TRUMP

A NEW APPROACH 249
things because of their connotations, but aren’t especially vivid. So
instead of saying we need to bring prosperity, health, and happiness
to poor people, we will say we intend to “center the needs of the marginalized.”
But it’s not obvious what you have to do in order to “center”
something; we need terms that make clear to everybody what the
problem is and what it would look like if the problem were solved.
We should be careful about using language that is unclear or vague,
because this makes our goals fuzzy.
It’s important to believe in things that are real. Left-wing principles
are often stated in abstractions. For example, “fighting oppression” or
“creating equality.” But the precise definitions of oppression and equality
are difficult to specify. What would a world without “oppression”
look like? What does true equality mean? These are difficult questions,
ones whose answers are not obvious. But the word “oppression” and
“inequality” are used so frequently on the left that they are assumed to
be meaningful, without a careful inquiry into what the actual reality
of these terms is.
This is not to say that our underlying concerns or values should shift.
It’s not to say we should be any less concerned with the people who are
marginalized. It’s to say that we should have clearer and less abstract
ways of thinking. Sometimes, left-language gets so wrapped up in talk
of “oppression,” “domination,” “symbolic violence,” “privilege,” etc.,
that it loses track of the underlying events that these terms have been
created in order to describe. The more one uses shorthand terms (like
“systemic injustice”) rather than descriptors of the actual problems in
people’s lives that this shorthand term refers to (like “women being fired
for becoming pregnant” or “factories closing and leaving hundreds of
dads unable to pay for their children to visit the doctor” or “black
men on the way home from their jobs being thrown against police
cars and frisked” or “transgender people being bullied and beaten up
and then crying all night believing they are totally hated and alone in
the world”), the less we help people who are not leftists understand