The following is an edited version of remarks delivered by A. James McAdams, Sarah Shurts, Laura K. Field, and Sam Piccolo on May 2, 2024 as part of a presentation of the book, Far-Right Newspeak and the Future of Democracy (Routledge, 2024). A full recording of the event can be found here.
A. James McAdams
Thank you, Marlene. And, thanks so much for inviting us. And greetings to everybody out there. everybody in particular who is interested in the future of illiberalism and democracy. This project was long in gestation. We had four meetings and originally called the project, The Uses and Abuses of the Language of Liberalism and Democracy.
I would lay emphasis on the word language because this theme infuses the book, the theme of language. And so therefore, it should be no surprise to anyone why we would choose as our title, Far-Right Newspeak. This is a reference to George Orwell’s focus in all of his works on the importance of language and how it can be used and abused with political consequences.
But our use of the term “Newspeak” is also a play on the word, a provocation in this sense: Orwell feared that what he called liberal-democratic “Oldspeak” was on the verge of capitulating to the Newspeak language of authoritarianism and dictatorship. But in contrast, and this is one of the central points of our book, the contemporary far-right practitioners of Newspeak whom we consider do the opposite.
Rather than invoking the language of dictatorship, they invoke the liberal democratic idiom of George Orwell’s “Oldspeak,” the idiom of equality, individual rights, tolerance, liberty, the rule of law. They invoke this idiom to call into question the foundations of liberal democracy. So, ironically, they justify this inversion of Orwell’s concept by declaring that they are the real defenders of democracy against a supposedly Orwellian threat from the left. In Far-Right Newspeak, we have sought to make a distinctive contribution to the way one studies this manipulation of language.
Now, the contributors to our book are not the first to call attention to the use and abuse of the language of liberalism and democracy by such noted personalities as Tucker Carlson, Marine Le Pen, Thierry Baudet, Jarosław Kaczyński, Jordan Peterson, and of course Donald Trump, in addition to many others. Yet in the book, we try to do something more ambitious than to just identify the use and inversion of this language. Our goal is not only to describe the new Newspeak, but to explain why these individuals’ manipulation of political language has caught on with so many people in advanced democracies and most importantly with middle-of-the-road audiences and voters. And that’s what counts.
Part of the answer to this question is that most of the politicians, pundits, and intellectuals in our book cannot be easily or usefully equated with the fascists of old. Whatever they might happen to believe deep down, they do not make the challenge of interpreting their aims easy for us. They are not like Aleksandr Dugin advocating a “truly fascist fascism.” They’re not like oddballs like Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug, defending slavery and a return to the Middle Ages. After all, if the Carlsons and the Le Pens of today were to employ explicitly anti-democratic or neo-fascist rhetoric, they would have no more success than the fascists, neo-Nazis, and skinheads who have largely been marginalized in post-World War II Europe, at least until recently.
Few people would take them seriously, because liberal democracy today is not the widely untested and contested form of politics that it was a century ago. In the 1920s and 1930s, far-right extremists were able to take advantage of the many weaknesses of fledgling democracies across Europe to turn millions of citizens against their government. In contrast, the contemporary far right is operating in societies where most people have been thoroughly acculturated in democratic norms. This is particularly true in Western Europe and North America, where democracy’s roots were laid at least 100 years ago, if not much earlier. And then with some qualifications, it’s also true in most of post-communist Eastern Europe where democratic institutions have been in place for over 30 years. Thus, it’s not surprising that contemporary far-right politicians and intellectuals would choose the political language with which citizens are most comfortable. And also, in doing this, they do them a favor, because by using this rhetoric, their followers do not have to fear the social opprobrium of rejecting the established democratic order when they’re supporting the far right.
Historical context and political pragmatism alone do not account for these figures’ successful invocation of far-right Newspeak to appeal to broad swaths of their populations. For the manipulation of any language to gain traction, it’s not enough that politically salient words are recognizable. More importantly, they must be intelligible. That is, they must coincide with the lived experiences of the people to whom they are addressed. In my two chapters in Far-Right Newspeak, I seek to account for this very high degree of intelligibility by focusing on the character of liberal democracy itself. In a nutshell, I contend that the success of the contemporary far right lies in its representatives’ exploitation of a fundamental contradiction that Leszek Kolakowski refers to as a perpetual antimony that is inherent to all liberal democratic regimes. This is the essentially unresolvable tension between these regimes’ obligation to safeguard the individual’s rights and freedoms, and their corresponding responsibility to attend to the welfare of all citizens.
In less polarized times, the affirmation of this abiding tension is a sign of a robust democracy. After all, policy makers get together, they work to find an appropriate balance between individual rights and the common good that gives all segments of society the opportunity to realize at least some of their interests. These are the kinds of politicians that we would wish to see in the United States in particular.
In contrast, in our currently turbulent times, far-right actors take the opposite position. In effect, they advise their supporters that the tension is resolvable not through accommodation or compromise, but instead by choosing one side over the other. And then invariably, as I show by singling out three principles (and there are more)–freedom, equal rights, and democratic representation–they choose to emphasize the side of this polarity, individual rights, that serves the interests of majorities or people with power while they dismiss the focus on the common good, which happens to serve those with the least political power. The fact that this approach can lead to the exclusion of significant numbers of people from the benefits of the public realm is precisely what makes these figures far right and not just right.
The far right’s success in supposedly “speaking the language of the people” in this exclusionary way has at least two notable and profoundly different implications for how we interpret the motivations of its supporters. On the one hand, if we look at it from a cynical perspective, we could say that the practitioners of far-right Newspeak essentially give their supporters permission to give vent to their least charitable sentiments. Thus, instead of criticizing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs for their shortcomings, which would be a normal part of the democratic process, they reject the programs as outright violations of ostensibly absolute claims to individual rights.
In contrast, there’s another way to look at this situation which is more generous. This is simply that many of the people who follow these far-right figures are more or less unaware of the delicate balance that exists, the tricky balance between rights and duties, that is inherent to a well-functioning democracy. In this case, they easily fall prey to illiberal and anti-liberal positions and cast their votes for anti-democratic politicians while thinking, incorrectly, that they are actually defending liberal democracy.
In light of this more charitable interpretation, we might wonder whether the fault lies simply with them, with the supporters of these far-right figures. It might also lie with establishment politicians and intellectuals who, as my colleagues on this panel might suggest, are equally at fault for failing to include all of their country’s citizens in the democratic process.
Sarah Shurts
I started this piece by trying to truly understand the growing appeal of right-wing politics in France. In the 2012 presidential elections, Marine Le Pen won 17% of the first round of the vote and did not qualify for the second round. Ten years later, in the 2022 presidential elections, she secured 41.5% of the vote in the second round. As I am writing, National Rally has just earned 33.15% in the first round of the snap elections for the National Assembly called by Macron after National Rally came in first in the June European Parliament elections. Clearly, National Rally and other right-wing parties are on the rise. And it’s not just in France. We’re seeing it throughout Europe and in the US. In many places they are winning over large percentages of the voting public, so clearly they’re resonating with people.
To understand why and how these parties were thriving, I needed to try to appreciate what made Marine Le Pen’s National Rally suddenly more appealing. One of the most significant spikes in votes for Le Pen over the past ten years was among women voters. In the 1995 and 1997 elections, the National Front of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was supported by only 12% of female voters, and the gap between men and women supporters was 60% to 40%. However, since Marine Le Pen’s accession to the leadership of the party in 2011, elections have increasingly shown a decline in the gender gap and an increased percentage of female voters. In the second round of the 2017 presidential elections, the gap between male and female supporters often actually inverted by 0.2 percent, and National Rally won 31.9% of the female voters in the coveted 18 to 26 bracket, up from 9% a decade earlier in 2007 under her father. The shift of female voters continued in 2022, according to the Harris Barometer of voting intentions in April, Le Pen was expected to receive 26% of the female vote and 20% of the male vote.
So my question became specifically what made her increasingly popular among women voters, since they had not previously shown an inclination to vote for the National Front under her father? I needed to find out what Marine was saying and doing differently than her father that now made National Rally attractive to women. And it was not a softer stand on immigration. Studies show that during the tenure of Jean-Marie Le Pen, women were more likely to be opposed to immigration than men. Also, the party’s core Islamophobic and anti-immigration platform has not changed dramatically despite Marine’s efforts at what she has called a de-demonization of the party. What has changed is a concerted effort to appeal to female voters in other ways.
Feminist organizations and scholars on the left have consistently called this appeal to women by Le Pen a fraud or a masquerade to gain votes. One statement, signed by 38 associations for women’s rights on April 19th, which was the eve of the second round of the 2020 presidential election, began by saying “the extreme right is incompatible with the rights of women.” They warn their readers when it comes to women’s rights, the extreme right has one constant that of fighting us, despising us, and trampling on us. Therefore, it was incumbent on all women to vote not for Le Pen to become the first female President of France, but rather for Macron in order to unreservedly block Miss Le Pen. In the second round of the presidential election, these feminists announced Le Pen’s use of the feminist language of women’s rights as a hijacking, a co-opting, and a double game, an instrumentalization, a pandering discursive strategy to broaden their appeal, and a manipulative facade. But this approach does not try to understand why women might find Le Pen appealing. It just chastises women for being incapable of seeing the ruse, and that doesn’t appear to be working.
What I argue in this chapter is that this appeal to women needs to be accepted for what it is, not a trick or a facade, but rather a concerted effort to redefine those concepts of women’s rights and equality for use on the far right. Infusing the traditional language of liberalism and republicanism, particularly the terms rights, liberties, and equality with right-wing values and meaning, lets Le Pen reappropriate, reinterpret, and revalue the old, familiar concepts. Her approach is to proclaim the right-wing version equally legitimate, or even as an older and therefore more legitimate interpretation. And I think this approach is one she shares with the post-liberal intellectuals that Laura will discuss later.
By presenting her right-wing ideas as coexisting easily within these reassuring republican concepts, Le Pen’s program resonates more effectively with an ever broader, more mainstream circle of French women. The reinterpretation makes right-wing policy, which might previously have made women hesitate, seem less extreme, less illiberal, more socially acceptable, and more morally defensible. In this way, Le Pen can shift the direction of French political culture rightward without being seen as contradicting or challenging the liberal and republican values so essential to French concepts of identity.
For example, Le Pen’s right-wing concept of equality for women is key to her rejection of what she calls neofeminism. She says she is not a neofeminist because she sees men and women as equals rather than oppressors and oppressed, and rejects the perception of women as victims. Instead, she promotes equality not as sameness, but as a right to difference and complementarity. This right to difference does not imply male superiority, but rather upholds, she says, the republican principles like equality of the sexes. But within this equality, she says, “we have the right to be different. Once again, I am defending the fact that women can be different. I am not looking for men and women to be the same, just because they are treated in the same way.”
Her view of a right to difference and equality as complementarity of roles extends to protection for stay-at-home mothers. While Le Pen strongly supports working and professional women and highlights her own role as a working single mother, she also validates the work women do in the home and celebrates the fulfillment women can feel in their roles as mothers and lives. In particular, she proposes to double the social support payments for single mothers to €230, which is higher than Macron promised, so that women can choose to stay home with their children if they wish. Her right-wing reinterpretation of equality was labeled a ruse by feminists, who pointed as evidence to her opposition to the parity legislation, which was passed in 2000 and requires equal numbers of male and female candidacies for political offices, which is an area where women have been historically underrepresented. But Le Pen argues her opposition to parity was in keeping with a long French republican history of equality as opportunity. Le Pen says she rejects all forms of positive discrimination, which she claims inexorably eats away at the Republic, and calls instead for the older Republican ideal of equality as equal opportunity and meritocracy.
I find Le Pen has been particularly successful appropriating the language of rights, freedoms, liberties, and equality for women for National Rally’s anti-immigration and Islamophobic policies. She utilizes a familiar trope of the Islamist, misogynist, male immigrant to call for protection of women’s rights to security, equality, and liberty in public life for both non-Muslim and Muslim women alike. When asked what brought them to the far-right movements, many women described being motivated by news reports of women being attacked or repressed by Muslim men. Taking advantage of this trend among women voters, Le Pen laces a liberal language of rights and freedoms into an illiberal hostility toward immigration and Islam, a technique which has yielded three main campaign discourses: equality of treatment, freedom of dress, and rights to personal security. She writes of what she calls Islamism that “it is an offense to the Republic that replaces our values and laws with others, which rest on the inequality between men and women.” In this way, she says, “it is incompatible with the rights, the liberties and the principles recognized by the Constitution.” In 2019, she enumerated the many ways in which Muslim women were treated that violated French principles of equality and liberty, saying, “is it not disturbing that the ministry is obligated in France to launch plans against female circumcision or against forced marriage? These phenomena say much about the disquieting evolution in our country on the rights of women.” In this way, Le Pen presents the National Rally program as the defender of French values, women’s rights, Muslim women victims and Western civilization against the repressive male patrimony of fundamentalist Islam.
In her 2019 French Women Proud of Our Liberties, Le Pen complains that French women’s freedom to dress as they choose is curtailed by fundamentalism. National rally calls for legislation to ban the veil and the burkini in the name of republican secularism, particularly in the schools, and thus links freedom of dress to secular republicanism and then to equality of opportunity for women in education. But the discourse on dress is not just about freeing Muslim women from oppression. It also evokes another far-right stereotype of the Muslim or Arab immigrant male as a sexual aggressor. The stereotype was pounced on by Le Pen and other right-wing networks when, on New Year’s Eve 2015, over 1200 women were sexually assaulted in Cologne by gangs of men, predominantly Middle Eastern and North African in ethnicity. After the assaults, Le Pen made waves, saying “I am revolted today by the unacceptable silence and therefore tacit consent of the French left in the face of these fundamental attacks on the rights of women. I am scared that the migrant crisis signals the beginning of the end of women’s rights.”
I’ll close by just saying that women within the far right today see their adherence to National Rally as anything but incompatible with the rights of women, as left-leaning feminists have claimed. Le Pen is utilizing a powerful narrative of right-wing female empowerment with a reconceptualize language of equality, rights, and liberties and it is rallying a new mainstream voter. I think the way forward is to recognize the possibility that the far right has learned how to speak to women and offers them protections and roles and identities that many of them want. Then we can decide what to do with this information. But denying this fact or refusing to listen to the argument is not working.
Laura K. Field
Thank you and thanks everyone for coming. And thanks to Jim and Sam, especially, for putting together this project. It was a real joy to work on with everybody. I’m really happy to be to be part of it.
My work in general focuses on intellectuals. That is not only the focus of the book, which has a lot of other kinds of actors, from politicians to, you know, newscasters and other kinds of influencers.
My chapter in this volume is about the American post-Liberals, with a focus in particular on Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule and a little bit too on Gladden Pappin. And there’s also a little bit in there about Bill Barr, which I may come to regret. We could talk about that in the Q&A.
I focused on how these two thinkers in particular, Deneen and Vermeule, revamp the liberal conceptions of freedom. So I focus on the concept of freedom. These postliberal thinkers form their own unique cluster, within what I call the New Right, working within an American context. For one thing, they are closely connected to Catholic integralism, or what is sometimes now referred to as neo-integralism.
One scholar, Kevin Vallier, calls them the premier radicalism of the New Right. And the reason he gives for this [characterization] is that they offer the alienated something positive – which is an ultimate goal, a vision, a dream. And I think that’s right. I think they are the premier radicalism of the New Right. And I would add that because they’re intellectuals – and among the intellectuals who constitute the New, the New Right in the States, they are quite a bit less politically involved than others – and I think that this makes them somewhat more principled than other intellectuals we see, but also a good deal less effective, arguably.
In his introduction to our book and in the intro to our session today, Jim noted that most of the subjects that are treated in the book give preference to freedom, rights and liberties over sort of equality and the common good and duties, and so when push comes to shove, they would sacrifice equality for the sake of liberty. The postliberals that I discuss are different. Where others on the far right jettison equality and seem to embrace the language of liberty, the postliberals almost do the exact opposite. They embrace equality and the common good, and they more or less jettison traditional liberal freedom. But they do not abandon the idea of liberty altogether. And so in my chapter, I take a close look at how this works.
Deneen and Vermeule are very different thinkers, I should say. Deneen is a political theorist at Notre Dame and Vermeule is a legal scholar at Harvard and that difference impacts how they each approach the ideas of liberal freedom and of liberty in the American context. The short version is that whereas Deneen seeks to redefine freedom so that it comes to mean something different to the American mind, Vermeule seeks to demote freedom in the pantheon of American constitutional values. Both approaches seek to transform the way in which we understand liberty, especially as part of the American legacy, and both approaches seek to transform the extent to which individual liberties are or aren’t protected by the state.
Deneen’s approach, I think, is much more straightforward. He taps into the long tradition of political thought that distinguishes between positive and negative liberty and he criticizes negative liberty, or what we might call “freedom from” and seeks to restore positive liberty or a more classical conception of freedom. So he leans on this well-known ambiguity between negative and positive freedom to push in one particular direction.
Negative freedom is typically understood by political theorists to mean freedom from. So freedom from constraint as the absence of limits, the ability to make autonomous individual personal choices for oneself. Negative liberty is tied up with the idea of limited government, and the notion that law should impinge as little as possible on our personal choices. So according to this idea of what liberty means, you should be able to do whatever you want, at its extreme so long as it doesn’t hurt other people. Individuals have control over their own lives in this conception and there are strict limits, therefore, on government action and the extent to which government can control or legislate individual choice.
Conservatives often think of negative freedom as sort of something like liberty as license. It’s just juvenile hedonism, undirected and shallow, a recipe for political chaos and collapse. According to thinkers like Deneen, the more we have negative freedom, the less truly free we are. As Deneen puts it, “liberalism is bound to fail because of its own success,” and that has a lot to do with this conception of freedom, which is just too unlimited, too undirected, and too chaotic.
So in the wake of the failure of liberalism and the failure of liberal freedoms, negative freedoms, Deneen recommends a different kind of freedom: true freedom or positive freedom and flourishing. And that is the freedom to act and do things -the positive freedom derives from people’s characters, their formation, their virtue, and their capacities. This kind of freedom doesn’t come easy. It needs strict habituation and cultivation, and it involves, and in Deneen’s words, “self -rule and disciplined self-command.” It involves an ability to limit one’s desires and to make the choices that conform with virtue. Deneen is in many places very explicit. “True freedom is the freedom that comes with self-control and virtue, as understood by classical thinkers and Christian teachers.”
Most importantly, when we’re thinking about how it contrasts with negative liberty, for Deneen, this kind of positive freedom is something that can be legislated. He approvingly cites Viktor Orban’s Hungary as a model of how the laws can be the best protector of genuine freedom. He says we’re going to need the help of the laws to have this new conception. In an interview in Hungary in 2021, he says, “I think we have a lot to learn about what will be the best protector of freedom, a kind of genuine freedom in a world in which you could say that the arrangements of the world are the deepest threats to a genuine kind of human flourishing, which I think is the deepest form of freedom that we can experience.”
To recap, Deneen wants to revamp the American understanding of freedom and to make more space for state coercion and the cultivation of virtue and the possibility of true flourishing as he understands it.
Vermeule agrees with this basic conception, this classical conception of freedom that Deneen endorses. But whereas Deneen is quite open about how much this account conflicts with the American tradition, (at one place in that interview, he admits this runs contrary to a deep seeded sense of what it is to be American, that to be free means that we have to be free of the government.) Vermeule, on the other hand, tries to reconcile American traditions to this highly unorthodox – in an American context – understanding of freedom.
He does this in two ways and both of them involve demoting freedom in what we might call sort of the American hierarchy or charting of values, tables of values. Vermeule’s book is called Common Good Constitutionalism. And so it’s a legal book. It’s about how to interpret the law and what the Constitution means and what it aims for. And he says that it all aims for the common good. When it comes to defining the common good, Liberty is not on Vermeule list. He talks instead about a classical tradition where the ends of the tradition or the purposes of the constitutional order are justice, peace and abundance as well as health, safety and security. He treats these ends as the straightforward, objective aims of all healthy political life. And so to note, again, just to make a point of it, freedom and liberty do not make his list. So they’re just sort of gone off the list of what he takes to be important in politics.
The second way in which he demotes liberty in his revisionist account of, American constitutionalism is that he says that the American legal tradition is based on what he calls a classical legal tradition. And just like his idea of the common good, which comes from the same tradition, he jettisons liberty from the list of first principles. So that means that when he goes through some of the founding documents of the preamble to the Constitution, he sort of pretends that things like the blessings of liberty in the preamble don’t count. They’re just sort of secondary goods. And so this whole account makes liberty as such a secondary value.
Vermeule is doing something quite different from Deneen. But in the end both agree that liberal freedom is overrated. And it’s time to repurpose the classical accounts of human liberty. They’re both in favor of using the laws and the constitutional interpretation to make this happen and they are both singularly undisturbed by the possibility of government overreach into people’s private affairs. For these two thinkers, people really do need to be shaped. I called my paper “Forced to be Free,” and I think that they would they would probably be okay with that.
I think it’s worth emphasizing that this is a distinctly Catholic vision. For the work I’ve been doing, I’ve been reading quite a bit about Catholic integralism because Pappin and Vermeule in particular are both vocal adherents to the neointegralist movement, and Deneen makes some gestures in that direction as well. The key leader of the this movement today is a man named, Edmund Waldstein, a Cistercian monk in Austria who has written, that “liberal freedom is the root cause of innumerable problems because it leads to sin and hedonism.”
I’ll just briefly conclude by saying, by quoting an essay of his called “The Contrasting Concepts of Freedom” from 2016, where Waldstein writes that he is convinced that we should oppose the modern view of freedom by every possible means. The most important means of opposition is the revival of the traditional and true account of freedom. There’s nothing in Deneen or Vermeule’s work that I have seen that challenges this assertion on the part of Waldstein, and in my view, this gives us a good sense of just how radical, and arguably somewhat deceptive their efforts against liberal freedoms truly are.
Sam Piccolo
Many of us are at least wary of the work of the right-wing thinkers, intellectuals, activists, pundits, politicians, etc. that our book covers. Beyond the substance of their ideas, many seem unworried that their efforts at intensifying (or accelerating) political conflicts in liberal democracies could lead to the descent of our orders into violence that, once begun, is difficult to stop.
But our wariness of these figures doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to learn from them, and I’d like to reflect on what we might potentially learn from the figures filling this book. In so doing, we can see what the far right’s challenge might teach us about what defenders of liberal democracy can do in response to these figures. I’ll outline how I think mainstream understandings of the concepts that Far Right Newspeak employs or redefines are—and might remain—vulnerable to these sorts of redefinitions.
The first one is the question of the centralization of economic and political power and the real threat to traditional liberal equality this poses.In recent decades, Western liberal democracies have seen a sort of unprecedented, at least in the past century, centralization of economic power, especially in addition to political power, as the economist Matt Stoller and others have convincingly shown, far too many sectors in our economy are run by monopolies or firms with strong monopolistic tendencies. In areas as distinct as advertising, news media, supermarkets and even general retail, citizens of liberal democracies must buy from an ever diminishing number of firms, firms that exert ever increasing power in markets and public policy.
The second area of weakness I see is in the realm of government legitimacy and openness related to the concept of freedoms. As liberal democratic ideas of limited government emerged in response to political absolutism of pre-enlightenment Europe, open information, some commitment to open debate and freedom of expression as a way of responding to the previous epistemological absolutism of that time is something that, might be vulnerable today. Stephen Pittz’ chapter in our book demonstrates this by drawing a distinction between pragmatic and systemic conspiracism. Pragmatic conspiracism is the reflection of genuine liberal values of questioning authority, of not simply accepting any established version of political life given from some kind of institutional authority. It’s a way in which citizens can participate in political life and he contrasts this with a kind of systemic conspiracy that sees the entire “system” as corrupt. I think we do have to recognize that there are times in recent years, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, when democracies haven’t allowed or haven’t encouraged the sort of pragmatic conspiracism that Pittz draws out.
A third issue from the book is the issue of gender similarly tied to freedom and inequality. As Sarah details, in France Marine Le Pen is articulating a theory of equality for women that diverges from most contemporary understandings of feminism. In his contribution to the volume, George Hawley explains how denizens of the so-called manosphere have extreme, enormous popularity among disaffected young men.
And though freedom has seemingly increased in the realms of gender relations and sexuality, for instance, there’s plenty of research in recent years that recognizes that individuals, the plurality in many cases have seen a general decline in their satisfaction in their romantic lives. In the realm of employment, women rightly feel that they remain underrepresented at the highest levels of power and earnings. Yet the glass ceiling has existed at the same time as what we might call the floor falling out from beneath men in certain industries, at least. And we see this in the increase in rates of addiction, suicide, incarceration, the so-called depths of despair as they’re described in literature. These sorts of statistics belie a widespread sense that gender relations under liberal democratic norms of the past decades aren’t aren’t improving as much as many had hoped, leaving liberal language on gender equality vulnerable to those who seek to redefine it.
It doesn’t mean that we want to accept all alternative visions, but just recognize that there are ways in which there are some shortcomings in liberal democracy around these issues. But liberals might also want to take these instances of Newspeak as clear smoke signals from bits of sparking dry brush, where their accounts of the world aren’t accepted fully by many citizens of liberal democracy and these sparks could really ignite wildfires if ignored. If they’re committed to the principles, and unless they wish to abandon the idea that citizens should consent to their own government, liberal democrats can view these instances of Newspeak as places where the need to reconsider their old speaking and redefend it, and wonder why they’re no longer persuading citizens in the same degree they once did.
