A failure to communicate

While an undergraduate at Yale, William F. Buckley, Jr. found an ideological soulmate and debating partner in the red-headed L. Brent Bozell, Jr. from Nebraska. The two were unbeatable in tournaments with Buckley’s devastating wit and Bozell’s earnest oratory. Bozell would eventually become Buckley’s brother-in-law and his co-author on the book McCarthy and His Enemies. He would find his greatest success as the ghostwriter of one of the most famous texts of American conservatism, Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative, which sold in the millions.

But while Buckley’s star would continue to rise and he would become a kind of policeman of the boundaries of conservative legitimacy, Bozell would take his family to Spain where he launched the ultra-montane Catholic journal Triumph and slowly descended into a discouraging marginalization. During those years, Bozell proclaimed the greatest problem facing the West was “the Gnostic heresy.”

While Bozell didn’t get far in convincing the world of the 1970s of the Gnostic problem, it seems he may have been ahead of his time just as he was with his impassioned advocacy of the pro-life movement. But we may be seeing something that brings the idea back to mind in recent years. The Democratic organization “Third Way” is trying to separate the left from its fascination with the development of obscure, ideological, and technical language because of the alienating effect it can have on ordinary voters.

Observers of cultural elites will recognize such language. Think of words and phrases such as “othering,” “holding space,” “unhoused,” “triggering,” “microaggression,” “birthing person,” “chest feeding,” “deadnaming,” “heteronormative,” and “Latinx.” (Despite holding four degrees, the first time I saw “Latinx” I thought it was pronounced “Lateenks” to rhyme with sphinx, instead of “Latin X.” I had to be in the right room at a university to get a clue.) There are many other such examples, which together constitute a kind of secret language and knowledge (an idea associated with Gnosticism), which is fluently exchanged by practitioners of the art but can leave others bewildered and isolated.

I remember when I realized that such persons were using the words “white privilege” in a way I found unrecognizable. The phrase has always had a clear meaning to me, which is the idea that whites constitute a kind of superior race. But I was hearing it used in a way that was far more indirect and which attached itself to people and practices that did not clearly relate to such a philosophy. Having achieved this redefinition, activists could gain the power of such a description without the accountability of a publicly understood meaning. From a Machiavellian point of view, I had to acknowledge ruefully the sleight of hand at work in a use of language that would mean one thing to true believers while simultaneously deceiving those not in the know.

Third Way is convinced their fellow Democrats have gone too far in the cultivation of terms that become a kind of currency among the fashionable class in the broader society. Accordingly, they have issued a kind of cultural memo imploring them to stop. Why? They are convinced that despite the success of propagating such terminology among elites, the rest of the American people find themselves confused, left behind, and being spoken to above their heads. Consequently, they are likely to rally to a plainspoken (even if at times painfully blunt) figure such as Donald Trump. The choice then, from Third Way’s perspective, is to continue in a kind of ideological game that appears to please a segment of society and to flatter their sensibilities or to win elections.

Frankly, Third Way’s advice is good for the American political community more broadly. The people of the United States govern themselves. It is essential that we speak to each other in a language that is clear and comprehensible, especially in the realm of politics. The Democrat consultant James Carville has referred in interviews to the wrong-headed instinct to base policy on what he calls “the faculty lounge” versus the hopes and beliefs of the American people.

But there is something even more important than the comprehensible over the arcane and that is the psychological effect of the language in question. Third Way points out that many Americans of all races look upon the catalog of approved terms and see a source not of liberation, but of fear. These words are a human resources minefield and a way to be destroyed rather than to help one prosper. Americans should not be like 20th century communists desperately striving not to depart from some moving party line. Instead, we embody Hadley Arkes’ ideal of human beings as those who give and receive reasons as they work toward moral decisions.