML” is anti-money laundering policy. Hiding in here is an admission that the money raised by the truckers was legitimately raised, though used for a purpose they considered bad. Sticking to his point, three sentences later, we have again, “if we list them as terrorist[s] we could act more comprehensively.”2

The screen shot below is taken from the handwritten notes of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, apparently from the same meeting, as they are also dated 13 February.3 “You need to designate this group as a terrorist group & seize the assets,” she wrote:

On the next page, we have another CEO saying, “label them as terrorists.”

The notes in the first screen shot are from a page headed “Dave.” At the Inquiry, it was suggested that it might be David Vigneault, Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, but Freeland claimed not to know. Other pages (the ones not redacted) in these notes contain the names of CEOs of Canada’s major banks. “Darryl/BMO”, is obviously the Bank of Montreal, and “Laurent F,” “Dodig”, and “Bharat” are not common names, though they do match the names of CEOs Laurent Ferreira of the National Bank, Victor Dodig of CIBC, and Bharat Masrani of Toronto Dominion. David I McKay is CEO of the Royal Bank, and is the only David among Canadian big six bank CEOs.

The collegial atmosphere is telling: all are on the same team, working for the same end, and there are no serious disagreements. The left-liberal Deputy Prime Minister Freeland is clearly the leader. Also present was Deputy Minister of Finance Michael Sabia, an illustrative figure. A sometime civil servant turned corporate CEO turned CEO of the autonomous public pension manager Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec, now an influential Deputy Minister, and newly appointed the next CEO of Hydro-Quebec. It is difficult, in reviewing the upward trajectory of Sabia’s ecumenical career, to say precisely where the state ends and where capitalism begins. It makes a relevant question to ask whether this is capitalism at all. For present purposes, the significant fact is that these oligarchs all speak the same language and share the same concern to end popular protest against bureaucratic overreach. They are on the same side, and it is not ours.

The casual and purely instrumental use of the word “terrorism” stand out. That talismanic, fear-laden term was first introduced by a banker, seconded by another banker, and carried the obvious assent of the Deputy Prime Minister. No one said, “they did some bad thing, and that is terrorism, therefore we need the anti-terrorist laws.” Instead, the term was introduced in a purely tactical way, heedless of any moral concern: we would like to use certain powers, so let’s, “label them as terrorists.”

The Parliament Hill occupation was noisy, but entirely peaceful and good natured, down to the free hamburgers, the dance floor, and the famous bouncy castle. While obviously embarrassing to the government and to its kept bankers, there was no terrorism here. The crime rate in central Ottawa in fact went down during the Freedom Convoy.4 Whatever one thinks of vaccine mandates or any other issue, the Freedom protest was not by any stretch terrorism. But the T-word has worked its way into public discourse so completely, and we have become so inured to the idea of extraordinary draconian state powers whenever the state deems it necessary, that the idea can be thrown out casually, without even the need for excuses or arguments, however pretextual. The only arguments are utilitarian: it would be faster and more comprehensive to call people terrorists, and it indeed it was.

I remember well the public mood after 9/11, and was then fully supportive of granting police and financial agencies large powers against terrorists. Whatever remarks might pass about one man’s terrorist being another man’s freedom fighter, we all thought we knew what was meant by that key word, and it did not include Canadian truckers. Had I been told that those sweeping powers would one day be used against peaceful demonstrators embarrassing to a progressive government, I would have scoffed. But I would have been wrong. Whatever the arguments for anti-terrorist powers twenty years ago, they have become today a tool of bureaucratic power and a danger to the citizenry. There is a need for a comprehensive review and repeal of anti-terrorist laws, and also, more fundamentally, a need for a rethink of the entire public discourse of “terrorism.”

The point is emphasized by the fact that on 17 February 2022, as the Emergencies Act was in force, and on exactly the same day that Freedom Convoy leader Tamara Lich was arrested, there was a real terrorist attack in British Columbia, against the Coastal Gas pipeline work site. About twenty camouflaged attackers used axes, incendiary devices, and booby traps against workers and police, before disappearing into the forest, in what was obviously a well-planned and tactically skillful attack, including an ambush of the police response.5

This image of wrecked vehicles is on the CBC’s website, as is night video of the attack.6 There have been as yet, over a year later, no charges, such is the state of official uninterest in a real terrorist attack.

The language of terrorism has become so debased, and so removed from concrete reality, that real terrorism is not recognized as such, while peaceful political protest is targeted. That native and environmental causes command official support merely reinforces the point: the language “terrorism” has been disconnected from political violence, and is now an opportunistic discourse pointed almost exclusively at opponents of the bureaucratic state.

Freeland refers several times in the above document to threats to “our democracy,” that first person possessive recruiting the auditor into the class of those called upon to feel threatened. It is this language of terrorism that has become a threat to “our democracy,” and with it to our civil liberties.

President Biden, as I wrote last week, uses concocted statistics to describe his opponents as terrorists, and here in Canada we do the same. The U.S. misuse of the language of terrorism was public, and intended to operate in the realm of public discourse, indeed does not function without being public. Here in Canada, we see in Emergencies Inquiry documents that “terrorism” has become a name so habitual and so normal that it is used purely pretextually. The language of terrorism is used simply to invoke a convenient power, and no one even pretends to make an argument that those targeted are terrorists. The word has become a habitual label for opponents, and if it is functional, there are no objections.

The time has come to revisit and probably to repeal the large variety of anti-terrorism powers granted after 9/11, and just as importantly to reject any discourse of terrorism disconnected from real planned and armed political violence. The powers and the enabling discourse created in the aftermath of 9/11 are no longer used against terrorists. They are now pointed at us.

2

https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/exhibits/SSM.CAN.00008766_REL.0001.pdf

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https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/exhibits/SSM.CAN.00008764_REL.0001.pdf, ~p. 10, unpaginated

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Documents published by the Public Order Emergency Commission inquiry into the Freedom Convoy and the Emergencies Act show that the language of insurrection was well established in the official mind prior to the arrival of the protesters in Ottawa. As I wrote recently, a prefabricated narrative existed, and it determined subsequent government messaging and policy (the two are sometimes hard to distinguish).

The language of loyalty and disloyalty, and the associated argot of insurrection and sedition, is the language of power. It is necessarily the language of those who possess power, and who expect to retain it. It was once the language of kings and lord chancellors, more recently of senators and segregationists. The language of “insurrection” and “sedition” is the language of power demanding obedience, and threatening disobedience. It is a language now spoken fluently on the left.

Not long ago, during the BLM riots of 2020, the left was celebrating what they called an uprising and sometimes an insurgency: echoes of the Viet Cong, heroic fighters for the popular cause (a distinctly mangled understanding of the Viet Cong, but it is their misunderstanding). A district of Seattle was occupied by the armed left; signs went up declaring that visitors were leaving the United States. GoFundMe promoted a fundraiser. The newspapers said that this was mostly peaceful.

The left has long seen itself as a rebel against unjust authority. The Partisan Review, The Jacobin, Dissent, Rabble.ca: these are the journals of the activist left. “Question Authority,” said the T-shirts, as did professors preaching from positions of authority. Che Guevara, an official of Castro’s tyranny, adorned the walls of dorm rooms. Transgression was fetishized; any self-respecting peer-reviewed article had to transgress a few boundaries, with extra points for a quotation from Georges Bataille. Antifa still tells us that “All Cops are Bastards.” The reflex has been long practiced, and puts the left into some novel if contradictory positions.

But so soon after celebrating actually deadly riots, in which dozens died, the left found itself in political power in the United States, as it is here in Canada, and in other countries of the English-speaking world. The left had long captured educational institutions, many churches, and most bureaucracies. Its capture of the security state, already penetrated by the “resistance” to Trump, was not far behind. The George Floyd riots completed the leftist capture of police departments.

The January 6 riot was the ideal pretext: violence surrounding the transfer of power was easily turned into an “insurrection” by a press compliant with institutional power. The I-word was ridiculous: an insurrection is an armed rebellion against state authority. The January 6 riot was deplorable (if one can still use the term unironically), but the rioters were not armed, and it was not a rebellion against the state, and had no leaders and no plan. The fellow with the horns was not Robert E. Lee; the gawking mob of tourists not the Army of Northern Virginia. The “insurrectionists” penetrated the Capitol, and wandered around taking selfies. The only person killed by violence was Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed woman shot by a panicked policeman, but that has not stopped a servile media from writing about the deadly “insurrection.”

The state, the police, and the media are today on the same side, and the legally loaded label of “insurrection” offered the opportunity to turn the full force of the security state on the supporters of President Trump. In the name of democracy, they round up their political opponents.

The legend took hold, and the specter of insurrection has proven useful. Here in Canada, documents made public by the Public Order Emergencies Inquiry show that government officials had internalized the understanding of January 6 as an insurrection, and with it the necessary consequence that dangerous insurrectionists were out there, even prior to the arrival of the truckers in Ottawa.1

As the screen-shotted text makes clear, the “growing narrative” was not created by the political operators. It already existed, and was a standard part of government talking points about “our democracy.” The LRB here is not the London Review of Books, but rather the Liberal Research Bureau, the Liberal Party’s opposition research arm, which obviously needed no briefing. And this “growing narrative” was well-fertilized by the media which (as other released documents make clear) was acting as an arm of the state. The point is not that these cliches are false, but that they are established as true. They are the mental furniture of the official mind, available and taken seriously.

The language of order is now spoken by left, and the demand for obedience implicit in the language of insurrection and sedition is now wielded as a weapon against the citizenry. This language is a recent acquisition, its novelty speaking of the speed and direction of ideological change. The confidence with which the left speaks this language testifies to a confidence in the stability of its power. Given the hegemony of the left, which to say its control of the means of discourse (that has existed for some time), and also its hold on the institutions of state power, among them the legal profession, the judiciary, and the elected levels of government, that thoughtless arrogance is, alas, justified.

The experience of the Emergencies Act in this country, like the dragnet sweeping up even peaceful January 6 protestors in the United States, demonstrates that the left’s hold on the language of power has become a direct threat to our civil liberties.

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I am not sure if my observations are original, but they can help to identify what the media, and by extension hegemonic power, thinks about contested issues. Though the bias is usually obvious, there is value in the demystifying tools of textual criticism, which make precise what had been indistinct. The mechanically minded also like to see how things work.

When the mainstream media really cares about something, it reports only one side of the question, and here, in the drearily predictable topic of drag shows, we have such an issue. Voice is allocated to the favoured: the good guys are interviewed, allowed to speak in their own voices, shown in humanizing detail, and allowed the last word; the disfavoured side is described from a distance and as a caricatured unity, allowed at most a quotation from a politician.

Today’s Globe and Mail carries a story by Adrian Morrow, the paper’s Washington correspondent, entitled, “Drag artists in U.S. face armed protesters and legal attacks as performances are targeted.”1 The headline captures the gist of the story, better than headlines sometimes do. All the stereotypes have been conscripted: right wing, reactionary, gun-nut, Republicans, Q-Anon, the transgendered, and minorities are all here. And this being a Canadian paper, Morrow does not neglect the customary glaze of self-satisfied anti-Americanism.

The allocation of voice is his article’s defining characteristic. It begins with one Brian Hernandez, named with the plural “they,” and the neologistic salutation “Mx.” Hernandez is quoted saying, “the agenda is to erase queer lives,” as though this was a straight fact, and not hyperbole. Two other drag performers are also quoted, one “over tacos in San Antonio’s Pearl District,” with further unnecessary detail about the buildings in which they had lunch (factories turned into upscale restaurants: there is more there than the reporter realizes). Also quoted are a pro-drag lawyer and a professor at Johns Hopkins, described as an expert in transgender history. (Who knew there was such a thing?)

The only opponent of public child-focused drag shows quoted is a Tennessee legislator called Chris Dodd who complains about, “recruiting children to this lifestyle.” There was once a Democrat Senator of that name; there is no member of the Tennessee House or Senate called Chris Dodd.2 No one on the anti-child-drag side is interviewed; certainly this putative Chris Dodd has not been. All live quotations come from the favoured side; the disfavoured are described in Morrow’s voice as “bigots,” and left with a misattributed sentence fragment.

A semiologist would pick this apart: the tacos and subsequent information use unnecessary detail to signify an authentic humanity (a real person who likes tacos!). Unintentionally they tell us who the reporter is comfortable having lunch with. The lawyer signals legal, even constitutional, validation. The professor of history is a sign of intellectual authority and long-term perspective. The lawyer and the professor also tell us, again unintentionally, which side wields bureaucratic power.

The article’s language is didactic: the use outside quotation marks of phrases such as “the right of transgendered people to live their gender identity,” combines with the obtrusive pronouns and salutations to tell the reader that these concepts are unproblematic and supported by all sophisticated and progressive people. This is how you should think, or at least speak. Failure to do so would make you a bigot.

The gender theorists tell us to read for the silences. Here, a silence covers Antifa, as is the Globe and Mail’s practice, as Morrows describes armed counter-protesters clad entirely in black. (Is there some sort of editorial bull on the topic?) And the supposedly anti-LGBTQ Club Q attack in Colorado is mentioned, while the writer maintains a dutiful narrative-protecting silence about the fact that the murderer was a transgendered person. The realm of silence extends beyond the voices of the disfavoured to include inconvenient facts too.

The same one-sided coverage has been evident in the Globe and Mail’s coverage of medical controversies. An article by medical correspondent Carly Weeks about public anger at medical authorities mentions Jordan Peterson and Amy Hamm, a nurse guilty of holding that there are two sexes, without feeling the need to speak to or quote either Peterson or Hamm. By contrast, Weeks begins and ends with substantial quotations from an official in the Nursing Association prosecuting Hamm, allowing her a peroration on such uplifting themes such as “trust,” “absolute care”, and “interpersonal connection.”3

Hamm and Peterson are described rather than quoted. We are told that Hamm is a “nurse who is involved in a disciplinary hearing after the college determined she made discriminatory remarks against transgender people.” Peterson was the object of a complaint about “controversial tweets.” In both cases the retreat from specificity into bureaucratic generalities avoids giving the reader the important information that Hamm said that there are two sexes, and that Peterson’s “controversial” tweets supported Poilievre and criticized Trudeau. The positions of both would command wide support, but here we have only discrimination, discipline and controversy. The denial of voice combines with distancing abstraction to serve a polemical purpose.

A final example, again relating to the Globe and Mail’s reporting of an emotionally charged issue, is given by an article about controversies surrounding critical race theory and associated practices at the Waterloo District School Board. A long Saturday puff-piece on an educational bureaucrat who is also a Black Lives Matter activist begins with his experience with online threats and ends quoting him saying "all kids can be successful," and on “caring.” As so often, the narrative structure of mainstream articles begins and ends with the favoured person, allow him a quotation that concludes the article on an uplifting note.4 The narrative is old but powerful: the protagonist faces problems, but rises above them.

In this case, somewhat unusually, an opponent of critical race theory is actually quoted, though only briefly and in order to be confuted by the reporter in the next sentence. By contrast, the bureaucrat, one Jeewan Chanicka, is described with obsequious respect:

Mr. chanicka is Muslim, and he spells his name with lower-case letters because he identifies with his Polynesian Indigenous spirituality and says that he doesn’t give more importance to himself than his surroundings, including animals, bodies of water and trees.

This strikes the required multicultural notes, the didactic tone telling us not to notice that an orthodox Muslim would regard Indigenous beliefs as pagan heresy. Once again, the English language is butchered, orthography becoming performance, the unusual lowercase spelling claiming to be a sign of modesty, as the claim is destroyed by its imposition on everyone else. Chanicka’s rationalization strikes a further false note, the more so coming from a teacher, as in English we do in fact capitalize the names of bodies of water, such as Lake Ontario, though admittedly not the puddle by the back door. The journalist has left her critical faculties behind; we are being instructed to follow.

I have surveyed three Globe and Mail articles, all reported pieces published for the Saturday brunch section. In each case, an effective voice is allowed to those representing the cultural left — the drag performers, the medical establishment, and the educational establishment — but denied to critics. The latter, if allowed to speak at all, get a brief sentence and are immediately countered by the reporter. The favoured interlocutors are granted authenticity by way of humanizing detail and personal experience, and are allowed to speak at some length. The narrative structure of each article begins with the personal obstacles faced by the protagonist, and ends by quoting the hero on an uplifting note: “It’s never been this open, this free, this accepted. You can live your full, complete, actual life,” says a drag dancer. Open, free, accepted, full, complete: the sixties are here again, and who but a bigot could be opposed?

Three factors will tell you who the mainstream media likes:

• Voice: as measured by quantity of quotation, especially from actual reporting;

• Detail: personal, often excessive, detail is used as the sign of authentic humanity;

• Peroration: the protagonist is granted the last words, almost always ascending into abstraction untethered to concrete referents.

Voice, Detail and Peroration: all are attributed by the writer. None are inherent in the objective, externally existing situation of controversy surrounding emotive cultural topics. All three are attributes of the text, and all three will be granted by the media to the favoured party, which is to say to the cultural left. I often come away from a Globe and Mail or other mainstream story with a strong sense of parti-pris, a sense that the author had a side in the controversy, and frequently with a list of factual errors too. But even without explicit errors, the allocation of voice, detail and the privilege of peroration will identify on the basis of textual analysis, rather than gut feeling, which side is favoured, and how favour is allocated.

Nor is it a coincidence that in each of my three examples bureaucracy (law and the academy in the first, the medical and educational bureaucracies in the last two) is on the side of the cultural left. It could hardly be otherwise. We live under the hegemony of the bureaucratic left, and mainstream journalists are its janissaries.

To read this chart naively, we are experiencing an epidemic of racism. But of course the opposite is the truth. Our society (and by “our society,” I mean the Anglo-Saxon world as a whole) is less racist than it has ever been. Outside their mothers’ basements, we have few racists in our society. And yet we have a positively neuralgic fear of racism, and have talked ourselves into a moral panic about it. It is perhaps human to be most afraid of the danger that threatens least.

“White supremacy” has changed its meaning. It once named social and political systems in which white people enjoyed legal and other privileges. Today, it names an indistinct and rapidly expanding mess of attitudes and practices arguably in some way related to past racism, while retaining the strongly pejorative meaning that rightly attaches to the original specific sense. The term has changed denotation (direct meaning) while retaining an engrained and politically powerful connotation (implied meaning). In common use the tainted connotation obliterates the memory of any specific meaning.

In Gramscian theory, a hegemonic ideology tells us what is simply common sense, and unproblematically true. The prevalence among the upper classes of the belief that our society is one of “white supremacy” speaks of left hegemony; the ability to expand almost beyond recognition the term’s direct meaning while retaining its opprobrious connotation speaks likewise of the hegemonic power of the left.

The once canonical text on its topic, White Supremacy by George M. Frederickson, compares the two most prominent historical examples of white supremacy, Apartheid South Africa and the American South, showing the significant similarities, and some differences, between the two. White Supremacy was published in 1981, a work of anti-racist scholarship inspired by the idealism of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, in which Frederickson had participated.

I read Frederickson as an undergraduate, and it was eye-opening, as I had imagined that Apartheid South Africa (then, at the risk of dating myself, a hot topic on campus) was some uniquely perverse society, and did not see it in a wider global context.

White supremacy, for Frederickson and indeed in common parlance at that time, named social systems in which people with white skins had legal privileges, and people with black skins were reduced to slavery or other forms of servitude. For progressive and Marxist historians, white supremacy served economic aims by creating a supply of cheap labour. One need not be a Marxist to see that the Marxists were right about that.

By contrast, the current sense of “white supremacy” is much less definite, more vague, but also more pervasive. I first noticed it in the works of bell hooks (lowercase), the Marxist feminist who became prominent in the 1980s, and has acquired a large, admiring and increasingly mainstream following ever since. The panegyrics on her recent death were fulsome.1 Quite possibly someone else got to this extended sense of “white supremacy” first, but having read a great deal of Marxist and Marxisant theory, I first noticed this neologistic use of “white supremacy” in hooks. While one can find an antecedent to anything, hooks, with her large academic and activist following, licensed and propagated this new, fuzzier but more permeative usage. A genuinely oppositional figure in her youth in the 1960s, her movement inward toward the centre of hegemonic discourse paralleled the trajectories alike of feminism and of Marxism.

[To risk an excursus, the lowercase “bell hooks” is a nom de plume, borrowed from a revered ancestor whose greatness imposes lowercase upon the descendant, or so she explains. We live in a world that fetishizes transgression, which here takes orthographic form. But I follow Eliot in believing that an author should say what she has to say in the way in which she has to say it.]

For hooks, white supremacy is epitomized by Betty Friedan, of all people: not everyone’s idea of a racist. Friedan’s Feminine Mystique of 1960 discusses the shortcomings of the lives of implicitly white middle class housewives, and therefore, according to hooks, Friedan was guilty of reinforcing white supremacy.2 Nor is this a drive-by insult; the attack on white feminists, led by Friedan, and the narrowness of their concerns, is the central purpose of hooks’ polemic.

When I look for white supremacy in the world of 1960, I think not of Betty Friedan but of Joe Biden’s old friend George Wallace, and of H.F. Verwoerd, the ideological architect of Apartheid, then Prime Minster of South Africa. But in all fairness, hooks has half a point: it is true that Friedan’s easy and unthinking slippage into a discussion of middle (and upper) class women as though their problems were one and the same with the problems of all women was made possible by the racial hierarchy of Friedan’s society. What is unthought and unexplored is often what is most ideological, which is to say most engrained. But it is also the case that Friedan spoke for one part of a vast egalitarian movement, of which the civil rights movement was a core part, a movement that ultimately gave us bell hooks. So give hooks half, but only half, a point.

Hooks’ sense of “white supremacy” extended the narrower directly political and economic meanings to include adjacency, presumption and silence, these being imputed to Friedan. It has now gone mainstream (at some risk of understatement), and become associated not with the U.S in 1960, but with the U.S. today. Hooks’ work is notable for its stream of confident assertions concerning white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and other large abstractions drawn from the Marxist tradition. The abstractions are mutually reinforcing, amplifying rather than qualifying one another. They pertain, not to some past situation, but to the U.S. in which she was writing. Her assertions are almost always unreferenced and unargued, as though they were matters of straightforward observation, requiring only the aperceptive courage to point them out. They often serve as peroration, which is to say as conclusive and motivating rhetorical climaxes. It is a style that expects and needs a friendly audience.

Hooks did much of her writing in the politically conservative period from 1980 forward into the the current century. In the same decades, the academy was overrun by the left, with bell hooks in the vanguard. The preferences of the academy licensed her frequent departures from scholarly precision, giving her place and prominence. The radical scholar Russell Jacoby observed this contradictory phenomenon, writing that he would give all the English departments in the world for a seat on the Supreme Court. I am not sure that it would have been from his point of view a good long term bargain. Her side has attained hegemonic power, and hegemony lasts a long time.

The intellectual historian Quentin Skinner has built a massive scholarly corpus around the concept of political languages, by which he means the rhetoric than can be used to political effect at any given time. Skinner observes that the term “slavery,” with its deeply ignominious connotations, was successfully deployed by Whig polemicists of the seventeenth century to describe the position of Englishmen under royal rule, thus discrediting the latter. We have in “white supremacy” a term whose ignominy has been similarly borrowed, repurposed, and re-deployed with learned support against not against the society of George Wallace but against that of Donald Trump and Barack Obama.

An expansion of meaning has overtaken, or been forced upon, the term “white supremacy.” By a kind of semantic imperialism, it now names a very large and very indistinct set of attitudes and practices, from old-style racism to policing to far-fetched claims that rationality, English grammar and even arithmetic are “white supremacist.”3 These radically expanded and obviously absurd meanings are taken seriously; it is unfortunate that bell hooks is not here to tell us what she thinks; nor is Derrick Bell (the founder of Critical Race Theory), who made great use of rational argument. That these expanded meanings are taken seriously speaks of the fact that they express sentiments already present, in however inchoate a form, when hooks gave them articulate and credentialed expression.

That the opprobrium rightly attached to the old fashioned formally established "white supremacy" explained by Frederickson could be fully retained even as this semantic expansion occurred is evidence that the hegemonic leftism of the present age hears in hooks and her many followers a conclusion it wants to hear. The hegemonic leftism of our age is deeply convinced of our society’s indelible racism.

Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, our society is not the same as that of George Wallace, let alone as that of Apartheid South Africa. It is an abuse of language to imply that our society places black people in a position of legal inferiority or sets out to reduce them to servitude. That black Americans do badly by many measures of social well being, including wealth, criminality, incarceration, and education, may be quite accurately traced to past racism, but is not evidence of present “white supremacy” in any but this newer, polemically stretched sense.

The loaded and inflammatory term “white supremacy” is obviously not an accurate description of our current situation. One can hardly hope to solve social problems, let alone to help those who suffer their effects, from a false starting point. Nor does the application of the term “white supremacy” to our society today do any honour to the many, King and Mandela among them, who fought the real systems of white supremacy anatomized by Frederickson.

But “white supremacy” as moral denunciation is politically powerful. If it neither informs nor convinces, it does unify and motivate the already convinced, and just as frequently it silences. It wins arguments, and that is what polemical slogans are for. It implies, nay it shouts, that our deeply damaged, morally tainted society needs thorough-going change, revolution from above. The party of “thorough” finds in “white supremacy” justification for sweeping powers, and large amounts of money. We may expect to hear of “white supremacy” as long it remains an effective weapon in the hands of state and hegemonic power.