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This is On Point. I'm Debra Becker, in for Meghna Chakrabarty. The fight over the power of language seems to have taken a twist. Many conservatives have long accused the left of policing language, saying that liberals are trying to dictate speech.
have been told to say chest feeding instead of breastfeeding and to replace the term mother with mother or birthing parent. The left says you can identify as anything, a tree, six genders, you cannot identify as a black conservative. This whole crazy left wing idea that we're not allowed to debate ideas, that we're not allowed to discuss things, that we have to silence people, censor them. What's next? Will the Ninja Turtles apologize for appropriating karate?
Or the X-Men now, the Latin X-Men. That was conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, Fox News host Jesse Waters, and Vice President J.D. Vance. Conservatives say this so-called speech policing is pushing a, quote, woke ideology. Indeed, there has been a push, particularly on the progressive left, to reconsider certain words.
owner's suite. It's a ter never heard of, but as of traction. The better know being frowned upon in som is just a gender neutral t nephew. So if your sibli nonconforming or non bina a lot and that's how we
has been to be able to make sure that we have a language that is inclusive to queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people like myself. That was reporter Amber Miller, TikTok creator Mae Fay, and activist Jonathan Jace Green.
Now, President Trump is taking on language. Speaking at the Justice Department last month, he touted his order, which is titled Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship. On day one, I signed an executive order banning all government censorship and directing the removal of every bureaucrat,
who conspired to attack free speech and many other things and values in America. Yet the same day, Trump also issued an executive order declaring the policy of the United States is that there are only two genders, male and female. For four long years, we had an administration that tried to abolish the very concept of womanhood and replace it with radical gender ideology. Maybe you heard something about that.
They destroyed women's spaces and even tried to replace the word mother with the term birther person. As a result of Trump's executive orders, agencies are scrubbing or trying to avoid using certain words on government websites and documents. Those words include female, gender identity, race, and DEI.
Is the Trump administration changing language to reflect its policies, or is it engaging in the same language policing that conservatives accuse the left of perpetrating? This hour, we want to talk about this war on words. Joining us is Thomas Chatterton-Williams. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and the Hannah Arendt Center Senior Fellow at Bard College. He wrote a recent piece in The Atlantic titled How the Woke Right Replaced Politics.
the woke left. Thomas, welcome to On Point.
Hi, Deborah. Thanks for having me. So let's start with your piece. This is why we asked you to be on today, How the Woke Right Replaced the Woke Left. And you start off by describing a sort of social justice orthodoxy, right, that swept through the culture during a specific time. So explain for our listeners who may not have read your piece what you think woke means and how it began.
That's such a great place to start because I think that this is one of those words that everybody at this point has heard, but it means different things to different people. Wokeness is not even a term that I necessarily would choose myself, but it's the one that has stuck. And it really describes what I think is this idea that the world is controlled by some sort of systemic power, whether that's white
white supremacy, systemic racism, or patriarchy or whatever, and that you need to be awakened to be able to see all the ways in which this kind of power inequality creates classes of victims and oppressors. And then it inspires a kind of politics of grievance in which everything, specifically institutions but also norms, must be dismantled and society has to be wholly restructured from the ground up.
This paranoid style has, you know, it certainly was ascendant on the left, I would say, from definitely the second term of the Obama administration. It peaked during COVID and the racial reckoning of 2020. And then, you know, I would say that it came precipitously down after the attacks in Israel on October 7th and the campus protests that created protests.
quite a backlash. But now we're in the phase of a backlash that has fully become kind of woke from the right. We didn't just recenter things in the middle. We have a kind of paranoid style from the right that wants to dismantle everything, but it's fully fastened to the power of the government now. So I think it's much more horrifying than what preceded it. Yeah, right. I mean, I have to say the title made me sort of uncomfortable.
Right. I mean, because because woke is is now really a pejorative term. Right. It sort of reminded me of when folks used to say someone was PC or politically correct. Right. But but the ideas behind being politically correct to the initial ideas, it just is the initial ideas behind looking at society and seeing where the power dynamics are and perhaps speaking up against them. Those initial ideas are.
are not bad. Those are very positive things. It's just how they then become culturally or socially enforced. And as you said, it became almost paranoid, right? So explain that a little bit of how we went to sort of something that was really a call to activism to something that's now negative.
That's a great point. And I think it's important that you take the moment to specify that, yes, the reason why wokeness has been so appealing and has really been an animating energy on both the left and the right is because there really are inequalities and power imbalances and forms of oppression that we do
do notice and that do disturb people of good conscience in this society. And so you start by saying that, look, it looks like
You know black people are discriminated or against or you know Latinos are discriminated against or women are not fully represented in this area and it gets taken to a kind of all-encompassing extreme at the worst in the worst excesses where then that becomes the only lens through which you perceive any interaction and every single aspect of reality has to be reformatted to address this one single discrepancy and
And I think on the right, too, you know, if what the left was concerned with was systemic power imbalances from racism and patriarchy, you could say that, you know, the right is really concerned with what we could call like the post-war.
war liberal order and all of the kind of imbalances that come through globalization and all these different ways in which there really are some problems that should be addressed, but the bad
aspect of this kind of activist-inspired politics of grievance is that it loses all sense of proportion and it makes things so intense that there's no ability anymore to compromise. Do you have an example that comes to mind right away of how you think wokeness went awry and what you think maybe may have been a touchstone for when things churned?
Well, I've got a book coming out this summer on this subject. Tell us all about it. It's called Summer of Our Discontent. And I've got, you know, some examples that really stuck out in my mind. But, you know, this is not going to be news to many of your listeners, but in the summer of 2020,
many people in America, especially some people in the media and other institutions of some influence, became so concerned about, you know,
criminal justice reform and police brutality that the idea of, for instance, dismantling or abolishing the police actually got serious consideration. I would say that that's an extraordinary loss of proportion.
that started from a good place being concerned about a man dying on video and taking it to an extreme that actually warps and distorts our social fabric and our politics and creates the very backlash that it purports to want to
There were so many situations like this. If you look at a place like... If you look at the media, people were scapegoated and fired, oftentimes for things that were not considered...
wrong even in the previous day. So you look at James Bennett at the New York Times opinion pages. He was fired, ultimately scapegoated by a kind of incensed mob of his junior staffers who demanded his resignation because he published a sitting U.S. Senator, Tom Cotton,
on an opinion that was certainly charged that the president should consider sending in the National Guard to stop the looting and rioting that was happening in the wake of George Floyd's death. But that was an opinion that the majority of Americans did agree with, whether we like it or not. And the idea that that made minorities unsafe to hear the opinion was an idea that was pushed rather forcefully and had real consequences for people's lives.
I think that that's a moment where you have to step back and say, what are we doing? And have we become so awakened or awoken to all forms of injustice that we are creating new forms of injustice in turn? Right. And so, of course, those questions and what happened there have really now been taken over by the right, right, and became really a campaign rally for President Trump.
Yes. So one of my main issues with the kind of great awakening that the ascendant left enjoyed for the past decade and change
is that it simply is ineffective on a pragmatic level. It created the very Trump revolution that swept him back into office because he was able to make some valid points about where institutional elites abused their cultural dominance. Now, I think he's instituting things that are far worse
far less concerned with actually fixing what's genuinely wrong in society and much more a kind of camouflage for acquiring power and exploiting it. But that...
cannot be addressed, I don't think, and it cannot be combated without seeing the ways in which the left made possible the conditions for this abuse from the right. Okay, we're going to talk some more about this after we take a brief break. We're talking about the political war on words in the second Trump administration. I'm Deborah Becker. This is On Point.
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Before the break, Thomas, you were making some points about why or how you think the woke left really set the stage for the woke right. And I'm wondering if you would just expand on that a little bit. I know you talked about what you felt were perhaps some extremes of what the left did and what progressives did right around the time of 2020 and how that may have really set the stage for a second Trump administration. Can you just expand on that a bit?
Sure. Well, you know, the thing that was so disturbing about Trump's second win was that he had expanded the multicultural coalition that was voting for him. He had grown the support among non-white voters.
to a higher level than the Republicans had enjoyed since the Nixon administration, right? So he really found some issues that connected. And we can't just dismiss it as a kind of white backlash or racism, but one of the issues that he hit upon that seems to have really resonated was this ad that was extraordinarily effective last fall about Kamala Harris being for they/them and Donald Trump being for you.
This was a kind of self-imposed own goal that the Democrats never had to make. It was a kind of niche issue that starts from a place of caring about a marginalized group, but actually ballooning the care for that group to such an extent that it alienates
the mainstream. And you really, what we have to contend with now is the realization that you really can't help anybody if you concede all power to somebody that would oppress them. So it doesn't matter really where your heart is in these issues as the left often tried to signal through activism and through kind of forced language and forced virtue signaling. It doesn't matter how pure the signals you, the virtues you signal are if you can't exercise political power.
So it's not so much the specific issue that is really what people should be faithful to. Is that what you're saying? Well, I think that you have to have values and principles, but you cannot be completely divorced from the reality of where the country is. People often compare these kinds of issues to the civil rights movement in the previous century, but the fact is that
that took getting the majority of Americans on board. It took a long campaign of exercising real political power through the electorate and the courts, but not just imposing from the top down a kind of worldview that alienated the rest of the country.
I want to bring another voice into the conversation now. Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University. He's written seven books, including one titled The Politics of Language, another titled Erasing History, How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Jason, welcome to On Point. Thank you, Deborah. And hello, Thomas. Hi, Jason.
So what I want to ask you, Jason, is I'm wondering what your thoughts are about all of this, about language policing on the right. And I'm assuming you know that Thomas just wrote a recent piece in The Atlantic titled How the Woke Right Replaced the Woke Left. And we've been talking about some of these ideas here. And I'm wondering if you could just give us maybe a broad overview of your thoughts about language and the so-called woke right, if you will, Jason.
Yeah, so Thomas and I co-authored a New York Times piece a while back about the woke right, really, attacking their bans on critical—their sort of legalized bans on critical race theory. So I really applaud his standing up for this issue today.
when the right does it, though Thomas and I have strongly differing views on issues like backlash. For example, I think it's really problematic to say this is the fault of one
whatever came before Trump, because Elizabeth Hinton has a book called America on Fire, and one of the chapters is called The Cycle. And she talks, she documents how in small city after small city in the United States for decades, there's a black, there's police violence against a black person, and then there's a response by the black population, and then everyone agrees to do something about it, and then there's a harsh white backlash.
I think Hinton demonstrates that this is just the structure of American life and has been for many decades. Now, coming to the issue of banning speech, what you're really doing here is you're banning perspectives. You're banning ideologies. So ideologies are perspectives on the world.
And central to an ideology is a way of talking about the world. Each perspective on the world comes with a way of talking about the world. So, for example, if you want trans acceptance, acceptance of trans people, you're going to have to have, you're going to have to alter language a bit.
And these alterings of language or debates about language are nothing new. Carter G. Woodson in his 1933 book, Miseducation of the Negro, has an appendix called What We Call Ourselves where he's sort of grumpy old manning about the arguments about what black Americans call themselves.
So this is an age-old issue. So now what the Trump administration is doing, and Thomas rightly calls our attention to it, is they are using the government, the state power rather than sort of social shaming to ban perspectives by targeting the characteristic words in the speech practices of those perspectives.
All right. So they've got the power of the government to do this, whereas before it was maybe you were canceled on social media or perhaps you lost your job or there were other institutions that kind of enforced some of what was considered acceptable at that time. But now it's very different. That's right. Go ahead. I'm sorry.
Well, yeah. When the government does it, as Thomas said, it's always going to be the case that a democratic society is going to involve contestation of perspectives. And as a philosopher of language –
who follows J.L. Austin, speech is a way of doing. And when you speak, it's a way of behaving in the world. And so people are always going to struggle to argue about that, just like they argue about ways of
other ways of behaving in the world. I want to go back to what you said about backlash just for a moment, because I do think it's interesting. You think that this is a natural backlash to what we're seeing now from the right and from government is a natural backlash to what happened, say, starting pre-2020 and then through the pandemic?
This is for Thomas or for me? This is for you, Jason. Oh, I don't think it's a natural backlash at all. I think it's different societies have different historical patterns. And what Hinton's work shows is that our historical pattern is this pattern of black struggle and white response. I mean, I think, you know, BLM, KFDA,
It's always been the case that black protests are described in terms of looting and rioting. This is all the way back to the 1960s. So no matter what you do in black protest, it's going to be described. They're going to focus on some instances and generalize it to looting and rioting. Tom Cotton's piece called all Black Lives Matter protests looting and rioting.
And so it was a general sort of – so I don't think – I think like the goal is –
You know, there were certain aspects of Black Lives Matter, like defunding the police, that I think were problematic in the ways that Tom, in much the ways that Tom has said. But I think the ultimate thing is that just a larger version of what, as Hinton has demonstrated, happened in city after city after city. And it's a struggle not against the police specifically, but against the entire criminal legal system where the United States incarcerates
until El Salvador, Bukele, has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world. And in 2015, the last time I spun those numbers, almost 10% of the world's prison population came from the tiny group of black Americans, which suggests that something is structurally off about the United States.
So as long as those numbers stay the same, there's going to be, as long as there's radical structural inequality, there's going to be protests against that radical structural inequality. And as long as there are protests, as we know from history, there's going to be backlashes to those protests. When we talk about policing language and what we're seeing now and sort of this coalescing around President Trump and the White House and sort of a more conservative viewpoint,
I wonder, Thomas, how much of this is human behavior in a way? That's tribal, like-minded people are gathering around an ideology. And I know that certainly Jason has mentioned that now, and you have mentioned as well, that now that you have the government behind this and enforcing some of these ideas, it takes a very different tone. But what would you say, what are some of the other differences, if there are any, that are evident right now?
That's a great question. I mean, one thing that just jumps out to me is the fact that yes, this is human nature, the urge to scapegoat, you know, mob justice, polarization, tribalism. These are things as old as time. But what we have to contend with now is the complete breakdown in the trust of expertise and institutional
influence and the kind of fractured, fragmented media environment we all have to navigate with people having not just different views or political inclinations but actual different sets of facts. We have a kind of epistemological crisis, to use more philosophical language, with Professor Stanley.
that I think is really exacerbating all of these problems and making, also it's allowing us to interact at scale in a way that was unprecedented in human history. So I don't really think that we're all supposed to be constantly arguing with each other and all in forums where we can weigh in on each other's linguistic choices every day in a way that kind of heightens tension and pushes us further apart. I think that
We can't separate the political crisis we're in from the kind of technological changes that have swept the country and the globe in the past decade and a half. To your point here, we have the example of changing even historical words, right, in the Trump administration.
perhaps most notably the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. And in February, at a White House press briefing, a reporter asked Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt whether it was retaliatory for the White House to limit the Associated Press's access to some White House events because the AP was continuing to call for
the Gulf of America, the Gulf of Mexico. We have a little bit of how Levitt responded. Let's listen. If we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable. And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America. And I'm not sure why news outlets don't want to call it that.
But that is what it is. The Secretary of Interior has made that the official designation in the geographical identification name server. And Apple has recognized that. Google has recognized that. Pretty much every other outlet in this room has recognized that body of water as the Gulf of America. And it's very important to this administration that we get that right, not just for people here at home, but also for the rest of the world.
And we should note that yesterday a judge ordered the White House to allow the AP to cover the Oval Office, saying that it was unlawful to block the AP because of its choice of words. But I think this is a very telling example here, not only in the choice of changing the name of something that was historically called something else, but also the mention there from Caroline Levitt that Apple, Google—
big companies were immediately going along with this name change. Jason Stanley, what do you take from this example of what's happening with language in the Trump White House? Well, this is a great example of what Thomas pointed out earlier, his insight that this has to do with power and domination. This language, using the government in this way to police language, serves the purpose specifically
centrally of expressing domination. And here, what the White House press secretary is doing is expressing domination. She's saying, we decided, we made this nonsensical choice. You know, this is sort of like far extreme nationalist choice that's kind of silly. But
The fact that we made it shows that we dominate Google, Apple, and the media. And we're telling the media that you better do what we say. And this is just a loyalty oath. A lot of what happens in authoritarian societies is there's a lot of sort of
silly loyalty oaths. You know, you swear allegiance to them that, you know, the 2020 election was stolen as federal workers are being asked now. And this is another one. What she's literally saying, as Thomas intuited earlier, is, you know, media, you better step in line. And this is for us. We don't care about the issue. This is just about you expressing subservience to us.
Right, right. And Thomas, I wonder, what are your thoughts about this debate, this controversy, I guess is a better word, over the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico? Well, I couldn't agree more with Jason's remarks here. It is about dominance. It's also about who gets to control how we perceive reality. And here, I think,
Whether we like it or not, we do have to go back further and see the ways in which people on the left opened the door to this kind of very cynical exploitation that the Trump administration seems bent on constantly doing.
using. There were many people, I think, who are not paying attention to politics every day, who are just low information voters, who are very persuaded by the argument that, well, the left told you that there are 112 genders or whatever and forced you to say words that don't exist and that the left forced you to say Latinx and all these things.
And so we're just giving them a taste of their own medicine. I can't tell you how many times people I've seen on Twitter and also in real life have brought that up as a persuasive point. So I think that
that this is worse. It's deeply cynical. I think I agree with Jason that it does tend towards a real authoritarianism. But I think that, you know, there are many Americans who are not nearly as offended by it as they should be. And we have to look in the mirror and understand how we got in a kind of situation where this is even plausible in the first place. Why such a focus on race and gender? What are your thoughts about that?
Who? Thomas. Sorry, I was still talking to Thomas. A focus from the Trump administration? Yeah. Why are we seeing such a focus on race and gender in words that specifically deal with race and gender? Why do you think that is so important to the White House? Well, here I also really agree with what I believe Jason's point of view would be, which is that those are just very, very easy and salient ways to divide information.
And this administration and the kind of reactionary political movement that swept it back into power is benefiting from our social and political divisions.
that's the simplest answer I can think of. All right. We're going to talk more about the changing language of the current Trump administration. We're going to first take a quick break. I'm Deborah Becker. This is On Point.
And we want to take a moment here to have a quick word about a show we're working on later this week. It's about Spotify. It's the leading audio streaming service, more than a half billion users across the globe. And those users rely on Spotify to discover new artists, and the artists rely on Spotify to get discovered. So this is where you come in. We want to know how Spotify has changed your listening habits and your relationship to music.
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Also, you can leave us a voicemail at 617-353-0683. That's 617-353-0683. And Jason Stanley, what I would like to ask you is to follow up on something that you have alluded to during the show, and that is the effect of social media. We're talking about policing language and how the right is now policing and even changing language and, in fact, borrowing some
of what the left had done earlier and perhaps reacting in some ways to what the left had done earlier. But I wonder, we also have social media now that's been such a big player in all of this on both the left and the right. What are your thoughts about how social media affects the policing of language?
Well, I'm going to begin by challenging a little bit of the premise of your question, which is that the right is borrowing from the left. I view things globally. I'm also a professor at the Keefe School of Economics, where I spend several weeks every six months teaching. And it's worth—so I see things globally. And what you're seeing in the United States is just an instance of a global strategy. It's kind of a boring authoritarian playbook.
Putin justified the Ukraine war by appealing to a war against gender ideology. He said on the eve of the full-scale invasion that one of the reasons they're invading is because of the parent one, parent two, civilization-destroying ideology. So this –
Now, in the United States, it's not just going to be the scapegoats, as Thomas pointed out, are not just going to be LGBTQ citizens or trans citizens particularly. So, you know, the international attack focuses on gender. It focuses on women being somehow, you know, oppressed by trans women or something like that. But in the United States, of course, you're going to add race to it.
In Germany, AfD adds Nazis and the Holocaust to it. So there's local things, but all over it's the same thing. And I just don't think that gender ideology is in any sense to be blamed for Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
All of these leaders are just doing the same thing. So I think it's too local to talk about borrowing from the left. It doesn't respond to the global facts. Now, as far as social media goes, I think this is going back to a point Thomas also correctly made. The social media –
These arguments about language, as I pointed out from Carter G. Woodson, I mean 1933, he's reporting on big arguments between black Americans about what they should call themselves. So in other words, all of this is old. So the Nazis were responding to Magnus Hirschfeld.
who was a gay Jewish man who had an institute who was investigating gender variability. So all of this is just really old. And we have to ask ourselves, as Thomas put it, what do you do when you add these new technologies to the kind of debates between perspectives? Should we accept certain perspectives? Should we reject certain perspectives that are just part of human culture and society?
But I just want to go back to something you said. Yes, this has been happening for forever, really, right? Political leaders have done this for a very long time. So what's interesting to me here is sort of the psychology, right? What happens...
when folks who may be looking for that sort of certainty and this assertion, this confidence assertion of a truth from a political leader, and that may provide them with some reassurance. But in this case, it looks like the truth keeps shifting. The foundation keeps shifting. You're completely devoted to this position one day, but it changes 180 degrees the next day, and yet you
That person needs to remain loyal to the personality and not necessarily the ideology. So what psychology is happening there? And is that different from what we've seen throughout history? Well, I wouldn't say political leaders have done this for a long time. The using the government, as both Thomas and I have been urging, using the government rather than civil society. Civil society will always...
you know, respond to these pressures in the way civil society has. But when it's mandated top-down from the government, that's an authoritarian move.
And there can be left authoritarianism, there can be right authoritarianism, but it's generally an authoritarian move. So now when you switch it up like Putin does or Trump is doing and you just sort of introduce nonsensicalities like the Gulf of America and people have to speak one way one day and one way another day, that's again the theme that we've both been urging of expressing dominance, you're trying to say,
OK, what the official state ideology is today, you know, it's just whatever the leader wants. So it's deliberate. Yeah, it's well, one of the questions we always that always comes up when I'm talking to people about authoritarianism is how much is deliberate and how much is just the natural way if you're a natural authoritarian, the way you act.
And what do you say? I mean, you've written, I know, extensively about this, but how would you describe sort of changes and language changes, even if they're shifting, as affecting society and our history? What do you tell folks? What's the main, you know, we only have an hour for this entire program, but what's your main point about how
how this has sort of long-lasting real effects on other things besides just what we're seeing in perhaps an executive order at the moment. Well, if you want to understand how central speech is to culture, think of denazification in Germany. Denazification was the targeting of Nazi ways of speaking.
So, they weren't illegalized, though some words were illegalized, but they were strong social sanctions about speaking in the way that Nazis did. And Nazism introduced ways of speaking. That's why one of the great books on Nazism by Victor Klemperer is called Language of the Third Reich.
And that's why Alternative für Deutschland. And so what happened post-World War II, this is the post-World War II era in Germany, is you had this strong reaction to Nazi ideology and the way that was implemented is by kind of banning and social sanctions against ways of speaking. Now, the reason you find Elon Musk and others focused so much on Alternative for Deutschland, J.D. Vance meeting with its head,
when he went there, is because they're pushing back on denazification. They want to speak the way the Nazis spoke as part of their mission to say Germans shouldn't feel so guilty about the past. And if you can change the way Germans think about the past, and note that changing the way people think about the past here goes with changing the way they talk.
So the ways we talk are not separate from the perspectives we have. And the focus on Germany is if you can reverse Germany's struggle with the past, well, that's like the top case. And so then you can do it everywhere. You know, I want to point out that you have been at Yale for more than a decade. But in the fall, you'll be going to the University of Toronto, partly because of some of the things we're talking about today. Is that right?
Yeah, I mean, you know, the attack on freedoms, the attack on our institutions and universities, the attack, you know, the scooping up. Yeah, I mean, solely because of this. And why is it better to be at the University of Toronto? What is there in Canada that might be more beneficial than maybe continuing to fight at Yale?
Well, I don't – I mean I think that I'm going to want to be participating in the defense of the people being attacked in America wherever I am.
But I don't hear, you know, the elite institutions, all the democratic institutions are being attacked. The media, the law firms, the universities, the K-12 education, they're all being attacked. And so there's a lot of work that my colleagues are doing and the administration at Yale is doing trying to figure out how to defend the particular institutions.
But in a way, you know, I'd rather go. It also has to do with my kids and raising them outside of this kind of culture. What happens under authoritarianism is you're always worried about whether or not you are safe. You're like, oh, they're only going after non-citizens now, few, or they're only going after the people in the pro-Palestinian protests.
Phew. You know, and having that lifted off you, like authoritarianism does that to everybody. So everyone is like, oh, phew, I'm safe. But it would be nice not to have that pressure. And also the University of Toronto is critical.
creating a center with funding where we'll be able to bring journalists from democratically backsliding countries and civil society workers to strategize together. So that's pretty exciting for me.
Well, it kind of reminds me of the quote from former President Reagan. I think he's quoted as saying, like, freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction, right? Am I quoting that correctly? I believe so. And, you know, many people say that we are watching, right, democracy go extinct. And, Thomas, let's bring you back into this conversation here. I mean, is that...
It sounds kind of dire, Jason, quite honestly. I'll get your thoughts on that in a minute, but I want to hear from Thomas first. I mean, is it that dire? I think it's a very serious moment in this country's history. I think that we are, depending on how the next four years go, next two years with midterm elections,
we are deciding whether we're going to remain the open society or whether we're going to turn the page into something that's much darker and that really does restrict the kind of freedoms that we thought were our birthright here. I think it's very, very serious. And I think that also at the same time, many people's lives will more or less continue undisturbed. So they may not take it
as seriously as it needs to be taken or address and respond with the urgency that the moment demands. Do you think it's a moment of urgency, Jason?
Oh, my God. Yes. And I should say that Thomas recognized this early on when we were writing against the critical race theory, anti-critical race theory laws. We both recognized, you know, once you move to the legal aspect of sort of like firing people legally for their ideologies. But, yeah, I mean, I view myself in the long tradition of intellectuals who have fled a country declining –
early on when the democracy was being eroded or eradicated by an authoritarian movement. I mean my father – my grandmother and my father fled Berlin but they fled really late. But plenty of intellectuals fled in 31, 32, 33. I'm not saying the future is determined.
But I looked at the expected utilities and did a calculation, and they were high enough that this society will turn completely into something like a fascist dictatorship that I thought, you know, may as well follow history and just in case. What do you say to people who aren't leaving and who are, I mean, is there hope there? I mean, how do you give them hope?
Oh, absolutely. And I have an incredible opportunity. I mean, I'm so lucky and privileged. And I think I would be safe if I stayed because Yale has done a great job protecting its scholars, unlike other universities that I won't mention. And so generally, Yale has been great. And I think that I have – I mean, I know I have a position of immense privilege there.
So I feel guilty in that sense, but I have kids and I have to take this opportunity. But what I would say is just – I mean Thomas talked earlier about patriarchy and racism being ways to exploit people. And we're seeing patriarchy very much being a way to – but this is why it's so confused to think of patriarchy and racism as dividing oppressors and oppressed.
Patriarchy targets all of us. Racism targets all of us. Du Bois and Black Reconstruction argued that, you know, race was a way to divide poor whites and poor blacks from each other so they couldn't unify to fight for their material interests. And what I would say is like, you know, so it's not patriarchy and racism don't,
Don't divide oppressors and oppressed because white people are the victims of racism and men are the victims of patriarchy too. So we have to hopefully see that as we go forward. And if we can overcome those ways of dividing us, I think we can fight back effectively.
Thomas, last word to you in terms of hope in the future when language is being changed and ideas are being changed and our perspectives really are at risk here. What is your final message to folks?
Well, I would say that, you know, we have to take seriously the truth that ideas matter, that language matters, that culture matters, that politics really matters, and resist the urge to simply soothe ourselves with our phones and with kind of our creature comforts and to allow ourselves to be entertained to death and amused to death and to kind of
not take things seriously because we see that this kind of political moment is also somewhat entertaining. I think we're really, we have to fight to remain serious and to stay
Optimistic, finally. I think that nothing can happen if you acquiesce to the kind of cynicism that this administration and the learned helplessness this administration hopes to impose. So, you know, we have to be serious, but we also have to be vigilant and optimistic. Okay. Thomas Chatterton Williams, staff writer at The Atlantic and the Hannah Arendt Center senior fellow at Bard College, thanks for being with us today.
Thank you for having me. Also, Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of several books, including Erasing History, How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Jason, thanks to you as well. Thank you. I'm Deborah Becker. This is On Point.