There’s an old joke about Tonto and the Lone Ranger that might have cracked your grandparents up, even though it hits a little too close to home today. I don’t recall all the particulars, but the gist of it is that the two of them are narrowly surviving one Wild West crisis after another. Shootouts with bandits, runaway stagecoaches, collapsing mineshafts, that sort of thing. Each and every time they pull through by the skin of their teeth, nothing but their wits between them and certain death. But then, one fateful day, the pair find themselves chased into a canyon by a huge tribe of hostile Indians. Pretty soon they’re surrounded on all sides by hundreds of angry bad guys. They’ve got nowhere to go. It’s the end of the line. As the Indians are closing in, the Lone Ranger decides to expire with a bit of class. He takes a deep breath, straightens his hat, and turns to his long-time companion.
“Well, old friend,” he says, “it doesn’t look like we are going to make it out of this one.”
Tonto looks at him and takes a step or two back. After a moment of reflection, he says,“Who’s ‘we,’ paleface?”
Oh, Lone Ranger, I feel for you, buddy! I really do. I mean what red-blooded, palefaced young man in these United States doesn’t know that exact feeling? Who among us, growing up as we did in strange days of hyphenated-American advocacy groups, of the lionization of minority and female achievements, of school curricula that weaponized diversity… Who among us doesn’t know the feeling of being suddenly defined out of a group for reasons of political expediency? I think we’ve all been there. A moment of silence for the poor old ranger.
Alright. Now I hope it goes without saying that the foregoing joke wasn’t an attack on Tonto himself, or a disparagement of the Tonto character. Certainly not. The Lone Ranger show was way before my time, and I never saw so much as an episode growing up. But I would nevertheless be willing to bet that the Tonto of radio and television was a stalwart companion in all weathers, right up until the bitter end, unlike the Tonto of the joke. I only bring that punchline up because it’s hilarious—and because it’s a pretty good illustration of a maneuver that gets a lot of use in our public discourse nowadays, a maneuver that I’ll call the opportunistic “we.”
The opportunistic “we” is a culture-war tactic and a feature of identity politics in general. The phrase refers to that certain slipperiness whereby sometimes (usually when discussing rights and entitlements and benefits) the word “we” refers to everyone, while other times (usually when determining who has to clean up their act or who has to foot the bill) the word “we” tends to exclude certain protected classes of people. Like, in Tonto’s case, the Native Americans. It’s an opportunistic slipperiness because it’s not particularly systematic or principled. It just seizes advantage where it can. If it’s lucrative or otherwise beneficial to do so, the identity politician insists on being treated just any other group member. If it’s not, he or she or zie insists on detachment. Easy.
To see the opportunistic “we” in action, just take a look at the giant histrionic fit that is “privilege” talk. I think folks in the know call it “intersectionality.” Whatever you call it, though, you can see that, at least ostensibly, these kind of ideologies apply universally. They’re all-encompassing, all-embracing, without respect to creed or country. We’re all part of the human family, all coequals in the global village, and so on. But of course where the rubber meets the road, we lose such lofty secularity and start to see far more carefully qualified definitions of who deserves special treatment and who needs to sacrifice their own interests in service of that treatment.
Take the feminists, for instance. On the one hand, they’re more than happy to talk about their vital contributions to Western art, science, philosophy, literature, etc. They talk about the “untold histories” of their brave forerunner sisters, who participated significantly in all of our proudest traditions. On the other hand, when it comes time for these progressive women to own up to their complicity in what they take to be unforgivable sins of history: the Christian West’s longstanding disapproval of homosexuality, its Crusades, its slavery, etc… well, then they were just sad, powerless stooges of the patriarchy, beaten down, complicit in these problematic actions and attitudes only insofar as they had been brainwashed by their male oppressors. That’s the opportunistic “we” at full tilt. Accept what accolades are available. But pass the buck right along.
The efficacy of this strategy goes a long way in explaining the endless fractalization of the left, as well as its cannibalism. People are constantly looking to draw themselves into a smaller and smaller, more exclusive “we.” This allows them to pursue their own agendas more immediately and aggressively, while pawning off responsibility for real reform elsewhere. Feminists feel excluded from mainstream America. Feminists of color in turn feel excluded from feminism. Tranny feminists of color in turn feel excluded from color feminism. And so on and so forth. At each additional branch a new group of people get to demand accommodation and refuse to play ball until such demands are met. It’s an ongoing pileup of abdicated agency.
Now if only these gymnastics were limited to college campuses, California coffee shops, and Tumblr blogs, we’d be in alright shape. Those places are known incubators of progressive discourse, regions where the most exotic flora of identity politics flourish. Were these maneuvers relegated there, we could all chuckle at the transparently mercenary nature of the whole business. But that’s not the case. The case is that here, in 21st century America, identity politics are national politics. They’re mainstream. They affect government policies. They effect media messaging. They even effect hiring and firing in the private sector. They’re pervasive. This is the ugly reality with which serious conservatives have to contend.
And the opportunistic “we” is alive and well in that ugly reality.
At any rate, I don’t want to rabbit on too long about all this. I just wanted to get us started thinking about the ways in which the referent of the word “we” can be shifted around behind the scenes for political advantage. And I wanted to suggest that this was a widespread practice. Next week, I’ll try to get into some of my thoughts on how we can engage with these rhetorical tactics effectively. How we might frustrate them. But until then I’ll just leave you with a little thought experiment about the thread of mainstream politics that I intend to pick back up in the next installment.
Think back to our esteemed Attorney General’s comments on American racism a few years ago. Do you remember them? Basically Eric Holder chastised the country, saying that “we” are “essentially a nation of cowards” when it comes to the subject of race. He enjoined us to have an honest “conversation” about racism in our own lives, communities, states. He even doubled down on this assessment when he was asked about it again in 2014. So let me just put it to you: when Mr. Holder said those things, called us cowards and whatnot, who do you think the “we” was? Who exactly was he castigating? On whom was he laying the onus for change, for improved race relations? Who’s job is that?
It’s a little slippery isn’t it?
