If you are a new reader/listener of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY or unfamiliar with work that I have published in other contexts, you likely do not know that, over a number of years, I have devoted a great deal of critical attention to the matter of ableist language. These critiques of ableist language have been advanced in blog posts here on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY (search our archives!) and on the now-defunct Discrimination and Disadvantage blog, in various articles, and in two chapters of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability.

In these venues, that is, I have been especially critical of how ableist language is repeatedly depoliticized and deployed in the institutional and discursive practices of philosophers, as well as the public statements and writing of oppositional commentators, activists, cultural critics, and other figures on the left politically. Philosophers, with their livelihoods and self-perceptions so tethered to notions of rationality and superiority based on notions of intelligence, are especially prone to inflict harm on disabled people in this way.

In other words, philosophers on the left, as well as oppositional commentators, cultural critics, and other “progressive” figures routinely engage in what I call “ableist exceptionism”. In a discussion of the ableist metaphorical uses to which philosophers and other academics put the term blind, I explained the term ableist exceptionism in this way:

Ableist exceptionism is the term that I have coined to refer to the phenomenon whereby disability, because it is assumed to be a prediscursive, natural, and politically neutral human characteristic (difference, attribute, or property), is uniquely exclude from the production and applications of certain values, beliefs, principles, and actions that circulate in political consciousness. My claim is thus that philosophers (and other theorists, activists, and so on) commit ableist exceptionism when they assume that the metaphorical and other use to which they put disability in language and discourse is politically neutral and innocent, although they politicize virtually all other speech acts, identifying them as value laden and interested. It would be very strange indeed if linguistic and discursive practices were constitutive of other social inequalities, yet somehow remained outside of, apart from, and indifferent to, the domain of disability and ableist oppression. In fact, ableism (and forms of power with which it is co-constitutive) saturates language and discourse–both everyday and philosophical–and is reconstituted through them. (33-4)

The recent upsurge in outrage publicly expressed in response to Donald Trump, actions of his new administration, and other social and political events in the United States has coincided with and been co-constitutive of an upsurge on social media and in other forums of the deployment of ableist language and tropes. That is, Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump, Karoline Leavitt, anti-vaxxers, transphobia, Vladimir Putin–it’s all brought out some of the most violently ableist public discourse from oppositional thinkers and writers that I have witnessed in years. That is to say, stupid, idiot, incompetent, imbecile, moron, and other ableist tropes and phrases are thrown into the public domain by authors, cultural critics, and commentators who want to grab attention/want to have maximum impact/want to make the wittiest remark/want their outrage to get noticed.

The motto of our times for the purposes of cultural critique seems to be this: “the more ableist, the more edgy.” Indeed, ableism is so normalized on the left, ableist language is apparently so unquestionably necessary for the expression of righteous anger and oppositional outrage, that few of your favourite cultural workers and critics seem to recognize it as violence.

Rebecca Solnit (among others) exemplifies the cultural critic/author on the left whose impact and relevance repeatedly rely upon and derive from this utterly uncritical production and promotion of ableist discursive violence against disabled people. In an interview that appears in the September 8 issue of The Nation, for example, Solnit’s ableism is on full display. Here are several of Solnit’s choice ableist expressions in the interview which is entitled “Rebecca Solnit on Trump, Books, and the Reincarnation of King George III”:

“how profoundly stupid Trump is”

“He couldn’t talk about … like normal people mostly can”

“his inanity”

“insane amounts of money”

“crazy, obese, chaotic sex-maniac loon”

“He’s so stupid”

In a more recent (September 11) Facebook post, Solnit described certain actors in the current U.S. administration as “incompetent idiots,” evidently unaware of, or perhaps just indifferent to, the role that these terms played in the emergence and rise of eugenics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well indifferent to the contemporary public critique of this sort of rhetorical violence in current discourse that disabled authors have articulated in various venues. The abundance of in-kind ableist responses that Solnit received on this Facebook post testifies to the formative role that her demeaning public utterances serve in the constitution and circulation of ableism in contemporary American culture.

A publication of radical and other oppositional writing, furthermore, The Nation should be both held accountable for the fact that it publishes the ableist speech of Solnit and other authors and compelled to acknowledge that it very rarely publishes the arguments and perspectives of disabled authors and thus seldom includes analyses that interrogate the very ableist speech that it publishes or the irreducibly political nature of disability more generally. Indeed, what is especially self-fulfilling about the ableism of the left is that its self-righteous ableist rhetoric is published and circulated without hesitation or critical editorial reception; that so-called progressive readers and audiences do not challenge Solnit and other authors for their (repeated) use of ableist slurs, ableist imagery, and oppressive ableist expression in general; and that the established literary, philosophical, and political venues for radical critique do not provide spaces within their pages and their domains for articulation of opposition to the(ir)(se) egregious social harms nor for the condemnation that they warrant.