Monthly Muse: 11/2024

Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation

Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.

Here’s the November 2024 Monthly Muse.

Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth

• Weekly Grounding #70

• Election Reflections

• Weekly Grounding #71

• Weekly Grounding #72

Contemplation

I argued in point #2 of my “Election Reflections” that “2016 was a referendum on globalization. 2024 was a referendum on wokeism.” In it, I put forward a theory of woke time lag. This is the idea that even after elite America reached “peak woke” by 2023, the majority of voters did not get the memo and are still responding to the trickle down effect of woke politics outside the exclusive bubbles in which it was incubated.

This is, of course, only one of the reasons behind Donald Trump’s electoral victory this month. After reading Janan Ganesh’s recent Financial Times column, “Liberals Speak a Different Language” (included in Weekly Grounding #72), it occurred to me that 2024 was also a continuation of the reaction to globalization that carried Trump to the White House eight years back. Even if Trump himself has significantly pulled back from his criticism of economic globalization, his voters still associate the Democratic Party with a deeper form of globalism that Trump (at least symbolically) resists.

Central to Ganesh’s argument is the idea that American liberals have developed their own language of “Liberalese.” The parlance and cadence of this new language is off putting for the majority of Americans. And, whether or not its leaders speak it, Liberalese has become increasingly associated with the Democratic Party. Ganesh writes:

To be clear, Democratic politicians don’t use Liberalese. Kamala Harris didn’t go around saying cosplay this and toxic that. But a party is judged on its proxies too. That is, the pundits, celebrities, scholars, business leaders and online activists who line up with that party. And the left’s proxies do speak in an alienating fog of in-group buzz phrases…Among certain kinds of graduates in the world’s big anglophone cities, this kind of talk is not that far from being ambient.  

The ambient presence of Liberalese has itself become a cultural signifier of globalization. Indeed, the hyper-mobile global elite are the speakers of Liberalese precisely because it is a language without rootedness in place, an idiomless idiom that allows one to fit in immediately with a certain deracinated social aesthetic common across a range of global metropolitan hubs.

Voting against a pattern of verbal tics and cadences may seem on its face like a superficial thing to do. But the so-called “culture wars” are never just about “culture” in this superficial sense. Often they are about technology or, in the case of distaste for Liberalese, deeper class resentments. Culture and class, form and content, style and substance, presentation and policy—these are always interconnected. This is one of the many lessons of the 2024 election.

Provocation

“[T]his way of talking is a style. It’s a style that has grown incredibly irritating. It’s a style that attributes to itself the supernatural ability to change reality by changing vocabulary. So, by its own standards it must be condemned as a miserable failure, insofar as it does not help people achieve justice, but primarily alienates and divides them. It functioned fairly effectively as long as it was restricted to the academic hothouse, but as it’s emerged, the futile absurdity of its layers of euphemisms has been exposed.

“There will be vestiges for decades, and many young people, having been thoroughly trained in woke academic style, will be confused and disabled politically for a bit as the echoes fade. They’ll need to adjust and maybe find a new way to be progressives. But the people who are really going to struggle are the college professors and administrators who came of age during this period, the squads of DEI officers and humanities professors who have already written hundreds of memos, or whole tenure books, in the approved vocabulary.”

—

Crispin Sartwell

, “Woke-Speak of Bosses at NPR and Academia Irks the Masses”