The Witches Are Coming

by Lindy West

  I started to explain: “So, okay, in the year 2000, a man named Al Gore ran for president, and he cared about the environment, and he lost, kind of, and after that … people thought … Democrats … drank lattes? And drove Volvos, which was, um, stuck up, I think. And this is like an extension of that, I guess.” She was already back on her phone.

  But no. That’s not right. You have to go way, way back. Barbara Ehrenreich summed it up efficiently in the New York Times in 2004, in a column about Michael Moore. She described how the notion of a liberal elite had started on the left, among anarchists and Trotskyites in the early twentieth century who had “noted, correctly, that the Soviet Union was spawning a ‘new class’ of power-mad bureaucrats.” Many of those thinkers had “mutated into neocons in the 60’s,” and they had taken the theory with them—an invaluable contribution to the American Right.

  “Backed up by the concept of a ‘liberal elite,’ right-wingers could crony around with their corporate patrons in luxuriously appointed think tanks and boardrooms—all the while purporting to represent the average overworked Joe,” she wrote. “Beyond that, the idea of a liberal elite nourishes the right’s perpetual delusion that it is a tiny band of patriots bravely battling an evil power structure.”

  The right-wing Club for Growth calling Howard Dean a “tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times–reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show” in a 2003 attack ad was just one data point in a decades-long propaganda campaign to cast the American Left as the real enemy of the “real” people. But it was much darker than that, even worse than giving right-wingers a smoke screen to appeal to the working class or stroking their underdog fetish. The myth of the “liberal elite” strategically frames liberal values—environmentalism, racial and gender equality, gay and trans liberation, immigrants’ rights, the social safety net—as inherently frivolous, dishonest, a joke. By extension, the people who would benefit from the actualization of those values are “fake” Americans—the nation’s most vulnerable groups being called decadent effetes by the most feckless, corrupt, undeserving legacy hires history has ever seen, people who have all the advantages in the world and still need to buy their kids’ way into college.

  By 2019, the far Right’s unflagging message that it alone is the steward of “real” America—and Democrats are the party of venality, of snobbery, of self-interest cynically masked as beneficence—has come to full fruition, its ultimate purpose revealed: to justify the stigmatization of care itself.

  It’s not just caring about the environment that’s effeminate and therefore despicable, it’s caring about anything. It’s care.

  If you train people to scoff at community and stewardship—at tending to the needs of others, yes, but also at advocating for oneself—you can do whatever you want to them and they will not complain. You can strip away their ability to earn a living wage, to send their kids to college, to retire. You can undermine their most sacred values. You can allow children to be massacred, and they’ll weep for the guns.

  This is toxic masculinity at its most pitiful. How sad—and I don’t mean that with disgust, it is truly, profoundly sad—to let us all die because you’ve been taught that wanting not to die is cowardice; that vulnerability is weakness; that anything short of charging into the increasingly brief future, assault rifle blazing, exhaust belching, with half-chewed feedlot steak falling out of your mouth, constitutes some sort of romantic tongue kiss with a perfect male figure skater, and that a romantic tongue kiss with a perfect male figure skater would be something worth genociding the planet to avoid.

  How did we let it get this bad?

  I remember sitting in physics class on the first day of the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999. I was a senior, still seventeen, and we’d been hearing for weeks that a HUGE and BAD anarchist riot was coming to destroy the town, with bombs and cops and garbage fires and tanks and bricks and marching bands and naked bicyclists with their choo-choos out and people dressed as turtles. Turtles! The Gap was on high alert!

  My understanding, at the time, was that activist types—“hippies” we called them in the nineties, a semiderisive and semi-ironic catchall for people who cared about stuff enough to make signs—were mad about globalization, which, as I understood it at the time, was something to do with money, which I assumed was morally neutral (INCORRECT), sweatshop labor, which I recognized as bad, and the killing of sea turtles, very bad. Inasmuch as I could formulate an opinion on something that I did not understand whatsoever, I was on the side of the hippies, even the Gap smashers probably. I was certainly not on the side of the cops. At least I knew that much.

  But I remember, on that day, a procession of protestors (almost certainly, if I had to guess, from the alternative school across the street) barreling down the hall outside my physics class, yelling and waving signs and banging drums, trying to entice other kids to march downtown with them and join the throng of 40,000. My classmates and I looked at one another, the call of the wild tugging at us just a bit, the yearning to be one of those kids who isn’t scared of sincerity, of action, of authority (my mother had forbidden me to go within a mile of the protests), to go out and do something just because it mattered. To be the kind of smart, engaged young person who actually understood things about the globe.

  Only one kid out of thirty grabbed his bag and walked out.

  I just remember feeling, with innate certainty, that he was a different kind of person from me.

  In the 1990s, activism—particularly student activism—was stigmatized as tedious, silly, self-important to the point of narcissism, and, most damningly, ineffectual. Student activism was Paul Rudd smirking behind designer sunglasses in the 1995 movie Clueless: “I’m going to a Tree People meeting. We’re trying to get Marky Mark to plant a celebrity tree.”

  It was Alicia Silverstone in Clueless, too, trying on activism for a day to impress a boy:

  “I’m captain of the Pismo Beach Disaster Relief!”

  “I don’t think they need your skis.”

  “Daddy, some people lost all their belongings. Don’t you think that includes athletic equipment?”

  If you were very, very cool in the early to midnineties, you could pull off a Beastie Boys “Free Tibet” bumper sticker or quote Rage Against the Machine in your social studies paper, but for your middle-of-the-road fat white dorks? The safest path, if you were both uncool and had no backbone, was to say all the right things about freedom and equality while rolling your eyes at the try-hards.

  I want to be very clear that I’m not talking about kids of marginalized identities, communities who have never for one second had the luxury to choose whether to fight or not. I’m talking about the average white kids, the comfortable kids, the suburban kids, who were too insecure or too self-involved to care about anything, who let Saved by the Bell soothe their little consciences to sleep because wasn’t Jessie Spano fucking annoying? Those kids grew up to be the great, white, complacent center—the nonvoters, the apolitical, the ones who just stay out of it, as though inaction isn’t a political stance.

  There was always reverence for “real” activists, of course—the civil rights movement, the suffragettes, Cesar Chavez, Harvey Milk—people who had lived and died and won great battles before we were born. But social justice activism as a continuum, a mantle to take up, a garden to tend and defend, a moral obligation (particularly for those of us born into comfort and power) was harder to see. Contemporary activists were human hacky-sacks with suspect motives or imperfect methods or fleeting loyalties or any other number of manufactured excuses as to why they weren’t legitimate, weren’t the same as our parents marching to end segregation on the same streets a couple decades before.

  This artificial divide between past and present is a tactic I recognize now among certain sects of antifeminism and the alt-right, the ones still shy of overt Nazism, still striving for plausible deniability. Second-wave feminists were
legitimate feminists, men used to tweet at me between flurries of harassment, believing that the concession worked as a kind of camouflage. Of course women should have the vote, checking accounts, birth control, jobs. It’s the third- and fourth-wave feminists they have a problem with—the “identitarians,” the “professional victims”—who demand equality not just in politics (as though we have that) but in culture. The ones for whom it isn’t enough for rape to be illegal but who want society to examine the behaviors that foster and enable sexual predation in the first place. The ones who want to have recreational sex but don’t want to be raped. The ones who are all about “safe, legal” abortion but reject the compulsory “rare.”

  The modern right loves to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a “real” activist, while deriding Black Lives Matter. They claim to support social justice in the abstract but hate “social justice warriors.” They’re all for freedom and equality, they say, but sneer at the mechanisms that might actually help get us there—affirmative action, deplatforming Nazis, reparations, voting rights for felons, prison abolition, respectful adjustments to language—as bleeding-heart pandering to the dreaded “political correctness.”

  In the 1994 comedy PCU, a preppy high school kid goes to visit a prospective college, the fictional Port Chester University, and falls under the guidance of a hundredth-year senior played by Jeremy Piven. “It’s a whole new ball game on campus these days,” Piven tells him, “and they call it PC. Politically Correct. And it’s not just politics, it’s everything—it’s what you eat, it’s what you wear, and it’s what you say. If you don’t watch yourself, you’ll get in a buttload of trouble.” The kid, being a classic, all-American boy-guy just trying to have a cool time, does get into a buttload of trouble, because all you have to do to get in trouble with those oversensitive PC types is nothing.

  At PCU, the Greek system has been disbanded and the student body has splintered into various political factions: the potheads, the radical feminists (“Those aren’t women, Tom, those are womynists”), the angry and paranoid Afrocentrics, the dirtbag white boys (our heroes, of fucking course), the Young Republicans, the dilettante causeheads (“They find a world-threatening issue and stick with it for about a week”), and so on. Walking across the quad, prefrosh and Piven encounter a litany of obviously very stupid causes: “Save the whales!” “Gays in the military now!” “Free Nelson Mandela!” “They freed him already.” “Oh.” Meanwhile, the bad-mommy principal is trying to change the mascot from “the offensive Port Chester Indian” to the endangered whooping crane. Can you imagine?? What a horrible PC bitch! In the end, she is fired, definitely with cause!

  Early in the film, Piven and the kid have a close encounter with the womynists, one of whom turns out to be Piven’s ex. The other womynists are not happy, because they are militant and only want to stomp phalluses!

  “You went out with a white male?”

  “I was a freshman!”

  “Freshperson, please.”

  That was what a feminist looked like, to anyone who didn’t actually know any feminists, in 1994.

  Do I think the screenwriters of PCU genuinely didn’t think that Nelson Mandela should be free? Or that they yearned for the eradication of whales? Of course not. It’s a comedy. But the joke of the movie was to paint student activism—which, sure, can occasionally be overzealous and underbaked just like any other youthful pursuit—as a farce, the opposite of fun. It’s a deterrent. It’s not a coincidence that, in 2014, Tucker Carlson’s propaganda shitrag The Daily Caller would call PCU “the best-known unknown movie in America with a Nostradamian capability of predicting what would happen to higher education—and the country as a whole—20 years after its release.”

  The term political correctness (much like the slimy pro-life) is a right-wing neologism, a tactical bending of reality, an attempt to colonize the playing field, a bluff to lure dupes into dignifying propaganda. True to form, the credulous Left adopted it wholesale in the early nineties—PCU was very much of the zeitgeist—electively embroiling us in three decades of bad-faith “debate” over whether discouraging white people from using racial slurs constitutes government censorship. Of course it doesn’t. Debate over. Treating anti-PC arguments as anything but a bad-faith distraction props up the lie that it is somehow unfair to identify and point out racism, let alone fight to eradicate it. Pointing out and fighting to eradicate racism is how we build the racism-free world that all but racists profess to want.

  Today, the anti-PC set frames political correctness as a sovereign entity, separate from real human beings—like an advisory board or a nutritional label or a silly after-school club that one can heed or ignore with no moral implications—as though if we simply reject political correctness we can keep, say, the Washington Redskins without harming native communities. But the reality is that there’s no such thing as political correctness; it’s a rhetorical device to depersonalize oppression.

  Being cognizant of and careful with the historic trauma of others is what “political correctness” means. It means that the powerful should never attack the disempowered—not because it “offends” them or hurts their “feelings” but because it perpetuates toxic, oppressive systems. Or, in plainer language, because it makes people’s lives worse. In tangible ways. For generations.

  I don’t know, call me a total causehead, but I kind of feel like it’s progress that we live in a world where dumping raw meat on a peaceful vegan protest and “[installing] speed bumps on the handicapped ramps” (real PCU plot points!) are no longer considered good jokes. Just my 1.636 cents (to a man’s two)!

  If you were a privileged white kid in the nineties who could feel a moral pull to fight for something but didn’t know where to start, looking to the media for inspiration was a dry, dry well. We had the joyless ecofeminists Lisa Simpson and Darlene from Roseanne. We had South Park’s Wendy Testaburger, who spent a significant bulk of her screen time being vomited on by Stan. Kat from 10 Things I Hate About You is a rabid feminist until she’s cured by getting a boyfriend. Topanga’s feminism on Boy Meets World was often a punch line (in her vision of a utopian future, Topanga says, “we moved all men underground and use them just for breeding”). Again, on Saved by the Bell, a show for children, Jessie was relentlessly mocked for calling out Slater’s chauvinism. It was a running gag for the entire series.

  The feminist cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian, in her video series Tropes vs. Women, calls these Straw Feminists:

  The Straw Feminist character is part of a fictional post-feminist world that only exists in Hollywood, the trope is a tool that’s used to promote the fallacy that everyone is already equal.

  What’s exceptionally frustrating is that these characters often bring up legitimate feminist concerns about women’s rights and women’s equality but those concerns are quickly undermined by the writers making the characters seem over the top, crazy, and extremist.

  Care, but just a little. A cool amount. This was the status quo protecting itself.

  I should say here that I am oversimplifying things. I didn’t go to the WTO protests when I was seventeen, but I did take action, a little, on the things that I could understand. One time in elementary school, I wrote a letter to the mayor suggesting that he build a train that could take people all over the city. He was like “Thanks!” Most people don’t know that it was my idea, but Seattle’s Link Light Rail is estimated to be finished in 2041. You’re welcome! In eighth grade I danced in a dance-a-thon fund-raiser for a nonprofit that provided nutritious meals to people living with HIV, and in high school I bowled in a bowl-a-thon fund-raiser for something I forget, while dressed as Abraham Lincoln.

  I took part in a program at my high school that trained students to facilitate classroom discussions about prejudice. We went on a retreat, we did bonding exercises, kids smoked in the woods, and we came back to our deeply segregated school (a by-product of a poorly implemented gifted program in a systemically racist city) in a historically redlined neighborhood a
nd spent one class period talking about racism, awkwardly. Twenty years later, that historically black neighborhood is almost entirely gentrified—the Seattle Times estimates that by 2025 it could be less than 10 percent black. Some of my white classmates own houses there now.

  The directive transmitted by PCU and the Straw Feminists to the comfortable class wasn’t never to care; it was to avoid caring too much. It’s the perfect cover, really.

  I did not go to the WTO protest partially because my mom told me I couldn’t and partially because I didn’t understand it but primarily because I’d been taught that when ordinary people try to do activism, they look stupid. Of course now I know that there is no effective activism without the passion and commitment of ordinary people and it is a basic duty of the privileged to show up and fight for issues that don’t affect us directly. But maintaining that separation has served the status quo well. It keeps good people always just shy of taking action. It’s tone policing. It’s the white moderate. But it’s changing.

  One recent afternoon, my older daughter paused while passing through the living room with a carton of mealworms to feed to her leopard gecko (my beautiful granddaughter, Richard Pepperoni B. Jordan), and asked, “Are you guys busy tomorrow night?”

  “Probably,” my husband said. “Why?”

  “Oh, you know how I’m in the Art of Resistance and Resilience Club? We’re finally unveiling our Black Panthers mural. Bobby Seale is going to be there, and I’m giving a speech. Well, actually, it’s more of a poem. You guys can come if you want to.” Shrug, bye.

  First of all, no, we did not know that she was in the Art of Resistance and Resilience Club. We did not know that, somehow, in between Mock Trial and student government and the spring musical and Feminist Union and regular Art Club she had also been painting a mural honoring the Black Panther Party for the past six months. We did not know that she gave speeches or wrote poems or that she was acquainted with Bobby Seale, who founded the Black Panther Party with Huey P. Newton in Oakland in 1966. But okay, you radiant freak! Do you have a secret second family, too, and you sneak out Tuesdays and Thursdays to be their daughter? Are you also the CEO of the Cheesecake Factory?