A recent article in the American Prospect was titled “Stop Calling Manchin et al. Moderates.” It unwittingly echoes a post-9/11 political debate, when it had become a journalistic cliche to refer to Muslims who were not terrorists as “moderate Muslims.” It was a legitimate critique to point out that Osama bin Laden was not different from most Muslims just by virtue of being more Islamic.
Does the same framework apply to Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who are just as much Democrats as members of the “Squad”? Yes — and no. Party registration is binary, like being pregnant. So, that’s the yes. But when people refer to the centrists of the Democratic Party, they are referring to a specific cleavage in left-wing American historical and ideological development, dating to what historians call the Progressive Era of the 1890s through the 1910s. And you can be more or less progressive, which is the strain of the Left that is especially dedicated to the use of technocratic central control to solve social problems combined with the top-down dissemination of an improving morality. (Progressivism at its Wilsonian core is the idea that inequality can be solved by forcing poor people to think like rich people.) When people refer to Manchin as a moderate, in this sense, there’s no reason to correct their language. Or, at least, there’s no reason to correct their language unless you are a progressive and you want to plan the available vocabulary to make it impossible to so much as name the terms of a dispute. Today, this is the go-to move among many of our most prominent progressives.
This month, political analysts, including James Carville, Don Lemon, and Joe Scarborough, attributed the Democrats’ poor showings in Virginia to “wokeness.” Inevitably, there was a backlash. It came not from people with substantive disputes, but from what were recently described as the “word Karens” who wanted to speak to the English language’s manager. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez notes it’s “a term almost exclusively used by older people these days [by the way].” (As an aside, almost two-thirds of people over 65 turned out to vote in the last midterm election, while only about half that many between the ages of 18 and 34 showed up. There are people for whom fashion should matter more than political strategy, but they shouldn’t be in Congress.)
As Freddie de Boer titled a blog post last week, “Please Just F***ing Tell Me What Term I am Allowed to Use For the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand,” I am also not attached to the word “woke” as such, though I have repeatedly given it a stable definition in print. Progressives who wish for expert committees to control the evolution of language may feel they have the power to decide what everyone gets to say, but it doesn’t change the outcomes of elections. People aren’t that easy to plan, as progressives keep finding out, but never learning. It’s important that in language, as in politics, there are some moderating influences pushing back against the forces that seek to control and manage change, rather than let it play out. Otherwise, we will simply be left without any words to describe the things going on around us.
