RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-hijack-of-language?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The Conservative Party in Britain is in trouble. Many natural conservatives have written it off as rudderless, leaderless and useless. Tory MPs are forming silos of attitudes that they believe define conservatism but which cancel each other out in a welter of recrimination, panic and closed minds.

As they miserably thrash around, we hear over and over again the irritated complaint: “Don’t go on about the culture wars. Ordinary people have no time for all that nonsense. What they want to hear from us is how to improve their standard of living. Oh, and stopping immigration, of course. Oh, and dealing with crime. All that culture war stuff is irrelevant to them. It’s a distraction from the real challenge: saving the Conservative Party”.

This is myopia on stilts. Culture — the attitudes that shape the zeitgeist and the national conversation — is not irrelevant to politics. It drives politics. Ordinary people may regard the battles of the culture war as taking place in a weird and distant galaxy called Intelligentsia.  But the issues involved have a direct bearing on their lives, their families, their communities and their nation.

If the nation and its culture finally slide off the edge of the cliff, the Tories will slide with it. The Conservative Party will only stand a chance of being saved if the nation and its culture are saved.

But how is the culture to be saved from falling off the edge of the cliff towards which it has been sliding for decades?

To have a chance of saving it, we must understand why it’s been pushed to the edge. Why conservatives, whose role in life is to defend what is valuable, didn’t recognise what was happening and fight to stop it.

Partly, this is because conservatives tend not to think in theoretical terms. Busy with realities, they have no time for ivory-tower fantasies. So they don’t recognise ideology until it bites them in the face.

Partly, it’s because Tory party panjandrums are terrified of becoming targets of the undoubtedly savage media pillory, used against anyone who defies the shibboleths of progressive opinion.

Partly, the Tories took a wrong turning when they decided — some time after the fall of the Berlin Wall —  that their ultimate cause was liberty.

Liberty, however, should be a means, not an end. Liberty is the means to achieve the good life, for yourself and for others and to create a civilised community.

Making it the end not the means took the Tories onto the same community-wrecking territory as the left. While the left did social liberty — and increasingly, sexual libertinism and anarchy —  the Tories made a fetish of the free market and projected their idea of the good through a reductionist economic prism.

As a result, the Tories found they had no answer to — indeed, couldn’t even recognise — the hyper-individualism of the left expressed through subjectivity and the dominance of feelings and emotion, the reversal of truth and lies, and the inversion of victim and victimiser.

There are, however, two other important reasons for the conservative failure to hold the cultural line. The first is a matter of temperament.  Conservatives tend not to be activists. They get on with the important things in life — family, work, acts of kindness.

Having no wish to change the world, they don’t become activists — and don’t realise that others are quietly organising to impose their own agendas. The result is that conservatives have become rabbits in the headlights, paralysed by the glare of a world that suddenly they don’t recognise because others became activists in order to change it.

This passivity has exposed conservatives and the rest of us to the second important factor: the way the left has colonised public space through the hijack of language to demonise and intimidate.

Those opposed to the left call them out on the basis of actual evidence for the specific things that they have done. The left, by contrast, demonise all who oppose them as bad people, forces of evil and enemies of humanity.

So to oppose transgender dogma is to be cruel and uncompassionate. To oppose mass immigration is to be racist and xenophobic.  To oppose the toppling of statues is to be a supporter of slavery and white privilege. To oppose Net Zero is to be a climate change “denier” and thus be likened, by not-so-subliminal association, to a supporter of the genocide of the Jews.

These aren’t just deeply unpleasant insults. They don’t just have the power to end careers.  The use of this language is key to changing the culture.

One of the remarkable aspects of today’s loss of cultural compass is that so many hitherto apparently responsible, sensible people appear to have lost their minds. How can it have happened that so many child therapists, teachers, civil servants, captains of industry and others are behaving like cultural zombies immune to rationality, and are inflicting so much damage on individuals and society as a result?

One reason is surely the close link between language and thought. No-one wants to be thought of as racially prejudiced or uncompassionate or bigoted. These terms don’t just result in social or professional death. Individuals internalise them as true about themselves. That’s surely because these words prey upon people’s deepest fears that they may possibly be bad people.

Many of those promoting the transgender cult or who force people, Salem-style, to confess to white privilege actually believe in the craziness because of the moral power of words like racist, cruel or hateful. These terms brook no argument; they represent instant damnation. The accusation is felt as a profound existential wound.

But such words are not being used on the basis of evidence. They are not being used accurately or fairly. They are being deployed as a form of gaslighting, using false accusation to make people think they have a grievous character flaw. They are used  to bully and intimidate people into silence and coerced conformity by the use of smear and character assassination.

So the left have used the hijack of language to move the Overton window. Those wanting to return to sanity and decency need to reclaim the language in order to move the Overton window the other way.

This means that conservatives must go against the grain and turn themselves into activists. “National conservatives” must become radical conservatives: not so much NatCons as RadCons.  They must become counter-revolutionaries.

They must make a strategic move from the back foot onto the front foot. At present, they invariably play defence.  The left hurl their insults and accusations at them; conservatives protest they aren’t racists, fascists, phobes or other enemies of humanity at all.

Playing defence like this is a mugs’ game. Engaging on the territory chosen by your tormentors is to lose the argument before it even starts. Going onto the front foot means being proactive, defining your own ground and taking the fight to the enemy.

And the left are vulnerable to this because of their Achilles heel. If people in general want to think of themselves as good, how much more so is this on the left. This is because, far from actually caring about the wretched of the earth or the causes they wear on their sleeve, they are narcissists who only care about their own self-image as heroically fighting abuses of power or saving the entire planet.

This Achilles heel means they are vulnerable to their tactics being flipped and used against them. They pin mendacious labels onto their opponents; the way to flip this is call them out with evidence and facts as promoting the very opposite of what they purport to stand for. And the way to do that is to reclaim hijacked language for its true meaning.

For example, conservatives should expose human rights and equality laws as dishonest terms for what are in fact selfish demands and preferential treatment. Those who promote human rights and equality laws should be told they are not progressive or enlightened at all. Instead they promote social division, hatred  and bullying by setting group against group and enabling the strong to intimidate the weak.

Those “anti-racists” who promote the “white privilege” canard should be called out themselves as racial bigots who demonise all white people on the basis of the colour of their skin — the very quintessence of racial prejudice.

Those who have promoted the transgender cult to children should be described as promoters of child abuse who, if they are therapists or teachers, should be struck off or fired for gross abuse of trust and professional ethics.

At the same time, conservatives should promote positive ideas for a culture of hopefulness based on concepts such as personal responsibility, community security and looking after others.

Language is critical to the rescue of society. Western culture has lost its integrity. To begin to restore that integrity, we first have to restore the integrity of the words we use.