{"id":40595,"date":"2017-10-25T05:00:51","date_gmt":"2017-10-25T09:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=40595"},"modified":"2017-10-24T14:59:39","modified_gmt":"2017-10-24T18:59:39","slug":"climb-aboard-the-invective-treadmill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/10\/25\/climb-aboard-the-invective-treadmill\/","title":{"rendered":"Climb aboard the invective treadmill!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Megan McArdle<\/a> tries to point out the urge to call everyone you don’t like a “racist” or “white supremacist” runs you the same trust risk that the boy who cried wolf did:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the inverse of what Steven Pinker has dubbed \u201cthe euphemism treadmill,\u201d where we try to find nicer words for something we don\u2019t think is very nice, and find that the new words quickly take on all the old connotations. So \u201ctoilet,\u201d turns into \u201cbathroom,\u201d then migrates onward to \u201crest room.\u201d Only we still know there’s a toilet behind that door, and whatever words we use about it, our feelings don\u2019t change.<\/p>\n

This is why attempting to change how Americans feel about illegal migrants by changing the terms we use to describe them is a project doomed to failure; whether they are \u201cillegal aliens\u201d or \u201cundocumented immigrants,\u201d the political realities remain the same. People who feel negatively toward \u201cillegals\u201d feel just as negatively toward \u201cundocumented immigrants.\u201d<\/p>\n

The invective treadmill works in a similar fashion, only in reverse.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

During the 2016 presidential campaign, I found myself confronted by a curious problem: Many of my readers simply didn\u2019t take it seriously when I pointed out that Donald Trump was, if not an outright racist himself, at least happily pandering to people who were.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe media calls every Republican racist,\u201d my conservative readers replied. \u201cThey said it about Mitt Romney, they said it about George Bush, so what\u2019s different about Trump?\u201d<\/p>\n

They were right. Other columnists had accused Romney and Bush of being racist and pandering to racists. I pointed out that Trump’s racist appeals were different, and much worse, than anything that earlier Republican presidential candidates had been accused of. But it didn\u2019t do any good. The media had cried wolf to condemn garden-variety Republicans; labels like \u201cracist\u201d had been rendered useless when a true threat emerged. We shouted to no avail as Trump coyly flirted with hardcore white supremacists, something no mainstream party had done for decades.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it seems to me that critical race theorists have gone to \u201cwhite supremacy\u201d precisely because the increasingly broad uses of the word \u201cracism\u201d have made it less effective than it used to be at rallying moral outrage. The term still packs some wallop, but less than it once did, because it is now defined so broadly that a Broadway musical could sing \u201cEveryone\u2019s a Little Bit Racist.\u201d White supremacy, on the other hand, is still clearly understood as beyond the pale.<\/p>\n

But if we indiscriminately apply the term to everything from the alt-right white nationalist Richard Spencer, to anyone who thinks that football players should stand for the national anthem \u2026 for how long will white supremacy still be considered beyond the pale? What happens if people accused of racism start shrugging off the epithet — or worse, embracing it? And when another Richard Spencer comes along, how will we convey how dangerous he is?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Megan McArdle tries to point out the urge to call everyone you don’t like a “racist” or “white supremacist” runs you the same trust risk that the boy who cried wolf did: It\u2019s the inverse of what Steven Pinker has dubbed \u201cthe euphemism treadmill,\u201d where we try to find nicer words for something we don\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,13],"tags":[1079,1037,456,1020,99],"class_list":["post-40595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-altright","tag-donaldtrump","tag-hysteria","tag-progressives","tag-racism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ayL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40596,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40595\/revisions\/40596"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}