"Power All the Way Down"

"Already during his lifetime some scholars complained that, as the historian Lawrence Stone put it, Foucault's 'dominance and control' model 'reduces the actors in history to two, the controllers and the controlled.' In a recent book, 'Left Is Not Woke,' Neiman goes further. For the political left, she argues, Foucault's legacy has been disastrous: a reflexive distrust of Enlightenment ideals—including tolerance, universalism and progress itself—which are viewed as cynical ploys by European states to justify imperialist ambitions. His theory does not allow for a human collective bound by shared values and fighting for the common good, she writes, only for 'a bunch of tribes jockeying for power.'"

At The New York Times, Emily Eakin marks the 100th birthday of Michel Foucault.

And at Slate, Laura Miller reviews Eakin's The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory.

"Capitalization Is Not in Itself a Marker of Understanding or Respect"

"Behind the push to capitalize is the desire to define blackness, and it is a desire that I think we should be wary of. Any major conventional shift ought to be interrogated for its motivations and its implications. In this case, the shift has been touted as a radical (and antiracist) break from a (racist) past. But capitalization—the linguistic convention, but also the politics and theory behind it—is not new, and is indeed deeply anti-radical. Capitalization remains tied to what came before—to the conceptual framework and language of antiblackness—by its base and reductive impulse: by the desire to define."

Nicholas Whittaker at The Drift explains "Why We Shouldn't Capitalize 'Black.'"

"In Our Own Era of 'Fake News' and 'Alternative Facts,' the Need for Clearer, Simpler Language Is as Great as It Was in 1946"

"Fellow teachers, assign Orwell's famous essay on politics and language if your aim is to promote cultural literacy and critical thinking, or to present a classic example of the plain style, or to discuss the niceties of good versus bad usage. But if you're seeking to improve the literary skills of beginning student writers, don't start with Orwell's list of strictures or advise them to imitate the deceptive simplicity of Orwell's own style."

John Rodden at Commonweal wonders if beginning undergraduates are too young for George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language."

Generational Experience

At Spiked, Lisa McKenzie argues that "[t]he real divide is class, not 'generations,'" and Brendan O'Neill criticizes "[t]he tyranny of 'lived experience.'"

"First-Aid to Clear Thinking"

"She thus drew a line between 'political and economic' freedom–the kinds of freedom that democratic nations traditionally seek to uphold–from 'freedom of mind'. For Stebbing, freeing one's own mind is, uniquely, one's own personal responsibility, and is, she explains, hindered by ignorance. People might appear to be free, because they live in a liberal democracy, but this apparent freedom can be illusory. Genuine freedom consists in individuals knowing how to think freely."

At Aeon, Peter West discusses philosopher Susan Stebbing and her 1939 book, Thinking to Some Purpose.

Positive or Negative Liberty

"The challenge for Democrats, rather, is rhetorical. If Americans prize 'freedom' more than 'equality,' Democrats need to find the right words to convince people to support equality-furthering policies. With such a tenuous grip on both parts of Congress and without Trump as an easy foil to turn out Democrats' base and turn independent voters away from the GOP, the success of the party's long-term agenda and their hold on power will depend on their doing so. It also might just help unify the party in the process."

James Piltch at Politico argues that, for Democrats, "appealing to a shared sense of community will help them connect with Americans now and increase support for equality-based messages and policies later."

"This Is a Truly Epochal Development"

"Constantly replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a brilliant strategy of social exclusion. The rationale is supposed to be that this shows greater respect for particular groups. But there was no grassroots working-class movement among Black Americans demanding the use of 'enslaved persons' instead of 'slaves' and the overwhelming majority of Americans of Latin American descent—a wildly homogenizing category created by the U.S. Census Bureau—reject the weird term 'Latinx.' Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and successfully imitating their betters."

Michael Lind at Tablet discusses "the consolidation of a national ruling class."

"If We Replace 'Sex' With 'Gender' as a Way of Thinking About Ourselves, It Will Be Harder to Tackle Sex-Based Oppression"

"None of this means 'GC' feminists are in favour of bigotry, or don't care about the obstacles and prejudices faced by transgender people, or that we deny the existence of people with differences in sex development. What it does mean is that we think rejecting sex as a way of thinking about ourselves would be a terrible error. And that we urgently want to be able to discuss this, in a respectful way, with those who disagree."

At The Guardian, Susanna Rustin contrasts "Beauvoirian" and "Butlerian" feminism.

Covfefe

"'Although the etymology of the word is a matter of debate, for at least 50 years 'kayfabe' has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We'll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it's real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined.... The aesthetic of World Wrestling Entertainment seems to be spreading from the ring to the world stage. Ask an average Trump supporter whether he or she thinks the president actually plans to build a giant wall and have Mexico pay for it, and you might get an answer that boils down to, 'I don't think so, but I believe so.' That's kayfabe. Chants of 'Build the Wall' aren't about erecting a structure; they're about how cathartic it feels, in the moment, to yell with venom against a common enemy.'"

Simon Reynolds on his blog discovers Donald Trump's Rosebud.

"If Ever There Was a Time to Rejoin the Two and Leverage Nationalism to Counter Ethno-Nationalism, It Is Now"

"Post-Vietnam progressives answered King's call to eschew imperialism but they mistrusted nationalism. Many came to regard it as just another expression of toxic tribalism that modernization and popular enlightenment would one day wash away. Democrats have told stories of class, gender, and racial injustice, and they have rightly pressed for ameliorative policies, but they have typically failed to scale up their message to a full-blown narrative that joins the pursuit of justice to the nation's ideals, identity, and greatness. Most party leaders have also refrained from taking the lead on national interests and security, leaving that to the Republicans. As a result, they left the flag with politicians who carried it into another reckless war—and eventually turned it over to Trump, whose patriotic pretensions too often go unchallenged despite their manifest hollowness."

M. Steven Fish, Neil A. Abrams, and Laila M. Aghaie at Slate argue that "American liberals have been relatively comfortable talking about race but have forgotten how to speak the language of nationalism."

"Care Less About What Happens in the Bedroom Than in the Workplace"

"'What the Democrats in California and in New York need to realize is that it doesn't matter how many votes we get in California or New York,' Betras said before 'going out on a limb' and predicting that those strongholds would stay blue. 'But that doesn't get us to the promise land. What gets us there is fly-over country.'"

Philip Wegmann at Real Clear Politics warns Democratic candidates away from emphasizing "gender-identity pronouns."

And Froma Harrop argues that "Identity Politics Are a Dead End."

"America's Adversaries Commit Crimes; America Merely Stumbles on Its Way to Doing the Right Thing"

"She didn't claim that Trump's detention centers are the equivalent of Auschwitz. But she denied that America is a separate moral category, so inherently different from the world's worst regimes that it requires a separate language. On Tuesday night she retweeted the actor George Takei, who wrote, 'I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America.' This was another act of linguistic transgression. When remembering the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II, Americans have generally employed the term internment camps—largely, the historian Roger Daniels has argued, to create a clear separation between America’s misdeeds and those of its hated foes.
"Ocasio-Cortez and others on the Millennial-led left are challenging that separation now."

Peter Beinert at The Atlantic writes that "for the first time in decades, the left is mounting a serious challenge to American exceptionalism."

"Thank God We Didn't Have Written Language Back When I Was A Teenager"

"By An Ancient Mesopotamian"

From The Onion.

"A Satire Meant to Be a Warning"

"But our friend Throgmorton didn't simply see meritocracy as some sort of Platonic ideal—he jingoistically claimed that the United States was already a meritocracy, and the world’s only example of it. Not only did he overlook the peculiarly British irony in which Young couched the term, he also missed out on an irony much closer to home: In 1959, five years after the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools, African Americans were still being systematically denied equal access to education across the South."

Ben Zimmer at The Atlantic discusses the legacy of Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033.

"Language of Post–Civil Rights White Supremacy"

"The expressions 'racially tinged' and 'racially charged' emerged during the modern civil rights movement. Newspaper databases show the same pattern as Google Ngrams: regular use began in the 1950s and '60s, increased in the late twentieth century, and has been rampant since 2010. ('Racially provocative' also skyrocketed in the 2010s.) Historian Barbara J. Fields has written that the substitution of 'race' for 'racism' 'transforms the act of a subject into an attribute of an object.' More than twenty-five years ago, Fields observed that 'the neutral shibboleths of difference and diversity' had replaced terms such as 'slavery, injustice, oppression, and exploitation.' Fields noted that such language enhanced 'the authority and prestige of race,' a phrase given meaning via the creation of hierarchies of power. The scientifically incoherent concept of 'race' becomes real through such speech acts, which serve to stabilize 'race' as a reality rather than denaturalize it as a social construction."

Lawrence B. Glickman at Boston Review criticizes euphemism that "masks the danger of racism."

Yas, Kween

"Young, cis women seem to have been seduced by it the most. That alone is little surprise: That demographic is known for leading the charge on linguistic trends. Drag has a language of resilience and snark, even as it embraces its feminine side. It can be emphatic or emotional or guarded. It's giving you side-eye or props or a scoff.
"For those reasons, it's also boomed online. Internet culture loves conveying meaning in a pithy, interesting way and, as Leap puts it, 'drag language appeals to affect.' It's the same reason emojis have become popular: It carries a certain depth, it's evocative, and it's funny. In the age of the meme, drag lingo goes far."

Lexi Pandell at Wired calls RuPaul's Drag Race "Pop Culture's Dominant Slang Engine."

"Debates Surrounding Our National Value System"

"'The American Dream' has always been about the prospect of success, but 100 years ago, the phrase meant the opposite of what it does now. The original 'American Dream' was not a dream of individual wealth; it was a dream of equality, justice and democracy for the nation. The phrase was repurposed by each generation, until the Cold War, when it became an argument for a consumer capitalist version of democracy. Our ideas about the 'American Dream' froze in the 1950s. Today, it doesn't occur to anybody that it could mean anything else.

Anna Diamond at Smithsonian interviews Sarah Churchwell, author of Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream."

"Before 1945, the Analogical Reservoir Was More Abundantly Stocked"

"Even in the most obscure local papers, there were constant references to an extremely diverse array of historical figures from the classical era to the 20th century: Pharaoh Thutmose III, Alexander the Great, King Herod, Emperor Caligula, Attila the Hun, Richard III, Henry VIII, Guy Fawkes, Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Boulanger, and Benito Mussolini."

Gavirel Rosenfeld at The Atlantic explores "How Americans Described Evil Before Hitler."

A Structure of Political Revolutions

"This line of thought echoes the way the twentieth-century Austrian philosopher Karl Popper thought science works: Scientists put forward a theory which they then test against experience. If experience contradicts the theory's predictions, the theory is 'falsified' and should promptly be discarded. Popper saw science as the model of critical and rational thinking, always open to being shown that it was wrong, always accountable to empirical evidence. He also saw science as a model for democratic politics. In a democracy, the government should always be open to criticism, and it should of course be accountable to voters, who test the degree to which government policies work or not. If not, they get rid of them in the next election and vote in a new government.
"The problem is that science doesn't actually work that way—and neither do democratic politics."

Alexis Papazoglou at The New Republic writes that in politics "[t]he battle has to be won just as much at the level of rhetoric and persuasion as anywhere else."

"I'm Talking About His Rhetoric, Not His Actions"

"I think as far as his rhetorical strategy goes, it's very fascist. He's certainly not calling to impose equality. It certainly doesn't have any hints of communism or anything like that. He explicitly targets minority out-groups in calling them rape threats with regularity, which has the psychological effect of creating an association between immigrants and crime.
"He regularly lies. He creates this connection between himself and his supporters with that technique of lying. Because it's this kind of 'Us against them,' rather than truth or falsity. He's harsh, but he's harshly patriarchal. He's very much the strongman. His values are social Darwinism. You don't find that in communist authoritarianism. You find him talking about winners and losers, and it's all about winning, and he's the biggest winner. He does hit all the classic fascist tropes, I have to say."

Isaac Chotiner at Slate interviews Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.