By Fiona Burke, Temple Law Review Volume 96 Staff Editor
Liberals have, as exit polls and Bernie Sanders point out, largely lost the working class and, in fact, most of America.
There are many reasons for this, all of which have been dissected and analyzed ad nauseum in the past few weeks and likely will be for even years. One such reason though, is particularly acute at institutions of higher education such as ours: liberal elites (and whether we like it or not, every single one of us is elite by virtue of our position as burgeoning lawyers) have become so fixated on political purity[1] that we have made ourselves a far too bitter pill to swallow with far too few practical benefits to anyone who really needs help.
Perhaps this is because of the age of the internet. As Jia Tolentino points out, to be seen online, you have to affirmatively act. “Acting” online usually takes the form of some representation of belief or value—commenting a criticism on a problematic post, posting a tangent to your Instagram Story, sharing a picture of yourself at a protest. Acting online is very rarely a tangible act of good; it is usually just words or some other signal about our values.
On the internet, to act is to speak. This could be the reason young liberals have come to equate saying the right words with actual political and moral good. While it is right and appropriate not to tolerate genuinely rude or hateful conduct from others, liberals seem to have forgotten that solely using person-first language, purging certain phrases from our vocabularies, or calling out others’ microaggressions (which usually take the form of using the “wrong” language) does not actually bestow any real benefit upon those most vulnerable—people who are struggling to afford housing, children who are not obtaining an adequate education, and those unable to access mental health care.
Regardless of its origins, liberal elites’ quest to exact a political and linguistic purity from those in our orbit seems to suggest the belief that if we can just rid our own circles of these minor transgressions, we will achieve some kind of trickle down justice; the eradication of things like cultural appropriation, microaggressions, and gendered language from our academic, professional, and social spheres will at some point translate into tangible benefits for the masses. These benefits for the masses do not seem to have materialized, and I do not believe they ever will. What we need is coordinated policy reform that has the potential to impact everyone.
In a world where properly articulating the right opinions has become equated with a moral good unto itself, improperly articulating the right opinion or—worse—having a diverging opinion necessarily becomes a moral wrong.
The fear of saying the wrong thing or having the wrong opinion is significant in academic spaces (one study found that 80% of students censor their opinions some of the time, while nearly a quarter do so often). Many people who might otherwise be sympathetic to progressive ideals do not want to participate in any kind of political conversation because it could easily turn into a lecture or an attack. When moderates feel this way, they distance themselves from the left. Many leftist elites are thereby happily insulated from having to encounter any contrary opinions. But there are many people who are not free to the same degree to insulate themselves from the effects of classicism, racism, misogyny, etc.: the working class and the poor.
If you do not resonate with the anxiety about being ostracized for saying the wrong things, you are probably one of the people I am directing this message to.
We need not care about the feelings of privileged people, political moderates, and conservatives for their own sake. But we should act like we care for the sake of all the people who are harmed when those moderates and conservatives become alienated from liberal causes. The more we alienate people by insisting everyone say things the “right” way, the more we ridicule rural America, or use concepts like “toxic masculinity” as an excuse for writing off entire demographics of people, the more likely someone like Trump is to be elected.
If we truly care about the causes we purport to, we will stop this incessant fixation on individual conduct, stop making liberal spaces hostile for people who don’t use the right buzzwords and lingo, and generally open ourselves up to the feelings and concerns of “the other side.” This does not mean indulging hatred or compromising values—it means understanding what might be fueling some of the anger on the right, focusing on actual policy and solutions to the world’s concrete problems, and remembering that not everyone has to talk the same.
[1] By “political purity” I mean the tendency to emphasize exorcising ourselves and our circles of any divergent opinion, tendency, or language that would go against the standard liberal ideological framework.