Label Warfare

If Alex Jones ever got anything right it was in calling his organization Infowars. We are in the midst of a heated information war. Ideally this would be a battle of ideas, but in practice it is a war of labels. Each side seeks to assign labels in such a way as to display moral superiority to the other. Some labels are apt and defensible, while others are outright farcical. Labels are deployed as weapons, and some become rendered useless in battle and must be replaced.

Generally the left is more active in this domain than the right, but also less effective. They must rely on weaponized labeling as they tend to fare poorly in the marketplace of ideas. Their ideas are easy to repudiate, and they aren't very good at arguing to begin with, because they haven't really had to. The liberal narrative has been the unofficial state religion for some time now, and they been able to get away saturation and shaming rather than engaging in logic.

We see that the left constantly has to rebrand themselves as their self ascribed labels become burdensome. Sometimes the labels are degraded by the right, but more often they are soiled by the left's own behaviors. A few years ago liberal became something of a dirty word, thanks to constant attack from conservative radio. So liberals started calling themselves progressives. Progressive had a positive connotation, and depicted their push forward in their linear worldview. It's an excellent label, but they've ruined it. Progressive is the term used by 3rd wave feminists, intersectionality psuedo-intellectuals, and street-brawling anarchists. Most people these days associate progressives with radical communist revolutionaries. It's interesting watching some on the left call themselves progressives to avoid the negative stigma of the term liberal created by conservatives, while many moderates seek to assure us they are liberals, to avoid the negative stigma given to the term progressives gave to their own term. They are in a position of defining themselves by what they are not. The Z Man has written extensively on the dangers of negative identity, or defining oneself on what they are not, in posts such as The Anti-Man.

The left rebrands any of their pet projects that become soiled. They frame illegal aliens as undocumented immigrants. The right has made the obvious rebuttals, calling shoplifters undocumented purchasers and so on. Negroes became colored and then black and then African-Americans and then black again. Now many say "people of color" which is just another way of saying colored. The left has had a lot of success dubbing the economic refugees storming Europe as refugees, making it nearly impossible to turn them back as the preferred label portrays them as victims who face certain death in their home countries. (Never mind that it's all young men who have left the rest behind.) They have also managed to label any identity they dislike (white, male, straight, Christian, etc) as privileged. While it hasn't garnered mainstream adoption like some other terms, it has given them an easy way to dismiss anyone they want.

The left engages in what I would call loose labels, or labels they can ascribe to themselves that apply to nearly everyone. Recently I heard a musician say he was a feminist because as a father/son/brother he could not allow his daughter/mother/sister to be degraded. Well that's a hell of a loose definition. Who wants to see their mother, daughter, or sister degraded? Feminists defend their position by pretending the definition is something that has universal approval. This musician practices up to 17 hours a day and is fairly successful. I wonder if he supports the notion that a bunch of the money he makes be taken and given to a mediocre female musician who practices an hour a day. Because that's what feminists actually want to do. And they also have a tendency to degrade themselves in public. He should just raise his daughters not to be feminists.

More often than not their labels fail. They can't call themselves Marxists anymore, or Communists, even though that's what they are. Cultural Marxist is considered a pejorative, as is their own invented phrase "social justice warrior." While Bernie was big they defended the term social democrat, not knowing, it would seem, the original name of the Russian Communist Party. [The Russian communists also rose to power through label warfare. Bolshevik just means majority in Russian. The battle between the Bolshevik and Mensheviks was over before it started.] The left has become exceptionally bad at labeling their opponents as of late, resorting to the worst names that practitioners of the progressive cult can imagine: racist, sexist, Nazi, anti-semitic, Nazi, and a whole slew of hate-based terms. These terms mostly only serve to radicalize themselves, which probably doesn't bode well for their long-term success.

The right doesn't engage so much in labels but doesn't fail as much either. Mostly it's enough just to call the leftists whatever they call themselves, and they will generate the negative connotations for us. We spend more time deconstructing and sabotaging their labels than we do creating our own. One area where the right really hit a home run was in the term Pro-Life. This has been almost impossible for the left to counter, and is a powerful tool in rallying Christian votes. The countering Pro-Choice label just doesn't have the same gusto. During last year's March for Life in Washington DC that news orgs were using the term anti-abortion instead of pro-life. By choosing to use a negative definition for the marchers rather than their own term for themselves, the enormous bias of the media was revealed, showing the power of the label.

One conservative label that has acquired a negative connotation is neocon. But then again, neocon was never really a conservative label at all. It was the label that imperialists gave themselves to get conservative votes, and was ruined by their failed foreign interventionism. Other negative terms have come from the right itself, by calling liberals posing as conservatives RINOs and cuckservatives.

All this brings us to the alt-right. It was a label given to conservatives who wished to separate themselves from the establishment right; from the neocons and the corporate globalists and the National Review. It was dangerously close to a negative identity to begin with. It was also an abused term. The left found the most radical component of the alt-right and used that to try to attack Trump with. (Hillary's anti-alt-right speech wondrously backfired.) It's worrisome now that the term has finally become a burden, and was done so by members of the alt-right in Charlottesville. While the left instigated the violence, the world now associates the alt-right with yokels popping off Nazi salutes. The brand is all but ruined. We find ourselves in the position of having to rebrand, just like the left always has to do. What can we say, that the Nazi saluters aren't alt-right? They certainly fit the definition of non-establishment right-wingers. So now we're forced to do what we should have been doing already: providing positive identity labels of what we are, rather than negative labels of what we are not.