Weaponized Indignation
We’ve reached an unfortunate point in the discourse where disagreement is almost universally perceived as either a personal attack or an expression of being offended. This occurs across the political spectrum — the Centre and Right calling progressives “snowflakes”, the Left imputing malice and inflicting hostility on those not adequately “woke”. What’s worse, on my end of the scale — the far Left — conflicts in the details can overshadow shared goals, spurring cannabalistic infighting among natural allies. The result is political stereoblindness: the depth and nuance of any given issue are lost behind the first objectionable surface detail.
A few recent examples illustrate this. At the risk of flogging a dead horse: Don Cherry. Anti-racist activists and generally-decent people decried Cherry’s implicitly racist (at minimum xenophobic) rant and many loudly called for his ouster in response. On the other side, very few publicly supported the validity of his argument, instead defending Cherry’s right to “free speech” against the politically-correct whiners. Both of these views present a flattened version of the situation. Cherry’s supporters redirect the conversation so they can maintain an ambiguous stance on bigotry, and present a simultaneously weak (easily offended) and strong (dangerous mob) reactionary SJW strawman of their opponents. Unfortunately, this strawman isn’t *entirely* inaccurate; much of the outrage this week was directed at this incident specifically, and it was the sheer volume of complaint that resulted in Rogers’ decision to deplatform. This is unambiguously a good outcome, but the rancour over this event both overshadows Cherry’s longstanding history of being a shithead without consequence, and risks reducing the issue of racism to an incident-by-incident game of whack-a-mole (see: Trudeau’s blackface). Sure, any public visibility can become the site of productive conversation, but when the focus is on the bigot rather than bigotry itself it becomes harder to see (or entirely hides) the systemic racism in our midst — especially in ourselves.
This week’s episode of South Park was similarly uproarious. The A-plot briefly summarised: vice-principal Strong Woman enters a women’s athletic competition, but discovers that an ex-boyfriend (a caricature of macho man Randy Savage) has disingenuously identified as a woman to enter the competition and defeat her out of spite. As the villain continues to gloat and intrude upon her life, PC Principal eventually confronts this character, drawing attention to the deception and unfairness of this act of petty revenge. In response, he is called a bigot and a transphobe, which creates a frenzy of public outrage and shuts down the criticism entirely. Justice is ultimately served at the hands of the female students of South Park Elementary, sending both the villain and Cartman (whose B-plot served as a mirror) packing. At the end of the episode, Strong Woman and PC Principal are worried about the reaction of their “PC Babies” at home, but to their surprise they are welcomed without reservation, and remark “looks like they’re growing up.”
At this point, I should note that I found this episode to be off-side, even by South Park’s standards. I don’t support the plot vehicle they chose, and the show itself has a history of icky transphobic humour. That said, the public reaction to this episode neatly illustrates its point. Having raised a nuanced and challenging issue — the competitiveness of trans athletes in sport — the discourse quickly turned reductive and toxic. Many on the Left began and ended their critique with “transphobe!”, while others on the Centre and Right blindly cheered Stone and Parker for “sticking it to those sjw losers” and/or expressed transphobic views themselves. In reality, this story wasn’t even primarily about trans issues (which is why I really wish they’d used a different vehicle) — but rather the impossibility of good discourse when approached in bad faith.
Trans women are women — this much is clear and not in question — but there are aspects of the quest for trans acceptance with complex contextual factors and no definitive answers. The same is true for racial equality and all other elements of social justice; if the problem were simple, we’d have solved it by now. There’s certainly no reason or obligation to entertain bad views, or to endure the questioning of “rational skeptic” sealions — no, tear those apart post-haste. But weaponizing the language of indignation to sidestep good-faith discussions of nuance transforms a complex social matter into a simple personal one. Instead of crafting solutions yielding a more inclusive society, our focus turns to assigning blame and reveling in the infliction of punishment.
The Right are masters of this technique, with a venerable tradition of scapegoating and stoking fear-of-change. By rendering legitimate criticisms as the complaints of oversensitive individuals, they can safely sidestep issues without having to offer a rebuttal — instead positioning the “snowflake” as the irrational bad actor. When the Left adopts this strategy, we enter the discourse on our opponent’s terms — weakening our ability to shut down threats to fundamental justice. This isn’t a matter of tone policing; it’s about selecting the right targets and bringing the right tools. Our enemy is not evil people who hold bad beliefs — it’s bad beliefs and the ways they seduce decent people.
That said, “ok boomer” strikes me as the most appropriate response to bad faith conservatism. To be clear, this isn’t a slight against people of a particular age group — most baby boomers I know are cool, and you know who you are. There is, though, a subset of folks (not necessarily of that generation) that use the strategies I’ve outlined above to replace the rich, interconnected complexity of the world we share with a simplistic, self-centered, backward-facing fantasy. Since the nature of this delusional reality is built on false premises and bad logic, the only way to defend it is with bad rhetoric and deception. It’s tempting to think one can break through and reason one’s way to consensus — and sometimes it works — but when you’ve already been infantilized as an absurd, dismissable parody there’s little ground to be gained. It might seem hypocritical to be dismissive in turn, but frankly this entitled millennial has more important things to do.
Anyway, this is another case of a one-line Facebook quip turning into an essay, so I’ll relent. Tl;dr: bigotry bad, issue is complicated, focus on causes more than symptoms, don’t suffer fools. And please don’t yell at me.
