Thread by @KathrynTewson

So, there’s a rhetorical trick I’ve noticed amongst the MAGA/Trumpist/whatever crowd that I want to call some attention to, because it is fuckin’ insidious.

In this exercise, the speaker re-defines moral positions as political positions, and then claims these differences must be set aside in the name of unity or fairness or neutrality or whatever.

For example, a lot of us saw this:

https://twitter.com/us_spacecomcsel/status/1370041512894025729

Which garnered a lot of responses like this:

And of course, it is no such thing. The idea is ridiculous.

What these folks are doing is trading on, and blurring the line between, two definitions of “political.”

One is the philosophical sense in which political issues are those which affect the “polis,” the city-state and the people which make it up, in the issues of their daily lives and their interactions with each other as individuals and groups and with the State.

This is “political” in the sense of “the personal is political,” for example.

The second definition of the word is much narrower and centers on partisan politics. Political parties, candidates, elections, endorsements, fundraising, etc.

This is the sense in which the military bans political speech while in uniform, as well as the sense in which 501(c)(3) charities must refrain from political action so as not to jeopardize their tax-exempt status.

They are similar, but they are not the same.

Nobody on earth can ever refrain from political speech and activity in the first sense. It’s woven into everything we do.

Political speech in the second sense? Sure. There are plenty of folks who never talk about that stuff at all.

So when someone claims that speaking out for trans rights, or racial justice, or freedom from harassment is “political speech”? There’s a sense in which they’re not wrong. The personal *is* political.

But jf their next point is that we should shut up about it because it’s “political speech” or “politically divisive” or some equally specious nonsense, that is an argument in bad faith to get you to remove all morals and ethics from your argument and treat it like a chess match.

It’s not a chess match. There are good guys and bad guys here, and the bad guys are way aware of which side they’re on.

They’re trying to redefine “politically neutral” to mean “strategically amoral.”

Don’t let them get away with it.