The Right's Rollercoaster to Hell Part II

To get a firm grasp of what Trump is doing, let’s examine the role of the Right.

To understand the Right, we also need to understand the Left, liberalism, neoliberalism, progressives, and radicals.

I’m going to insist on a historically accurate, analytically useful usage of all these terms. In the past when I’ve argued for people not to use these words in a way that erodes their historical meaning, I’ve gotten the reaction, “but words change their meaning all the time!”

Words Change, boo

[Apparently boo comes from the French, “beau.” Anyone know more about that evolution?]

Language is constantly changing. This is a basic observation for anyone who pays attention to language. As far as my level of linguistic nerdiness, let’s just say I read Beowulf in Old English for fun, and leave it at that (Hwæt!) My point is, as an passionate language nerd, I very much want us to nourish and care for language, and to be healthy language needs change. The crux is, languages change for a great many reasons: some of the ones I like the most include migration, with people speaking multiple languages cohabiting and evolving new meanings and significations through sharing. Or: people of lower classes and oppressed groups innovating language to distinguish themselves from or even become intelligible to the upper classes and the cops. These are both beautiful examples of decentralized intelligence.

For more on decentralized intelligence, check out:

Reasons I don’t have much tolerance for include historical amnesia, milquetoast political correctness that changes forms without addressing oppressive power dynamics, and [shudder] that particularly American tendency to scorn the beautiful linguistic richness of the English language and turn every word into a flattened synonym of another word, losing all nuance and distinction, and plunging us towards an Orwellian hellscape in which we have a thousand ways to say nothing other than “good” or “bad”. While we’re on this one, check out “Politics and the English Language.” And, of course, in the next year or so I’ll have a series on “Lost Words” and “Forgotten Words.”

So in the US, in the late 20th century conservatives corrupted the meaning of “liberal” to signify someone who