Boyers himself has been shut down in his classroom at Skidmore College by a student accusation that he exercised “privilege,” which he describes as “a noise word intended to distract all of us from the substance of our discussion.” Its invocation is meant to punish its object “by making him into a representative of something he could not possibly defend himself against.” He writes, “Nothing is easier than to wield the charge of privilege and thereby to win instant approval.” In other words, it’s a cheap shot.

  Sometimes the cheap shot backfires. A September Guardian editorial scorned David Cameron’s experience of having his disabled six-year-old son die in his arms as “privileged pain.” The attempt to deny the former British prime minister the integrity of his suffering went down so poorly even with the paper’s loyal readership that the editors were forced to admit the editorial “fell far short of our standards” and to provide an amendment. Yet for the sneering dismissal ever to have seen the light of day speaks volumes. The privileged are denied even the right to anguish.

  Meanwhile, it isn’t clear what an admission of privilege calls you to do, aside from cower. That tired injunction “Check your privilege” translates simply to “STFU”—and it’s telling of our era that “shut the fuck up” is now a sufficiently commonplace imperative to have lodged in text-speak.

  Because the Left’s collective vocabulary functions as a T-shirt, the better for the like-minded to recognize one another like campers on a field trip, members of this in-group have naturally adopted a hip descriptor for themselves. In The Problem with Everything, Meghan Daum identifies “woke” as borrowed from the civil rights movement, when the term “signaled one’s allegiance to a more general ethos of progressive righteousness.” Sadly, the resurrected buzzword has already backfired, having rapidly proved an inadvertent gift to conservative commentators, who’d wearied of their shopworn swipes at “social justice warriors.”

  In more and more commentary, the term “woke” and attendant mischievous improvisations are delivered with a smirk. The monosyllabic tag has turned out to be wonderfully adaptable for the purposes of derision. Snide variations abound: “the wokery” (mine), the “wokerati” (Lisa Simeone), “the woke-ing class” (Julie Bindel), or Daum’s shorthand for “NPR-listening, New Yorker–reading, Slate podcast–downloading elites”: the “wokescenti.”

  The wokescenti’s biggest terminological success is surely “people of color,” whose nearly universal installation in public discourse shouldn’t reprieve the term from scrutiny. (After all, what does that make everyone else, “people of whiteness”?) While this curiously archaic construction is commendably inclusive, erstwhile “minorities” also encompassed a range of skin tones. Savor the historical irony that the expression “people of color” referred to black Americans in post–Civil War Jim Crow legislation. And there’s no avoiding the absurdity that “colored people,” which the more modish phrase strains to avoid, is a dated 1950s term that came to be construed as disrespectful. “Linguistically,” Murray notes, the distinction is “without a meaningful difference.” Yet when poor Benedict Cumberbatch appeared on Tavis Smiley in 2015 and carelessly alluded to “colored actors,” all hell broke loose: outcry, public apology (“I make no excuse for my being an idiot and know the damage is done”), the works. “Throughout this episode,” Murray reminds us, “nobody seriously claimed that Cumberbatch was a racist.” He had merely committed, Murray observes, a “crime of language.”

  The same demented theatrical deference has abruptly made the noun “slave” almost unprintable. Therefore in a long New York Times article in September about Virginia Theological Seminary’s historical complicity in slavery, we find reference to “enslaved people,” “slave labor,” “the enslaved,” victims of “involuntary servitude,” “people who were sold,” people who were “once owned,” “enslaved laborers,” “enslaved men and women,” and previous faculty who had “owned black people”—but, scrupulously, never one use, outside of direct quotations, of “slave” as a noun.

  These circumlocutions are meant to emphasize the fact that Africans traded like chattel were not, in their essence, slaves but human beings. With similar deference to a referent’s humanity, “the obese” has given way to the prolix “people living with obesity,” as if all that excess weight is merely renting a spare bedroom down the hall. Yet the logic of this prohibition taints any noun that refers to a person. If I’m a “Londoner” or a “libertarian,” is that all I am? Aren’t these words, by identifying me via a mere location or creed, reductive? Given that butchers and bakers and candlestick makers cannot, in their essence, be distilled to their professions, perhaps we should say instead “butchering people” and “baking people” and “people of candlestick making.”

  Another popular substitute for the neutrally proportionate word “minorities,” “marginalized communities” conveniently assumes the conclusion: that all minorities are exiled to the social edges. Cultural “appropriation” likewise assumes the conclusion that cultural cross-fertilization equates with theft. To force an antagonist of the concept to employ the term is therefore to win while skipping the argument. Underhanded, but effective.

  The premier example of this linguistic skullduggery—that is, winning an argument without the bother of actually conducting one—is the Left’s increasingly successful imposition of the disagreeable-sounding term “cisgender.” The logic of the 1990s contrivance—cis being Latin for “on this side of,” as opposed to trans, meaning “on the other side of”—feels forced and inorganic. More crucially, to employ the adjective is to endorse the view that sex is “assigned” at birth rather than recognized as a biological fact. The word no sooner raises thorny debates regarding sex and gender than shuts them down.

  Denoting, say, a woman born a woman who thinks she’s a woman, this freighted neologism deliberately peculiarizes being born a sex and placidly accepting your fate, and even suggests that there’s something a bit passive and conformist about complying with the arbitrary caprices of your mother’s doctor. Moreover, unless a discussion specifically regards transgenderism, in which case we may need to distinguish the rest of the population (“nontrans” would do nicely), we don’t really need this word, except as a banner for how gendercool we are. It’s no more necessary than words for “a dog that is not a cat,” “a lamppost that is not a fire hydrant,” or “a table that is actually a table.” Presumably, in order to mark entities that are what they appear to be, we could append “cis-” to anything and everything. “Cisblue” would mean blue and not yellow. “Cisboring” would mean genuinely dull, and not secretly entertaining after all.

  “Microaggression” is a perverse concoction, implying that the offense in question is so minuscule as to be invisible to the naked eye, yet also that it’s terribly important. The word cultivates hypersensitivity. The ubiquitous “transphobic,” “Islamophobic,” and “homophobic” are also eccentric, in that the reprobates so branded are not really being accused of fearfulness but hatred. (Sorry—hate. “Hatred” has gone the way of the floppy disk.) “Lived experience” is interchangeable with “experience,” save that the redundant double-barrel is pompous. The alphabet soup of “LGBTQ” continues to add letters: LGBTQIAGNC, LGBTQQIP2SAA, or even LGBTIQCAPGNGFNBA. A three-year-old bashing the keyboard would produce a more functional shorthand.

  Rare instances of left-wing understatement, “problematic” and “troubling” are coyly nonspecific red flags for political transgression that obviate spelling out exactly what sin has been committed (thereby eliding the argument). Similarly, the all-purpose adjectival workhorse “inappropriate” presumes a shared set of social norms that in the throes of the culture wars we conspicuously lack. This euphemistic tsk-tsk projects the prim censure of a mother alarmed that her daughter’s low-cut blouse is too revealing for church. “Inappropriate” is laced with disgust, while once again skipping the argument. By conceit, the appalling nature of the misbehavior at issue is glaringly obvious to everyone, so what’s wrong with it goes without saying.

  Every linguistic subset constitutes a code. But this vernacular isn’t as innocently contagious as “groovy.” In left-wing circles, neglecting to ape what has been tacitly declared as What We Say Now marks you as suspect. Conversely, weaving the ordained jargon into conversation signals ingratiatingly to your political clan, “I’m one of you.” (Hence when mainstream media outlets embrace these terms, they brand themselves as partisan.) In today’s political climate, deployment of progressives’ conformist vocabulary is also defensive. It broadcasts benevolence and an elaborate, gesturing respect for others meant to keep the wolves from the door.

  The whole lexicon is of a piece. Its usage advertises that one has bought into a set menu of opinions—about race, gender, climate change, abortion, tax policy, #MeToo, Trump, Brexit, Brett Kavanaugh, probably Israel, and a great deal else. Reflexive resort to this argot therefore implies not that you think the same way as others of your political disposition but that you don’t think. You have ordered the prix fixe; you’re not in the kitchen cooking dinner for yourself. “The seductions of this shorthand,” writes Daum, are that there is “no need to sort out facts or wrestle with contradictions when just using certain buzzwords” grants “automatic entry into a group of ostensibly like-minded peers.” This vocabulary is lazy.

  Assumption of the Left’s prescriptive patois may indicate solidarity with fellow travelers, but it also betokens the insularity and closed-mindedness of any indiscriminate embrace of fundamentalist dogma. It instantly alienates people who don’t sign up for the same set menu of views—which may sometimes be the intention. Referencing the “cis-heteronormative patriarchy” in discussions with strangers suggests either that you presume these people already agree with you on virtually everything, or that you’re interested in talking to them only if they do. Even when speaking to moderates, much less conservatives (who have their own coded lingo, such as “snowflakes,” “virtue signaling,” and “grievance culture”), you have shut down conversation.

  Standardized lefty catchphrases are now routinely employed to test allegiance and to exclude people who fail the test. Boyers notes that cherished left-wing concepts like identity and inequality are now used “to label and separate the saved and the damned, the ‘woke’ and the benighted, the victim and the oppressor,” thereby “yielding not significant redress but a new wave of puritanism and a culture of suspicion.” This moral division of wheat from chaff sows confusion about the difference between “sponsoring injustice and simply living more or less modestly in an imperfect world.”

  Like all new slang, the current crop has the attraction of seeming ultracontemporary. But as quickly as these ideologically loaded expressions proliferate, they also become hackneyed—a problem beyond politics. When students at Cardiff University petitioned in a buzzword-strewn diatribe to disinvite the feminist Germaine Greer, who does not see trans women as women, because “hosting a speaker with such problematic and hateful views towards marginalized and vulnerable groups is dangerous,” they displayed not only that they could not think for themselves, but that they could not write.

  Part III

  Confessions of an Expat

  “Bye-Bye Belfast”

  1997

  [Let an essay age long enough, and it can mature from dated to historical. The lessons of this small, personal tale—if not small at the time for me—also pertain to the fierce us-and-them polarization of the present. While you might maintain a semblance of neutrality by being phlegmatically apathetic, you can’t engage with national politics riven by the likes of Trump or Brexit without taking sides. There is no safe harbor. Worse, larger social divisions running hot are likely to incur collateral damage of the most intimate sort. In the last several years, many a Christmas dinner on both sides of the Atlantic has been ruined by hoarse-voiced disputes, and rarely over the consistency of the cranberry sauce. Furthermore, at ground level the personal and political inseparably intertwine. Did a friend-turned-antagonist disavow you because of a disagreement over current events, or did he or she never really like you to begin with?

  I might note that Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA, and more broadly Northern Irish nationalists—who all seemed back in the day to treasure their grievances far more than their aspirations to a united Ireland—basically invented identity politics. The obsession with language, the supersensitivity, the preening sanctimony, the attachment to victimhood: Northern nationalists got there way before American college students. Immediate recognition of that whole huffy gestalt may help explain the extremity of my aversion to the illiberal faction in the culture wars.

  This essay was originally commissioned by Granta and then rejected. The temptation being irresistible, I’m taking this opportunity to right what I like to think was a tiny injustice.]

  I moved to Belfast in 1987 to set a novel, a mission I learned on arrival was clichéd. A better question than why I came is why I stayed. Ten years later, I remain.

  My routine answer to taxi drivers runs that Belfast is, ironically, a quiet town, a good place to write, both friendly and cheap. This is rubbish. In truth, I’m hooked on the Troubles soap opera and its pleasant confusion of politics and gossip. I cherish Belfast’s dark cachet. I enjoy violence sufficiently nearby to be titillating, yet rare enough to put me at little personal risk—rather like having your violence and not having it eat you, too. I relish the opportunity—amply available on both sides—to act self-righteous.

  Yet what I like about Northern Ireland has become what I dislike. That is, I dislike myself for liking it. I may have acquired a perverse taste for Ulster infighting, but you can acquire a taste for plenty of things that are not very good for you. So the best question is why, after a decade in Northern Ireland, this American woman needs to leave.

  I first met the young man I will call Cory in Lavery’s, a gungy cross-sectarian pub near Queen’s University that has singularly resisted a makeover of retro-chic milk churns or Mickey Mantle Americana. Lavery’s is an unabashed shithole.

  In those days I still went to pubs, though after enough conversations like the one Cory rescued me from—about some punter’s exciting holiday at Disney World—I would forswear them. For a visiting American, the only alternative to this standard ach-I’ve-a-cousin-in-Fort-Lee fare was an earnest explanation of what the Troubles are really about. In time I’d prefer Disney World, but that evening I was frantic; I’d not come all the way from New York to talk about the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, and I was grateful for Cory’s reprieve.

  This was early 1988, what would prove a fun-packed year in the Northern Irish calendar. Still to come: the Gibraltar and Michael Stone shootings, the Andytown lynching, the summer’s Ballygawley bus bomb. I’m sometimes nostalgic for 1988. 1997’s sporadic checkpoint booby traps, stalled political talks at Stormont Castle, and shakily restored IRA cease-fire cannot compare. The Troubles are a spectator sport. During off-seasons, syncopated only by yammer about “parity of esteem” and “cross-border bodies with executive powers,” voyeurs feel cheated; locals grow torpid.

  Cory was refreshingly candid. To assertions like the above he would mischievously accede. Then in his midthirties, Cory was short, bearded, and impish, with a wicked grin and gorsey eyebrows that invited the cringe-making allusion to a leprechaun. He dressed shabbily, which I have always found winning, though by this standard most of Northern Ireland’s men are very winning indeed. A modest paunch gave his figure an unpretentious solidity, though he had slim, vegetarian wrists and bookish wire-rims. A diffident manner belied an immediate intent to pick me up, though his gaze had a spark. Sadly, I have since watched those eyes hood and harden. When we met he glittered through them, and these days Cory simply peers out suspiciously from behind his walled pupils like everyone else.

  My first novel had just been released in the United Kingdom. Cory recognized my name, and informed me, with a note of reluctance, of my first British review in that weekend’s Observer. He asked me round for coffee to obtain a copy at his flat.

  That novel had been decently received in America, so when Cory pulled out the crumpled newspaper in his tumbledown bedsit I wasn’t prepared. Now six books on I’ve toughened up, but my more honest instinct when confronted with a pan as a neophyte was to cry.

  Poor Cory must have been embarrassed, but he handled the situation with grace and invited me to collapse on his shoulder. He didn’t take advantage of my blubbering to cozy me onto his bed, but made me that cup of coffee. Whatever else has happened since, I will always remember his kindness that evening. Given my endurance in Belfast, that night was properly the beginning of a lifelong friendship. As matters turned out, the friendship was simply long.

  In Northern Irish terms, I have thus far failed to describe Cory at all. Never mind the eyes. All right: Cory is Catholic. A then-fledgling freelance journalist, he was born in working-class Andersonstown, a republican stronghold. But to Cory, IRA volunteers weren’t courageous freedom fighters sacrificing their young lives that their people might throw off the yoke of British oppression, but dull-witted, fascistic thugs who tyrannized their own “community”—a word Cory framed, astutely, with quotation marks.

  As for the Border, which in the North draws character more starkly than boundaries, Cory was an infidel. Regarding the God of Catholicism he was merely agnostic; regarding West Belfast’s earthly deity—Gerry Adams—he was defiantly atheistic. The counterpart of the Green Prod (decoratively guilty, ostentatiously liberal, self-consciously “Irish”), Cory was an Orange Taig. Alternatively, devout nationalists would denounce him as the corollary of an Uncle Tom: a “Castle Catholic,” in reference to the former seat of Protestant power, Stormont Castle. But Cory wouldn’t see himself as a suck-up to the unionist establishment, or what was left of it by 1988, of which he was also critical. Instead, he argued for the pragmatic economic advantages of British citizenship. Though he tepidly accepted the “consent principle” that Irish unification should come about only with the assent of the Northern majority, his politics were driven not by such democratic niceties but by gut antagonism. He detested the IRA.