Don't play 'Tower of Babel'

adopting the woke's terminology is to enact woke

Are you among the growing set of post-liberals/former leftists/disaffected-and-alienated-from the left? Pick the term you like the most, that offends you the least, and please know I mean that term and move past that without making this conversation about my terminology, please. Thank you.


If you answered yes, I’m in your set, too. Our set has some problems that I call “emotional hangovers” or “hangover allegiances.” These are terms I use to describe emotional trigger points that are deeply embedded in us after years of going along with the progressive/leftist way of viewing the world.

Even when we change our political minds, those emotional buttons still exist. This is natural, and normal. But (there’s always a but), they do need to be examined. And I would say that we do have a duty to rein them in and notice how they affect our thinking and actions.

Some common emotional hangover triggers in our set:

-Instant emotional identification with the female party in any conflict

-Instant emotional identification with the black/gay/trans/ party in any conflict

-A deeply rooted, still-held belief that we live in a patriarchy and that any expression of male anger or defiance is a danger. And that it’s right and proper to react to it that way without listening to the man or allowing him room to be or to talk without defending himself against this feminist orientation.

-Instant emotional identification with the party we perceive to the underdog, or the party that a media story has presented to us as an underdog.

These emotional hangover triggers point to a psychological reality we need to drag into the sunlight: Many of us disaffected people are still operating, to some degree, on our emotional programming from our days as progressives. We are internally conflicted and fragmented. We’re not really sure, deep down in our core, that it’s moral or right for us to have changed our minds.

A scared internal part of us still believes we’ve become Bad People since we started to think and believe in a way others describe as “conservative.”

If this does not describe you, then I am not writing about you in this essay. Please resist the temptation to accuse me of “projecting.” I am not projecting. I am candidly acknowledging that not everyone is described this way, and I am offering this to you to contemplate, not ordering you to believe me.

But yes, I do believe that to the degree that what I wrote above describes parts of me, it also describes a great deal of other people who share things in common with me. And many of those are things we all share in common with humans. There is a difference between rank projection and accurately and proportionately detecting true patterns in human emotion and cognition.


One of the ways we display that these emotional triggers still have a hold on us is our tendency —even those of us who describe ourselves as anti-woke—to unthinkingly adopt new terminology. Left terminology. New names for old things. The euphemism du jour.

This is not merely a matter of style. These euphemisms have substance, and they have points of view. They do actual political work. Many of us are working directly against our own claimed anti-wokeness by using these terms.

When we do this, we sign on to the very political projects we claim we want to stop. We signal deference to the progressive received opinion.

Here is a short list of terms that I see many people using who I believe should reconsider.

-”The unhoused” No. This new euphemism is deliberately constructed to place blame on an external oppressor, and remove responsibility and agency from the “victim” (he was victimized by the state/the middle class by not being housed by them)

-Capitalizing the ‘b’ in ‘black’. This is rank linguistic racial supremacy, and frankly, I’m annoyed that smart people I respect do this. I shouldn’t have to point this out. It’s that obvious.

-”Sex work”. Come on. Do you really wish to signal that you believe prostitution is just work like any other? Do you really want to sign on to the veiled Marxism in this term?

I’ll add more as they come to me.

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