"The R-Slur," Inner Circle and Outer

stop asserting social consensus about language rules when it doesn't exist

Elspeth Reeve, in a conversation on the alt-right/incel right/new right:

I know, like, so one troll many years ago described to me like being in this Discord server where someone knew had come in and they would say, “say the N word, say it,” and they would resist. And like, what? It's just a word. Just type it out. What are you so scared of? Like, you can't come in here if you are not willing to say the N word. So then they do it, and those same people would turn around and say, “Well now you can never leave because we'll screenshot that and show all your friends that you said the N word.” And I almost see the same thing happening with the R slur, meaning disabled people, like that has become kind of like a word you have to use to show you like you are, you are fully in, like, you’re fully read in.

Ah, yes. The “R slur” - that’s “retard” or “retarded,” obviously - is a mark of being fully read into the alt-right, part of the inner circle of MAGA… or of being part of, like, 80% of American men. Right? Because if we’re being honest, many many American men (and a not-insignificant number of American women) use the word retard casually all the time, and few of them have have explicit alt-right politics. I’m afraid that, in practice, it’s a normie word that does not imply a particular political project¹. Whether people should use that term or not is of course another thing altogether. I’m sure many or most who do so would never actually direct it at a person with a cognitive or developmental disability directly or intentionally; whether that makes any moral difference is up to your particular ethical framework. One way or another, though, I have to object to the notion that saying “retarded” is a sign of someone being part of a political niche the Reeve herself refers to as vanguardist. You don’t have to be part of a vanguard to use that word pejoratively. You just have to have gone to middle school.

This is particularly frustrating because the conversation Reeve is taking part in concerns how the once-fringe alt-right became the dominant faction in America’s ruling political party. But of course, a core way that the alt-right/new right/MAGA tendency grew was precisely through this kind of normative overreach on the part of progressives, the assertion of shared community expectations for language and behavior that simply weren’t actually shared. Put another way, one of the most consequential elements of the social justice era was the implication that certain language and discourse norms had been broadly accepted when they had in fact only been adopted by a small elite. This is politically damaging because, first, it breeds resentment among people who observe the distance between the idealized, top-down social rules suggested by someone like Reeve; people say “This lady says I’m a far-right cretin if I use the word ‘retard,’ but I hear it all the time on my college campus,” prompting them to further reject Reeve’s worldview. Second, it defines extremity downward - if someone is saying that you’re a radical MAGA freak if you use a word that’s certainly ugly but also not remotely uncommon in American parlance, then it inevitably serves to make MAGA seem less radical. This isn’t complicated, and it’s a dynamic that has played out again and again and again in the past fifteen years of American political life, where progressives insist that some belief or language is radical when in fact it’s common, leading not to more widespread adoption of progressive mores but instead to the further mainstreaming of what they call radically offensive.

Like so many progressives before her, Reeve is asserting a norm that’s not normal.

So why are Reeve and podcast host Chris Hayes trafficking in this attitude, never questioning whether it is in fact radical or fringe to use “the r-slur”? Because acting as though that term is so far beyond the pale in American life makes it seem like they are fully educated, inner-circle progressives with all the right views. They’re the ones who are asserting that they are, to use Reeve’s term, fully read in. It’s a perfect inversion of the trend Reeve is describing, just another smart-kid kula ring, certainly less noxious than pressuring strangers to say the n-word but no less comprehensible as a matter of in-group politics. Which is another dynamic that’s dominated progressive politics for the last fifteenish years: trading long-term political sustainability for short-term individual gain in the arena of performative righteousness. This is how we got so much of the bizarre, alienating vocabulary of social justice inserted into mainstream political debate. Many people, most certainly including many Black people, find using the term “Black bodies” instead of “Black people” deeply strange and off-putting. I suspect most people in the progressive intelligentsia were always aware of that fact. But constantly saying “Black bodies” advanced them within their own social and professional circles, even though it damaged the progressive cause more broadly. Like saying “misogynoir” or “othering” or “microaggression,” exaggerating the radicalism and offensiveness of using off-color language privileges the inner circle over the outer.

And, look, I get it - Donald Trump and Elon Musk are wreaking a whole lot of havoc in our government, and it’s easy to ask why any of this matters. The moral horror of potential devastating Medicaid cuts, used to fund even more tax breaks for the rich, has a way of arresting the attention. But to stop Trump or any other baddies, you have to win, and to win you have to be better at politics than the other side, and I find it just absolutely bonkers that American progressives are still not having any sort of a postmortem about the social justice era, a period of frank and at-times uncomfortable conversations that get really specific about how social justice language and norms alienated potential allies and hamstrung Democrats in elections. Not the usual witless “Democrats should move to the right” conversations that follow every lost election (honestly, every meaningful event in American politics), and not some crass and clumsy rejection of everything that social justice is about. Rather, we need to understand how the 2010s happened, why they were contrary to basic political success, and how we can build a movement that can achieve the actual moral goals of social justice (like racial and gender equality) without all of the histrionics, performative righteousness, and privileging of in-group status over effectiveness.

For the record, I certainly don’t want people to use the word “retard” or “retarded” to mock those with disabilities. And I would prefer it if people also avoided using those words in a casual context where the intent is not to harm, as I do. But that’s not a fight I’m going to win anytime soon; you see, the more that we try to ban unkind words, the more of an appeal those words have to people who want to speak for effect. You can lament that dynamic if you want, but it’s a durable and widespread part of the human condition, people pursuing offensiveness to achieve intensity. Indeed, that’s part of Reeve’s own reporting on the alt-right! And I’m totally unmoved by her conflating the “r-slur” with the n-word, which simply do not occupy the same historical, emotional, or social spaces in human speech. One is far more inflammatory, and for good reason. Plenty of people will use the word “retard” when outside of formal situations but would never use the n-word in any circumstance. Maybe they can’t articulate that difference in particularly coherent moral terms, but they believe in it, and I suspect Reeve does too.

We could also point out that the adoption and later monstering of “retarded” is as clear of an example of the euphemism treadmill as you will ever find. The word has a clinical ring for a reason; it was introduced as a term for people with cognitive and developmental disabilities precisely because it was seen as softer, less stigmatizing, and more technical than terms like “moron” or “idiot.” Its history should demonstrate that whatever more humane term we use next will itself eventually come to be seen as offensive, as people will use the negative reality of those disabilities as insults and then the insulting nature will accrue to the term. I don’t know that we have a good alternative to that process. The point, though, is that like language offense is always in flux, never static - and maybe people who want to oppose the new right ignore that reality to their detriment. Offense, after all, is their most powerful tool.

1. If you’d like to flip the ideological valence of this sort of thing, we could look at the idea that the great sales success of the recent Harry Potter video game is a rebuke of trans rights. This idea cropped up in a lot of trans spaces online - that those sales represented a terribly sad rejection of trans rights and trans lives. But as I said at the time, it’s almost certainly the case that a majority of the people who bought the game had no idea that Harry Potter has become part of that particular culture war, and the number who bought the game to affirm the “gender critical” position must be miniscule. The game sold so well because people really like Harry Potter. A majority of Americans don’t know how long a Senate term is; I assure you that most people aren’t primarily associating the vastly-popular Harry Potter franchise with the online political persona of its creator. Normie-ism cuts both ways.