the Lack in the Left

I’ve been listening on occasion to the Why Theory podcast by Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley. I don’t always understand what they’re talking about — but at the very least, there’s never a dull moment with these two.

This morning, I started the episode “Euphemism.” Full disclosure: I’ve only gotten about ten minutes in, because their discussion sparked thoughts that I needed to write down. So, without further ado or adon’t….

In this episode, Todd and Ryan posit that “euphemism” is the new politics — not only of the USA, where it perhaps has a lampshade permanently attached to it, but of the entire world. The initial example they give is D.O.G.E (which, for the record, I refuse to refer to as anything but the letters D-O-G-E, because “doge” and the associated pronunciation are a fun but ridiculously silly meme and I am determined to be prescriptivist about how utterly inane and juvenile it is to name a governmental agency after it).

Anywhich, Ryan and Todd state that the agency name “D.O.G.E.” is a euphemism for the agency’s destruction of the public.

It’s been 30 minutes, so I don’t remember now if the guys use the word “destruction,” but that’s how my Swiss-cheese memory has chosen to retain the information.

I’m connecting this with some of the things I’ve read in Todd’s Embracing Alienation (highly recommend!), in which he defines and discusses “the public” (especially in the book’s final chapter). Basically, in the public, you don’t get to make the rules. I don’t get to make the rules. For better or for worse, we all make the rules together, and none of us gets to escape the consequences of infringing upon or breaking those rules. You don’t get to leave your home, step out onto the public sidewalk, and behave in that space exactly the way you would inside your home. I don’t get to walk into a library and hum loudly to myself as I browse books, the way I hum and sing loudly when I’m at home. When we’re at a city park, we don’t get to fence off an area and refuse to let strangers into it. And so forth.

In the public, we’re constantly confronted with the Otherness of people. We’re constantly confronted with the myriad ways in which the Other

is alienated
is alien and
alienates us.

This highlights to us in a most discomfiting manner the myriad ways in which we ourselves

are alienated from ourselves
are alien to ourselves and
alienate ourselves both from the Other and from our Self.

The public is an uncomfortable space in which to tarry. It’s also a space that’s vital for our ability as humans to live together in this universe and on this planet. We must have a commons in which no one person and no one group of people gets to make all the rules and force everyone else to follow them. For better or for worse, we all make the rules of the commons together — and adhering to those rules by general consent is, paradoxically, one of the only ways we get to live in a society and yet experience freedom.

In simplest terms, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has the task of eliminating wasteful spending. According to Todd and Ryan (and me, ftr and fwiw), what’s happening is that this group of people with no experience in these matters is looking at things of the public they do not understand; seeing that these things are expensive, and doing away with them. The D.O.G.E. disruptions of Social Security, as well as D.O.G.E.’s plans for Social Security, are good examples.

The question, I think, is why? Of what possible benefit can all of this be? I know very little of economic theory, but even I can see that in the long run, this targeted erosion of the commons, of the public, will cost the US-American public an unimaginable amount more than any current “waste” costs us. (And it will cost us in more that just financial means.) I mean, if we’re to eliminate waste in governmental spending, can we please start with the disproportionately huge salaries drawn by politicians and their various staff organizations? Nobody should be able to become wealthy as a result of their job in government — not senators, not governors, not presidents.

The highest yearly salary in the senate currently nears US$200,000.00.
You cannot tell me that the value of that person’s work is greater than the value of the work of a schoolteacher in Oklahoma.
I’m not going to debate that.

Don’t even get me started on the president’s annual salary of US$400,000.00.

So. Before we go slashing things like museums and Medicaid, science and social programs, can we please eliminate the cash cow that all of our politicians are milking to our collective detriment?

But back to the why of it all. If even an uneducated layperson can see the looming disaster smeared in human feces on the wall, then what the hell is the because?

Well, it goes back to Lack. It goes back to alienation and self-alienation.

If you’re the kind of person who

categorically refuses to engage in honest introspection
feels irrationally angry at the thought of making yourself vulnerable to others
— which is an irrational anger that covers over fear of anyone’s seeing your failings —
despises and rejects the Otherness you perceive in someone who’s different from you
(and let’s be honest — what you despise in another person is usually something you despise about yourself)
and, therefore, despises and rejects the Other,

then of course you’re going to do everything you can to destroy and eliminate any spaces where the Other has the freedom to move, to speak, to act. Of course.

Of course.

And what we’re seeing is the Right’s radical, ultimate response to their own terror of the alien Other.
Which is, really, the Right’s radical, ultimate response to their terror of the Lack in themselves.

Now for the Left’s responsibility concerning all of this.

And feel free to sit with that statement, that idea, for a minute. Doesn’t feel great, does it? Nope, not to me, either.

I’ve never claimed the label “Left” any more than I’ve claimed the label “Right.” There’s a lot of personal history informing where I stand and where I’ve stood, but I’m not going to get into that right now. For my current purposes, suffice it to say that these days, if you’re wanting a neat drawer to put me in, you can use the one labeled “Left” — just keep in the front pocket of your brain the fact that no human is all one thing, and nuance is important.

Ideas and concepts that involve care and concern for the most vulnerable, no matter who they are — these are ideas and concepts we generally? find in that same “Left”-hand drawer. (“But Courtney — what of that nuance you were just talking about?” –Yes, I know. But this is a blog post, not a book chapter, so you’re going to have to bear with some of my generalizations and shorthand.) Elon Musk, a right-wing South African billionaire obsessed with the letter “x” and whose business career began with his father’s money, said, ““The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.”

That statement, y’all — anathema to any civilized human, correct?

Well, sort of. And maybe not.

It all depends on how you define “empathy.”

I’m not going to speak to how anyone else defines it. Me, I consider the word’s etymology and the fact that it was coined in English in 1909 as a translation of the German word Einfühlung (see Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary, ed. McCabe and Yanacek). It means a “feeling into” another person’s emotions or “feeling into” a situation. There’s a connotation of deliberately, intentionally trying our damnedest to

see something from the Other’s perspective
understand where they’re coming from
name the emotions they feel as a result (which requires checking with them to see if they agree with the names) and
feel those emotions with them.

Here, empathy goes far deeper than sympathy ever can, and it leads inevitably to compassionate action (in word and/or in deed).

Back in my day — nineteen-hunnert-an’-none-o’-yer-bidness — I interacted regularly with a lot of people who complained about “political correctness.” It was “politically incorrect” to say the word “retarded”; we had to say “disabled” instead. It was “politically incorrect” to say “stewardess”; we had to use the term “flight attendant.” Pretty soon, we couldn’t say “African-American” or “Indian” anymore; now it had to be “Black” and “Native American.” And even though nobody used this term back then, these people in my circles complaining about “political correctness” were annoyed at having their language “policed.”

I probably complained too, but I honestly don’t remember. I spent most of my days amongst German kids, who were more concerned about pronouncing their “th”s correctly than they were worried about US-American language foibles. But I won’t claim full innocence in anything, because I just can’t remember (see: Swiss cheese).

As I look back, though, I believe that this “enforced political correctness” was fundamentally a call to practice sympathy and, going deeper, empathy and compassion.

The call was to stop using words to hurt others. The call was to listen when others claimed that certain words caused pain. My parents taught me not to call my friend an “asshole” when he made me mad. Granted, their given reason was that “bad language” didn’t please God, and we didn’t really get into why it displeased God. But eventually, I understood that this God I was meant to please (and, Gentle Constant Reader, I do encourage you to check out my latest book for further thoughts on “God”) didn’t like the word “asshole” because it is language that dehumanizes.

And anytime we use language that dehumanizes, we come one step closer to seeing that other person no longer as a fellow human — German: “Mitmensch,” a “with-human” — but as an object we can either use or eliminate on a whim.

The call to “political correctness” was a call to stop using language that ignored the other person’s humanity. It was a call to respect the Other as a human eking out a human experience in this universe.

Today, in this Winter Year of Our Discontent 2025, we don’t call it political correctness anymore. We call it “triggering language.” We give content warnings. We make sure that no matter what we say in public, we don’t offend anyone. We tread carefully. We tiptoe around the pieces of eggshell that might be somebody’s unpleasant experiences, we know not whose, but we know that person is out there and might end up having a bad week because of something we said.

Y’all.

This is a fucking CULTURE OF TABOO AND EUPHEMISM, and it is ensconced firmly in that nifty Left-hand drawer.

This is no way to run a railroad.

Why?

Because euphemism creates an ungodly number of rules and regulations that erode the public.

WE — those of us futzing around in that Left drawer, even we who are the most well-meaning — we are destroying the commons with our Incessant Euphemism, and we started doing it a long time before South-African-emerald-mine-X-D.O.G.E.r Musk showed up as shadow-VP of the USA.

“Please put trigger warnings on your posts about _____________________.”

“How many times have I asked for content warnings about _______________? I don’t want to see this shit!”

Honestly, sometimes it sounds exactly like my deceased, super-conservative grandmother who couldn’t stand the sight of blood or any mention of sex in her presence. Minus the four-letter word, natch.

Again: in the commons, in the public, you don’t make the rules. I don’t make the rules. Nobody is in charge of the rules. Nobody is in charge of enforcing the rules. Plenty of people will gladly put themselves in charge of public rule enforcement, but they are trying to cover over their own Lack by functioning as control freaks, and all while probably breaking the rules themselves (either in the act of policing others’ language or in unrelated ways).

What it boils down to is:

you do not get to behave in public the way you do at home
you do not get to make public spaces conform to the rules you follow inside your home
you do not get to do what you want in public without consequences you don’t like
you do not get to tell people what words to use in a space that is not inside-your-home

you do not get to demand that the commons adopt your preferred euphemism

you do not get to use dehumanizing language in the commons without uncomfortable-to-you results
you do not get to project your fears onto others in the public and force them to do and say what you would do and say.

Simply put: in the public, in the commons, you don’t get to pretend that you’re inside your safe zone.

Because you’re not.

The public is a dangerous space, people. It’s full of people. It’s full of inherent, Lacking, horrific Otherness. You don’t get to pretend otherwise. And if you try to pretend otherwise — by inviting others to bully the person you’re trying to police, or by using dehumanizing language with the intent to cause suffering, or by taking a barely-metaphorical chainsaw to public service after public service — then all you’re doing is destroying our commons and their associated freedoms one after the other.

That’s all for now. I’ll write a follow-up if the next ten minutes of the Why Theory episode inspire as many ruminations.

You’ve been (content) warned.

P.S. Just ftr, a blog is not a public space. It’s the blog writer’s invitation for you to peek into a select window of their home. Comment fittingly.