“Social Justice” and the Right
Since language determines how issues are framed, rhetoric is an essential dimension of political warfare. Historically, the American Left has held the advantage when it comes to controlling the words we use to talk about our problems. “Political correctness” means nothing other than that liberal progressivism has the sovereign right to dictate the standards for public speech. That this phrase has been part of our vocabulary for almost half a century shows that progressives have been remarkably successful in policing our language, even in the face of public criticism. Nevertheless, the Right has notched some major successes relating to the norms of public discourse in recent years. Two victories jump immediately to mind.
Until Trump ran for president, “fake news” was a phrase used almost solely by mainstream media outlets to discredit alternative sources of information in the widening ecosphere of digital journalism. Ironically, though, the very outlets warning the public about the proliferation of “fake news” were the most responsible for spreading it. Trump and those in his orbit co-opted this piece of linguistic weaponry and used it to attack the slew of disinformation the legacy media uses to manipulate the public. Unexpectedly, this effort was so successful that people called on leftist media outlets to stop using the phrase entirely. When mainstream media attacked “fake news,” most Americans saw them calling attention to their own hypocrisy. Ultimately, this rhetorical appropriation—expertly executed from the Right—stole an arrow from the opposition’s quiver.
A similar gambit with the word “woke” has been even more successful. For decades, the adjective had been used by the countercultural Left as a compliment. To be woke was to have savvy political awareness—a unique attunement to the structure of American oppression and a grasp of the revolutionary techniques required to “dismantle” it. As late as 2017, the word still functioned in this way in academic circles—to be called “woke” was to have some scholarly cache. But since the unmasking of Leftist authoritarianism in 2020 (which conservatives successfully branded as “The Great Awokening”) that cache is gone. While wokeness still pervades the universities, its acolytes dare not call it such—the term itself is now passé. This transformation is nothing short of remarkable: to be called “woke” in 2024 is considered a slur. It connotes a facile, reflexive mode of thinking, a self-important sort of posturing, a kookiness masquerading as political sincerity.
There are other instances where conservative resistance has significantly modified the connotation of words taken from the never-never land of leftist thought. Most adult thinkers mentally recoil at hearing someone use the term “non-binary” in a serious tone. The public is well on its way to catching the sleight of hand inherent in the term “equity.” And even the word “progress” is now largely exposed as the cypher it always was—a kind of shorthand for Marxist kulturkampf.
Still, the Left maintains a monopoly on one term of special political significance: “social justice.” Since the George Floyd riots, talk of social justice has formed the superstructure of American and global political deliberation. It’s a very powerful idea, and conservatives’ avoidance of the term—or worse, our mockery of it—has worked to our opponents’ great advantage.
As a professor at a public university, nary a faculty meeting since 2020 has passed without some reference to social justice. For a while, I asked my colleagues to define the term. I wanted to have a discussion. I wanted to show them that their definition was debatable—that there is legitimate and substantial disagreement about the characteristics of a just society. But not a single member of the faculty indulged me. It took some time for me to understand why.
The reason is that they intentionally use the phrase as a political cudgel: in the mouth of the Left, social justice means nothing more or less than the full implementation of the Democrats’ radical, ever-evolving agenda. They’ve replaced the ancient philosophical question of defining the just society with a moral absolutism that implicitly and falsely posits a broad agreement on the answer. This is a technique to forestall any meaningful debate. By appealing to a consensus that doesn’t exist, they dare their interlocutors to take issue with their presumption. When someone does, they get to smear their opponents as enemies of justice itself.
Conservatives’ fear of these smears benefits the Left in two ways. First, it ensures that leftists’ (unstated) definition of social justice remains the political default and stays insulated from critique. This, in turn, discourages their opponents from using the phrase at all. It’s rare to encounter someone on the Right who makes explicit appeals to social justice. In part, that’s because progressives talk of social justice so frequently that conservatives are afraid that by using the phrase themselves, they might be mistaken for leftists. Further, since they are conscious of the highly-contestable nature of “social justice,” some on the Right avoid that term because they may be challenged to explain what would necessarily be a philosophically-complex vision of the good.
The final effect of this discursive surrender is that the Left sustains the illusion that Americans who care about justice should agree with (and vote for) Democrats. And that is an illusion. The hard truth—the heretical truth that progressives cannot admit to themselves—is that everyone wants social justice. Yes: everyone. “But what about the Ku Klux Klan? Surely, they don’t want social justice!” Yes. Them too.
When I say that everyone wants social justice, what I mean is that if asked, no one would state that they would prefer an unjust society. In other words, any Klansman (do any still exist?) would say that he does want a just society—and he would be sincere in saying so. The problem is that this Klansman would make that claim based on a screwed-up idea of the meaning of social justice.
But if it’s possible for people to arrive at flawed notions of justice, how do we know that the leftists who give it lip service have an accurate image in mind? The answer, of course, is that we don’t. If nothing else, their demonstrated reluctance to give any details should make us even more reticent to accept their view of social justice as benevolent, achievable, or even desirable.
The proper response to this problem is for the Right to make explicit, frequent, and favorable appeals to social justice. Of course, our concept of the just society differs greatly from our opponents. But we do want social justice, don’t we? Conservatives rightly believe that our society is perhaps closer than any other nation has ever come to the ideal of justice, but we, too, see areas for improvement. We must speak openly and honestly about it. The average apathetic American voter needs to hear conservative ideas explicitly defended on the basis of social justice commitments.
We don’t even need to give our own definitions of social justice at first. Our opponents’ shock at hearing the phrase in our mouths—a piece of their rhetorical property—will ensure that they challenge our usage. In that moment, we will have achieved the necessary conditions for a meaningful debate over what exactly we mean by social justice. And when that debate occurs, we should be prepared to demonstrate the contradictions and utopianism inherent in the Left’s (heretofore unstated) idea of social justice. Those flaws will be readily apparent to any neutral audience. There is a reason why progressives are so desperate to avoid any explanation of what they mean.
So as the election approaches, conservatives would be wise to make consistent, forceful appeals to social justice, assuming (as the Left does) that audiences already understand and agree with our conception of it. At the very least, we can provoke a dialogue that is long overdue. With some success, we can reorient our political discourse when it comes to justice. And in the best-case scenario, we can do what we did with “fake news” and “woke”—laying claim to the terms with authority in a way that forces the Left to abandon their disingenuous use of the phrase altogether.
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