"Undocumented Citizens" and the new Newspeak
Some Aspects of the Successor Ideology
Back in 2016, San Francisco voters approved a measure allowing non-citizens, including undocumented immigrants, to vote in local school board elections. It was a practical step undertaken at a local level in an ongoing project to erase the distinction between citizen and non-citizen driven by an unusual coalition of left activists and economic libertarians. The former proceeded from an ever-expanding commitment to human rights impinging upon territorial sovereignty in pursuit of the evacuation of the category of the nation-state itself at work within certain precincts of academia and the activist NGO-sphere; the latter had at their disposal economic projections that the free movement of labor, once a slogan of the internationalist Left, would yield enormous gains to global economic efficiency supported by and serving the interests of globalized corporations.
Open borders was the place where anarcho-capitalism, traditional Left utopian ("no Gods of Masters") anarchism, and the bureaucratic organs of institutional governance -- where the Koch Brothers, George Soros, the crusty punks of Portland antifa, and the international lawyers -- converged in a common pursuit of a shared end. From each of its component parts, the movement derived a distinctly-valenced claim to stand at the vanguard of moral and material improvement.
The contradictory impetus behind each faction's commitment mattered less than the ensuing output -- the collective pursuit of open borders through a series of incremental advances that would over time drain away the support for the maintenance of the citizen/non-citizen distinction and its replacement by a new moral consensus that it was the role of these movements to conjure into existence in the act of achieving its ends in fact. Papering over the contradictions while conjoining the postively-valenced aspects of the movement would have the polemical benefit of making anyone opposed to their goals at once intellectually benighted, morally backward, and dedicated to economic enfeeblement -- stupid, immoral, and poor.
The act by the San Francisco electorate was small in its practical consequences (around 50 non-citizens voted in the 2018 election) but large in its implications. It came a few years after aggressive executive action by the President of the United States to take the question of granting a path to citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants brought to the US as young children out of the hands of a deadlocked Congress. It therefore signaled at once 1.) the will of a vanguard movement to push beyond the ostensibly modest aims of DACA (which merely sought to give a path to citizenship to those who did not have a choice over whether to accompany their parents here, many of whom had never known another home,) to more ambitious projects that annul in practice the distinction between citizen and non-citizen as such -- and 2.) the readiness of a progressive voting public to enact such projects.
What remained to be done was to ensure that the rest of the country, much of which still believed ("clung to the belief" -- the sole way the benighted relate to the beliefs deemed to belong to the past by those who have arrogated to themselves the authority to decide which direction the arc of history bends) that the ability to discriminate between and assign differential rights to citizens and non-citizens was constitutive of the nation-state itself and therefore a fundamental aspect of sovereignty that the people have a right to enforce by virtue of their existence as as a nation, would be brought on board. At minimum, those continuing to cling would be made to understand that resistance is presumptively out of bounds, and would therefore not be represented by legitimate actors within the political system — exiled to a placeoutside the bounds of the respectable and thus, eventually, the sayable and the thinkable.
DACA was accompanied on the cultural front by the publication of the tech journalist Jose Antonio Vargas's New York Times Magazine's piece, "My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant," a plangent personal testimonial that framed immigration and border control as what it in fact is: an instrument of inequality. It is of course in pursuit of the inequality obtaining between residents and non-residents of the United States that brings millions to live in the United States while bypassing legal process that few have the resources to satisfy. But the equality of the resident is not the equality of the citizen; in addition to many of the other disadvantages (none serving as an bar to graduating from a first-rate US public university or becoming a successful journalist published in leading magazines) that Vargas outlines in his essay, the latter do not have a voice in the politics of the United States, despite comprising a large share of its agricultural and construction workforces.
Undocumented immigrants are thus, in the rendering of the issue then in the process of being constructed, the people building this nation who are denied political representation (though their children born on US soil are already citizens.) The logical next demand, of course, was the one that the San Francisco electorate wound up satisfying. The logical conundrum thereby evaded is that the inequality is the point: just as those seeking residency in the United States seek to possess a share in the inequality obtaining between themselves and those they left behind, those seeking the benefits of US citizenship by evacuating the distinction between citizen and non-citizen seek to universalize in principle an inequality (between American citizens and non-citizens) that exists by virtue of being delimited by a border. We will return to this paradox in subsequent posts, but suffice it to say for now, the Mexican immigrant communities on the Texas border ran up against this paradox and found the conundrum was not lost on them.
The terminological change from "illegal alien" to "undocumented immigrant" was still fairly recent when Vargas' piece came out. It was right around that time that a friend first gently corrected me in an email on the usage, breezily conceding that she herself had only recently been apprised of the new usage. "No human being is illegal" portrayed itself as merely etiquette and sensitivity while subtly smuggling in other implications: documentation was a mere formality, a matter of positive law that did not and could not speak to the underlying moral right. What remained to do was to complete the circuit taking us from "rights conferred on on us by virtue of our being human" to "rights conferred on us by virtue of being a citizen of the United States of the America."
This is to say that "undocumented immigrant" was merely a waystation on the path to what the University of Maryland Multicultural Involvement and University Advocacy office would declare in 2015 was the proper usage: "undocumented citizen." The oxymoronic coinage, issuing from a student life bureaucracy of a second tier state college, might easily be seen as merely the latest in a cascade of amusing "P.C. follies" issuing from academia. But in the context of the longer running cultural and legal projects that surrounded and accompanied it, it is an exemplary instance of a politics in a new key that came to influence American institutions and values across a range of different domains: the politics of what I have termed ideological succession.
The intervention fully enacted in the medium of language what NGOs and international lawyer were still busily trying to litigate into existence: recognition of the non-citizen as a citizen. It arrogated to itself through the humble medium of the student life bureaucracy a form of implied disciplinary power. While the campaign by the student life office merely sought to encourage rather than mandate the use of an oxymoron as a form of sensitive speech, it emerged accompanied by the promulgation of the micro-aggression as a subject of disciplinary action across universities.
A few years prior, the University of Berkeley office of student life issued a series of racial micro-aggressions that professors should avoid. They included "America is a melting pot," and "I think the best person should get the job." Under the guise of protecting student health and safety, the student life office resolved an ongoing debate about whether we should be a "salad bowl" that preserves cultural differences of sub-national units, or a "melting pot" where a process of amalgamation in pursuit of a single unified national identity by declaring one of the two competing propositions presumptively illegitimate -- an act of harm, if not hate and harassment, to be policed out of existence. Under the guise of protecting student health and safety it declared meritocracy as presumptively illegitimate as an institution. And though it did not formally declare these "racial micro-aggressions" to be subject to disciplinary action, it was did declare that taking certain positions on contested debates was not merely wrong substantively, (the purpose of open debate and free speech being thus to discover what is wrong or right through an exchange of ideas) but an offense against the community itself existing beyond the bounds of decency and subject to disciplinary action by the entity (themselves) with the authority to protect the community from harm.
The theory of the microaggression holds that seemingly benign statements contain latent within them the capacity to inflict psychological injury on marginalized people.
“Although they may appear like insignificant slights, or banal and trivial in nature,” writes Derald Wing-Sue, the Columbia University educational psychology professor, who wrote the book Micro-Aggressions in Everyday Life, “studies reveal that racial microaggressions have powerful detrimental consequences to people of color.”
Sue goes on to claim that microaggressions:
(a) assail the mental health of recipients, (b) create a hostile and invalidating work or campus climate, (c) perpetuate stereotype threat, (d) create physical health problems, (e) saturate the broader society with cues that signal devaluation of social group identities, (f) lower work productivity and problem solving abilities, and (g) be partially responsible for creating inequities in education, employment and health care.
The invocation of the juridical term “hostile climate” both justifies the quasi-legal basis of the new student life bureaucracies in policing dissent out of existence on an ever-proliferating range of questions and points toward the eventual goal of the movement to embed these concepts into the legal system itself.
We can therefore see here what the Successor Regime aims for and how it goes about obtaining its ends, which in turn tells us about the sociology of the movement of which it is a part: the manufacture of consensus around a range of issues through the capture of disciplinary power by adherents sharing a common set of values and goals that seeks to rule out various aspects of political action as presumptively illegitimate (border control, policing, prisons, standardized testing) by policing any debate out of them out of existence. It is a vision of a radically less disciplinary society of the street obtained through a radically more disciplinary society of the seminar room, workplace, board room, and bedroom -- an ongoing distributed process of moral revolution without central direction but converging relentlessly around the same handful of goals — a politics of persuasion without persuasion that eventually crosses the boundary into softer, and then harder, forms of coercion.
The process evades electoral politics entirely, simply erupting occasionally in enactments and pronouncements that appear to us in the guise of fait d'accompli, as the newspeak moves seamlessly from student life offices to the language of offices of the US federal government. On August 12, the Twitter account of the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Texas tweeted out a press release announcing that "Young soldiers admit to transporting undocumented citizens."
I agree with the line of argument but,Wesley, this is very dense verbiage. I understand you are writing about people who use similar language but please, let’s not here. Also, I agree the U. of Maryland is second rate. Many second and third tier institutions are among the more fanatical in adopting the Ideology, at least they can be in the vanguard of something.
On the subject of successor/woke/progressive manipulation of language, I thought (if not too presumptuous and apologies if it is) a piece I wrote for another publication.
John McWhorter, the distinguished linguist, has an ecclesiastical term for the members of the current woke/progressive/CRT movement: The Elect. He has chosen that term to emphasize the fact that the movement is not just like a religion, but actually is a religion (or at least a cult).
All religions are alike in certain ways, especially in the need for a common terminology, a series of definitions and words that make it possible to function within said religion. Sometimes these terms are spun out of whole cloth, appearing sui generis either at the beginning or as time goes by. Sometimes these terms are taken from “the outside world” and may, or may not, retain a close relation to their original meaning.
With The Elect (capitalization intentional), much of the terminology is actually taken directly from the self-help and therapy movements. This usurpation gives the terms a feeling to the public of general familiarity, lending a certain comfort when encountering them. By taking what, in many cases, was non-confrontational “feel good” terminology and warping it for their own purposes, The Elect can, and so far sadly successfully, “Trojan Horse” their belief system into society as a whole.
To start, take for example the term “trigger.” Essentially this word originally arose from self-help groups as a kind of shorthand to remind people to avoid situations that could lead to a relapse into whatever problematic behavior they wish to stop. Triggers were past activities one closely associated with that behavior – don’t hang out at the local bar every day because that makes drinking easier, don’t argue politics with your idiot brother-in-law because that makes going to jail again for no matter how justifiable assault more possible, don’t go down the ice cream aisle at the supermarket because that literally puts weight gain back on the table, etc.
Those triggers varied wildly from behavior to behavior, from individual to individual. What did not vary, though, was the sense that it was incumbent upon the individual to take responsibility for avoiding those triggers, to stay out of harm’s way, as it were.
But, as currently defined, “trigger warnings,” while bearing a facile resemblance to the original meaning, have mutated from an individual responsibility to a societal one. What was once a personal self-improvement tool has become a way for individuals to demand that society refrains from exposing them to anything that could cause even mild discomfort, real or even self-induced, under any circumstances.
If the term still had its original meaning, just as walking into a bar can “trigger” an alcoholic’s relapse, apparently discussing slavery in a college classroom could somehow trigger a relapse into the practice of slavery on campus.
Other examples of this type of dishonest co-option abound:
· Safe Space – Once a term for an environment that allowed its members to express themselves honestly and openly (think group therapy) without fear of judgement is now held to be an environment in which only thoughts and actions that are pre-approved by the group (no matter how that group is delineated) are allowed. Again, seemingly similar but in fact radically different.
· Doing the Work – In self-help groups, it means a constant personal process of self-evaluation, of being careful of addictive or other problematic behaviors. Now, in the current context, it means permanently and eternally attempting to atone for the Original Sin of whiteness, or maleness, or straightness, or any perceived trait that is defined by The Elect as inappropriately advantageous and/or putatively powerful.
· Speaking Your Truth – In many therapeutic settings, speaking from a very personal perspective about how one perceives the world is a useful first step in better understanding oneself and, therefore, be better able to move forward. It is, however, specifically not immutable and to be taken, in the long run, as final and actual truth. In The Elect version, personal truth is just as valid and is to be given the same cloak of universality as actual, real-world truth and therefore cannot be questioned. This has the effect of moving society’s goalposts from “speaking truth to power” to “speaking your own truth to gain power.”
· Crosstalk – Depending on a particular group’s norms, crosstalk can range from asking someone to clarify a statement, to asking if that person knows the reason for his actions, to directly challenging another person’s version of events. This last is usually at least frowned upon if not banned from the environment. The Elect has lifted this premise entirely and foisted it onto society as a whole because it is convenient to use it to silence dissent, disagreement, or mere questions. Doing any one of these things is deemed counter-productive and, according to The Elect, reflects the dissenters’ tacit admission of continuing fault, or at least their purposeful denial of the problem (as they define it).
· Inclusivity – Self-help and therapy groups are inclusive of anyone wishing to get help with whatever problem they may be facing. However, such inclusivity can lead to insularness and an unwillingness to look at those with similar issues who have chosen not to join the group as others, people to be wary of. The Elect take this occasional negative off-shoot of selective inclusivity and extend it to its absurd but in a way logical conclusion – anyone who they think should join the group and has refused is, therefore, by definition less of a person.
· Ridding of Toxic Elements – Hearkening back somewhat to the discussion of triggers, in a therapeutic setting this means to not just avoid potential recovery pitfalls but to also actively seek out and eliminate certain things from your life. The Elect define toxic elements as anyone or anything or any idea that you either do not agree with or could possibly change your way of thinking. (If you remember the many, many articles advising people on how they should handle discussing any even vaguely political issue with their old, out-of-touch, angry, less than progressive parents at a holiday meal – and whether or not they should even attend - you get the drift).
· Lived-In Experience – Like “your truth,” the idea is that everyone’s statement of their own lived-in experience cannot be questioned. Not only is it “your truth,” it actually has the merit of being supported by “your experience,” or at least how you perceived them. The Elect have morphed the “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” aphorism into a way to silence any criticism while simultaneously denying the very existence of the human empathy that makes the coming together of discrete individuals to form a society possible.
By using the cudgel of familiarity, the slippery slope of “that rings a bell, so it can’t be that weird,” The Elect have bastardized these terms to advance their political and social agenda. This dishonest slither of co-option needs to be seen for what it is – a very narcissistic wolf in a very trusting sheep’s clothing.
Author’s Note: None of the above is meant to denigrate using self-help groups and therapy when appropriate or their possible efficacy. And I’m sorry this trigger warning is at the end of the article.