On Sept. 7, Canada’s “progressive” Globe and Mail included a lengthy opinion piece purporting to convey the message of Carol Off’s recently published work “At a Loss for Words: Conversation in the Age of Rage.” The book’s theme would seem to be that while words are intended to operate as objective vehicles to reality, they are frequently imbued with perverse connotations by political ideologues wishing to incite rage and hatred without overtly seeming to do so. The rhetoric of Adolf Hitler is cited as a prime example, its obvious intent being “the dethronement of reason and the celebration of emotion.” Ironically, one of the informing ideas of these blogs is that the Left has come to rely almost entirely on “feelings” while frequently denouncing Reason as merely a weapon of the heartless Right!
Not surprisingly, Donald Trump’s rhetoric prior to the Jan. 6 “insurrection” is cited as an example of the abusive use of language typical of Hitler. In asking his followers to “fight like hell” in order to “save America,” he was, we are told, clearly suggesting they invade the Capitol. That he also demanded they protest “peacefully” and “lawfully,” is not mentioned in the article before me, a diatribe whose hypocrisy is truly disgusting. While I can hardly pretend to know Trump’s intentions in descrying the fact that he thought the election had been stolen from him, I can say with absolute certainty that the author of the Globe article proceeds to use language in the very same way he has spent multiple paragraphs denouncing!
The final paragraphs of the article focus on the threat to Democracy posed by “populism.” Now whereas “populism” used to refer to the political views of the “average” man, one perhaps suspicious of the intellectual/economic elites, the Left has reduced the word to an absolute pejorative, suggesting the masses to be rife with ignorance, racism and various other deplorable qualities. The radical Right, we are told, incites anger amongst its populist supporters by convincing them that the Left is uninterested in their welfare and actually intent on “destroying their traditions.” Such lies, we are told, are invariably effective because the common man is “self-indulgent” and uninterested in “ideas.”
Generalizations about any sector of any population are truly idiotic. But while the Left will quite rightly go berserk should a stereotypical generalization be directed at one of its “oppressed” minorities, it is apparently comfortable in demonizing all those “ordinary” people who do not share its world-view. Common sense and the lack of it, I would argue, are evident amongst all sectors of the species. The notion that the Brits who supported the Brexit initiative are all racists, is truly superficial. Indeed it is a valuation seemingly indifferent to the preservation of British Culture. So while the writer of The Globe article suggests populists are really not concerned with Ideas, is it not arguable that the Left, which obsessively reduces every issue to a matter of Identity, is itself utterly indifferent to the Ideas we embrace? Indeed does not its obsession with Inclusiveness entail an Intellectual Relativism yielding such absurd notions as the belief that one claiming Western European Culture is vastly superior to that of the Indigenous of the Americas, is no more than a White Supremacist? And oh, by the way, the “populist” belief that the Left is intent on destroying our “traditions” is not a lie fabricated by the “far right,” but an eminently verifiable fact!
So this massive article in The Globe and Mail which purports to be a sophisticated study of the subtle abuse of language by those seeking to incite hatred in their followers, commits the very sin it pretends to despise. Even more ironic is that in demonizing “populism,” it quite literally is undermining the basis of Democracy itself, i.e., the principle of Majority Rule.