“Left-wing Radical” may not mean what you think it means

To the European observer, Americans seem to love their extremes. “Go big or go home”- tiny houses vs. McMansions, boring vanilla ice-cream vs. chunky monkey caramelgasm chocolate chip, kombucha vs. 64oz soda. Europeans familiar with regular US day to day politics have always known than there is a cultural difference between the terms “politically right” “left” or even “center”. Bernie Sanders, for example, would probably be a centrist in Germany, perhaps he’d be in the Green Party. Half of the Republican party would be in the “business is our religion and we hate the poor” party, the FDP. The other half….let’s not go there.

Of course, it’s easy to speak about nuance when you have proportional representation, and therefore many different parties to choose from. Terms like “left” and “right”, “conservative” or “progressive” function more like a compass if you have a two-party system, like the US. Within a party, you have a general idea of where you want to go but differ on how you get there. (side bar: the disagreements among leftists, and the constant undermining of one another in the name of argument seems to be the same on both sides of the pond.)

After more than ten years in the US, I am used to these conflations, I understand them, and I generally know where I stand. And still, occasionally, I am stumped. It began when the current president discredited the BLM protesters in Portland as “left-wing radicals” hell-bent on destroying the city. The sociological make-up and the history of the BLM protests in Portland, the cruel response of PPB, the ideological flip-flopping of the wimpy current mayor deserves at least an article of its own, and I truly hope that people doing oral history are out there. In the meantime, I recommend the coverage of the Portland Mercury (and if you have a few dollars, donate to these brave journalists).

Then, the letters from Mike Pence started. I don’t know what I did to deserve the karmic punishment, but somehow my address ended on a Republican listserv. This time, Nancy Pelosi and her band of socialist radicals, alternatively “left-wing radicals” were attacked. Admittedly, this was the first time I saw “Nancy Pelosi” (net worth around 120 million, married to an investment banker) and “socialism” in one sentence.

At the RNC, the use of the word “left-wing radicals” became shorthand for some sort of dystopia between civil war and zombie apocalypse and a Hieronymus Bosch painting. It is a magic formula that when paired with a QAnon chaser goes down ever so smoothly.

Was this some sort of matrix-jedi mind-trick messing with me? Did I end up in an alternate universe? Was this the darkest timeline?

You see, where I come from, being a left-wing radical is an identity, a habitus. When I was in my early 20’s, being a left-wing radical meant that you lived in decrepit apartments with people whose ideology you shared. If you belonged to the academic part of the left-wing radicals, knowledge of theory from Karl Marx to the Frankfurt school, and constant arguments about it was required. If you were more of a practical go-getter type, knowledge ranging from printing pamphlets to making the occasional Molotov Cocktail came in handy. The lifestyle went along with a certain aesthetic, equally influenced by performative poverty, and the practical considerations of being able to run away from the police or surviving tear gas attacks. Don’t wear Prada to the protest, kids! And you were terribly busy, all the time. Organizing demonstrations, actions, writing letters, pamphlets, mobilizing people is hard work.

Aside from differences in Weltanschauung and fashion aesthetic, chronic illness and perpetual fatigue are not exactly conducive to a revolutionary lifestyle. So, while I sympathize with some of their goals, I have never been part of any of these groups.

But now, all of a sudden, I am a “left-wing radical”, just for believing that ripping kids from their parents’ arms and putting them in cages is wrong. For thinking that Black Lives Matter, and that it is not enough to address structural racism, but to dismantle it. For believing that healthcare is a human right, and that 170k people shouldn’t have paid with their lives for a botched government response to COVID-19.

Mockery aside, I kept thinking- do they know what they’re doing when they refer to people like boring little me, or the protesters, who are motivated by righteous anger as “radical”? The answer is: yes, you betcha.

Klemperer was Right all along

Victor Klemperer, a German scholar of Jewish origin wrote a book called LTI- Lingua Tertii Imperii (The language of the Third Reich). In it, he analyzed how the Nazi Dictatorship slowly, but subtlety undermined language. Here are two of the most quoted passages:

“Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously. … Language does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it. (…) Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all. (15)

“The Third Reich coined only a very small number of the words in its language, perhaps — indeed probably — none at all. . . But it changes the value of words and the frequency of their occurrence, it makes common property out of what was previously the preserve of an individual or a tiny group, it commandeers for the party that which was previously common property and in the process steeps words and groups of words and sentence structures with its poison. (16)”

Klemperer described a process that began long before 2016, but one that has been accelerated since. The first little drop of poison was “make America great again”: True, some willingly slobbered down that arsenic-laced cup from the snake-oil salesman in hope of a quick fix, but in the end, we all got doused in it. The next dose came in a tequila shot glass of “alternative facts” and “fake news.” The poison was at work when the president made his famous “very fine people on both sides” comment, creating a fake equivalency between white nationalists marching in Charlottesville and those wanting to stop them. Language has the power to shape reality, depending on which philosopher you ask, language is reality. The perversion of language and the messages it sends become less and less opaque the closer the election looms.

Some side effects of chronic exposure to arsenic are “gradual loss of strength; nervous manifestations marked by paralysis and confusion.” Before you know it, your system shuts down. Just as someone who is fed a slow, steady diet of arsenic without their knowledge or without ever questioning the cumulative effect, we have become accustomed to the perversion of language: we take it as a given that the right uses the expression “pro-life” suggesting everyone else is a stone-cold baby killer. We are used to the mental gymnastics of understanding that “school choice” really means “we destroy the already underfunded schools in poorer districts”. We hear an administration using the term “ANTIFA” as if it was an organization with card carrying members and a monthly finance committee meeting. “Christian values” has become shorthand for the cruel exegesis of evangelists.

I am obviously not the first person to make this comparison, and I won’t be the last. Does anyone really question the direct line from the President suggesting the Police should bang people’s heads in cars, to the constant talk of “gang violence” or “thugs” to the many murders of black people at the hands of those who supposedly “serve to protect” (another instance of Klemperer poison- who are they serving/protecting when and where?). The murders of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and the latest shooting victim Jacob Blake, to name just those of recent memory, are the physical expression of violence that began with language. It is no coincidence that on the evening when a couple charged with a felony weapons count is speaking at the RNC about their “rights to protect themselves”, a 17 year old gets driven by his mother across state lines to kill protesters in Kenosha.

Any German, Chilean, Spaniard or other citizen of a place that has been in the clutch of strongmen and their gleeful henchmen can recite the recipe for recovery — and it is long, arduous and potentially only partial: Call a spade a spade, and a narcissist a narcissist. Reject your daily dose of propaganda. Read Victor Klemperer. Use your words with care. Call out those who knowingly perpetuate the poison that has infused our discourse. And yeah, for the love of god and mankind, please vote.

Sincerely, a new left-wing radical.