Yesterday morning on CNN New Day co-anchor Alisyn Camerota was interviewing former Governor of New Hampshire and White House Chief of Staff John Sununu about investigations and broader speculations into the possibility of some kind of collusion between the Trump White House and Russia. Throughout the interview Sununu kept insisting on the lack of any evidence of “a veniality.” This is what it sounded like:

CAMEROTA: I’m trying to gauge your comfort level with all of this
SUNUNU: My comfort level? The only discomfort I have is with folks in the media trying to create a veniality without having the courage to specifically tell me what the veniality that I should be concerned about is. I don’t have . . . I have not identified a veniality. Have you?

Is “veniality” really the word Sununu wanted to use? It refers to a minor sin, easily forgiven. I don’t think that’s what anyone speaking about these matters is really interested in. My guess is that what he meant to say was “venality,” which means capable of being bribed or open to corruption. The two words are actually very different, coming from completely different roots. The weird thing is, I’m still not entirely sure what the intended meaning was, or if either veniality or venality were being properly used.

I was at university in the early 1990s, a period that we can now refer to in hindsight as the crest of the first wave of political correctness. There were even arguments over appropriation of voice and cultural appropriation that were loudly debated at meetings of the Writers’ Union of Canada. For those of you with an interest in such historical matters, Philip Marchand covered the moment in an essay later reprinted in Ripostes: Reflections on Canadian Literature (1998). Then things died down. When Russell Smith sent up the whole matter of identity politics in his novel Muriella Pent in 2004 he was very much looking back on matters that no longer seemed that relevant. Here is the first paragraph from my review of Muriella Pent, which I wrote 13 years ago:

Muriella Pent is a curious novel that could be easily mistaken as prematurely dated. It has, for example, a lot to say about fashions in the arts, about what’s in and what’s out, and it directs its satire toward subjects (like the debates over political correctness and appropriation of voice) that are now very out.

Ouch. In my defence, I did end the review by saying it would be wrong to write Muriella Pent off as “a blast from the past,” and closed with these now prophetic words: “I have a hunch it might be ahead of its time.”

Well, it’s been a while but the once “very out” topics of political correctness and appropriation of voice are now very much back in. For good and ill. Who would have thought in 2004 that in 2016 someone would come along and ride a crusade against the forces of political correctness all the way into the White House? That would have seemed even more preposterous than a President Trump.

Whatever you think of all this, it’s clear we’re now experiencing a second wave. Looking at the dates it’s hard to miss the generational ebb and flow. That may be one explanation anyway for the curious rise and fall and rise again of the same arguments, expressed with the same rhetoric, pro and con (roughly, freedom of speech vs. exploitation and oppression). We even have, in place of Smith’s Muriella Pent, Stephen Henighan’s Mr. Singh Among the Fugitives, a new satire on identity politics in Canadian cultural circles.

It’s déjà vu, but is it progress?

I’ll avoid entering into the arena here, mainly because I think there is a basic disagreement over the terms of the debate (or conversation, as it’s more gently styled). Well-meaning people seem to mean very different things when they use the term cultural appropriation. For some, every work of art necessarily involves cultural appropriation, while for others it is an act of genocide. Both sides have a point to make, but obviously, expressed in these terms, they have no common ground.

But why are these matters becoming so prominent now? Is it because of the generational ebb and flow I mentioned? Or the effect of so many highly publicized examples of the phenomenon in recent years, like the cases of Rachel Dolezal (the former head of the NAACP who was outed by her parents as being white), Joseph Boyden (whose Indigenous heritage has been called into question), and Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner commercial (co-opting the Black Lives Matter movement to sell cola)?

I’m sure that cases like these all provided fuel to the fire, but I don’t think they were the real drivers. For that, I’d point the finger elsewhere.

(1) The media. You can’t exaggerate how much the media plays this stuff up, and the effect that has. After the story broke about Hal Niedzviecki quitting his post as editor of the Writers’ Union of Canada’s magazine due to an editorial he wrote (that began “I don’t believe in cultural appropriation”) there was a barrage of high-profile, mainstream commentary. The CBC ran op-ed pieces, as well as broadcasting interviews and hosting discussions online and on their flagship news programs. I think the National Post had two columns a day for nearly a week talking about it, and other newspapers followed suit. When was the last time, if ever, that anything having to do with writers in Canada received half as much media attention?

(2) Universities. I’ve previously pointed out that matters of identity are now the only subject of interest in English departments. Identity politics now constitute the foundation of any English program, and are of far more importance than the practice of textual analysis or making judgments of aesthetic value. What this has led to is the current critical dispensation, where, for example, the only question we need to ask about Joseph Boyden is whether his voice can be established as authentic.

These were both drivers of the cultural appropriation debate twenty years ago, but they have since metastasized. The media, in transitioning online, is far more dependent on pushing people’s buttons in order to grab clicks and eyeballs, going after immediate responses and snap moral judgments. Meanwhile, universities have limited the accepted terms of critical discourse to include only such matters of identity as are now being re-argued. Working in tandem they have made this time around an amplified version of the same debate we had in the 1990s, but not one with much more to say. My guess is that the conversation will move away again after a while, but I don’t think we’ll be moving on.

In the wake of the election of Donald Trump and the British vote for Brexit a lot of pundits fell back on the famous line from Yeats’s “The Second Coming” about how “the centre cannot hold.” Specifically, what they meant by this was the disintegration of the traditional party systems in established democracies. More generally they were expressing a concern over the fate of democracy in our time.

I’m not going to try to predict how all this plays out, mainly because my lack of skill when it comes to political forecasting is a matter of record. I am, however, struck by a couple of things about recent developments.

In the first place, we are clearly seeing a total rejection of the current system. Before Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election he first had to rout an entire field of establishment Republican candidates. You really couldn’t be a bigger political outsider than Trump. In turn, his status as destroyer or wrecking ball was the main reason he was able to defeat Clinton, who was the most establishment candidate imaginable.

This same anti-establishment wave has just washed over France, where the two winning candidates are both fringe figures in terms of mainstream French politics. The candidate with the most votes, Emmanuel Macron, is no outsider, but he is a newcomer to electoral politics who only founded his own party a year ago. His opponent, Marine Le Pen, is usually characterized as “far-right” if not fascist.

I think such a rejection of centrist, establishment politics is, though perhaps dangerous, certainly understandable. Large segments of the electorate now see the mainstream parties as having been unrepresentative, unresponsive, and incompetent during what has been a long downward spiral. And they have some valid reasons for feeling this way.

This leads me to my second observation. What we are seeing as the dust settles on the collapse of the mainstream middle is not political polarization. The new lines being drawn on the political map are between “centrist” politicians, often associated with banking and the financial sector, and the far right. Clinton and Trump. Macron and Le Pen. There is no movement toward the left. Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon have all been widely derided, if not pilloried, sometimes even within their own parties, as dangerous cranks and kooks. They were either kneecapped by the process (Sanders), left in the dust (Mélenchon), or been assassinated in the press by fire from all angles (Corbyn). Some of this may have been their own fault, but however you want to see it the point remains that “there is no alternative” on the left. Which, in turn, means that the centre is being pulled ineluctably to the right. In a recent book about the failed Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 the author (a Clinton supporter) admitted that Clinton herself may not have been a true progressive candidate, but she was as close as American politics was going to get. Which, if true, means there is no progressive movement in America today.

In short, the failure of the traditional party system and traditional politics — a politics which has been characterized, I think correctly, as being fundamentally neoliberal in nature — has led not to a rejection of that ideology but rather to a lurch even further down the same road. This is not a move that’s likely to help save a system that is in crisis, but rather one that will only hasten its eventual collapse.