The funniest article of the Trump transition was a Financial Times piece about bankers psyched for the MAGA era that quoted an anonymous finance guy as saying, “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.”
The funny part is that the quote is anonymous. It’s not actually true that he can say either of those words without fear of getting “cancelled.” He almost certainly has female coworkers and female family members who’d get mad at him. He probably works with people who have close family members with disabilities. Trump winning sort of signifies a rejection of this kind of politically correct pressure to modify your speech, but it also sort of doesn’t, not really. We’re still living in a society, with norms. And the very fact that conservative political ascendancy could be associated with greater freedom to use vulgar language is a reminder of the ambiguous nature of the ongoing vibe shift — Pat Roberston and Jerry Falwell weren’t telling people to talk like that.
The ambivalence around these issues is why point seven of the Common Sense Manifesto is itself a little ambivalent:
Politeness is a virtue, but obsessive language policing alienates most people and degrades the quality of thinking.
Some on the left have always maintained that what others criticize as creeping PC totalitarianism is just basic politeness. I don’t think that’s ever been true. But it’s also never been totally false. It’s completely reasonable that there’s some pressure in society to uphold standards of conduct around language, and people really should try to be nice.
Nonetheless, it’s a real problem for a movement trying to operate in electoral politics to maintain language-policing as a core value. You need to communicate in a way that is clear and broadly accessible. To an extent, you need to accept people as they are and try to find ways to appeal to them, not just try to reform their practices. You need to accept that social norms change and that this change is often for the better, but also empathize with people who are older or old-fashioned and find change a little bit disconcerting. And most of all, you need to focus on real policy issues rather than words.
Words are basically arbitrary
Because Martin Luther King Day coincided with Inauguration Day, I wound up not doing a Martin Luther King post. But I did spend a little time revisiting his work, and I was struck that some of his most trenchant is also a little bit awkward to quote in 2025.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Slow Boring to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.