At a Loss For Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage
By Carol Off
Random House Canada, 368 pages (Sept. 2024)
“I feel a lot better since I stopped reading the daily news,” reports a friend of mine. Young people get all their information in bites, short and sweet, or sour as the case may be. Among loved ones, as well as my dentist and a local veterinarian, I hear praise for the ‘brilliance’ of Trump. A good-natured Hungarian friend I have known for years is a great admirer of Victor Orban, though he prefers to live in Canada for now.
My old friend Carol Off has been thinking through this stuff, wrestling with it all, and she has written a book about it. Off rose to the top of current affairs journalism in Canada, to serve for almost sixteen years as a host of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship evening radio news show, As It Happens, where she interviewed thousands of people about the news of the day. In At a Loss For Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage she breaks down the burning crisis of our time — the rise of authoritarian governments — and explains why we are letting it happen. Reading it, I find that she has helped me with my confusion and invigorated my weary mind.
As with her previous works, the quality of the writing is compelling, the distinctive voice is persuasive. Her argument is based on close attention to these matters over many years as a journalist. In this brave new world of alternate facts, Off has set herself the task of reclaiming the meaning of some key words in our political vocabulary, a chapter for each one — freedom, democracy, truth, woke, choice, and taxes:
“Words that we rely on to define and defend civil society are either put to work for a different ideological agenda or gutted of their meanings, the values they once stood for mocked and distorted. …To accurately identify the causes of our anger and resentment, we need to be able to trust our language and each other; to agree on what it means and to recognize with a keen eye whose interests are served by this engineered breakdown of civil society. The political rage that has engulfed us is exhausting, rendering us almost incapable of rational conversations. But that’s the intent of those who are fueling it.”
As she unpacks radically different ideas about what ‘freedom’ means, and the uses to which the word is put in our culture wars, Off illuminates the history of slavery. It’s the shadow of Western humanists’ privileged freedom, wealth and leisure. Slave owners and investors from Thomas Jefferson to John Locke “had to twist themselves into rhetorical pretzels to justify their contradictions.” In our time, the moral contortions of smart money have more to do with oil, weapons and the other ‘sin stocks.’ Freedom for some is all about personal liberty, “the freedom from outside interference as you enjoy your worldly goods.” For others freedom is the deeper, broader concept of political freedom which expands from the personal to the collective and embraces full spectrum human rights. Off does a fine job of synthesizing and distilling her wide-ranging research to provide the essential ideas and arguments that lie at the roots of our current polarized political landscape, where the word “freedom” is a weaponized rallying cry.
Off dissects the legacy of humanism, drawing on recent studies such as Freedom: An Unruly History by Annelien de Dijn. She recognizes humanism’s achievements, yoking individual autonomy to social responsibility, alongside its failure to share this freedom with women and slaves. To amplify her argument, I think she would also have done well to read David Ehrenfeld’s classic challenge to our assumptions about our humanist roots, The Arrogance of Humanism. It’s essentially a critique of anthropocentrism, our human(ist) identity, which is at the heart of the ecological crisis. The idea is that this ‘long emergency’ of biosphere degradation and global heating is grounded in our bias to see ourselves in possession of nature for our personal liberty and exploitation, rather than having the humility to understand that we are one clever, appetitive animal in the interdependent web of life. Off’s book is not about that, and yet it is about the crisis of meaning and ethical behavior, and I would argue that this core problem of ecological ignorance, structurally embedded in our languages and our cultures, is of the essence. Just as the humanist tradition failed to give autonomy to women and slaves, so too humanists have been blind to the rights of nature, the rights of all species to flourish in a healthy biosphere.
Published on the eve of the recent US election, this book is prescient, and very helpful as a guide to the perplexed. “If Americans had been paying attention to global shifts, they might have known that the world’s democracies had begun a slide toward authoritarianism long before the scourge arrived on their doorstep.” Authoritarian strongmen are currently in power in India, Hungary, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Argentina, Venezuela, Russia, and course now the United States joins this rogue’s gallery of illiberal democracies. In all these countries the autocrats back their claims to legitimacy by insisting they were elected by the people. Off documents the many ways that Trump and his associates have been quite clear about their agenda to replace liberal democracy with something else, well-articulated in the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page policy blueprint for Project 2025, now unfolding before our eyes. While it is unlikely that Trump has read the tome, and may well diverge from the agenda with his “ego-driven caprice and uncontrollable urges,” the American Republican party is committed to its sweeping anti-democratic transformation of government.
In the chapter on Democracy, Off describes democracy’s death by a thousand cuts, which is ongoing. With her deep knowledge of the conflicts In the former Yugoslavia and the subsequent war crimes trials, she is able to make it clear that “the Balkan wars were the first act of the twenty-first century, its aggressors propelled by a yearning for a single, simple narrative to shut out the complexity of our time.” She quotes at length the journalist Anne Applebaum’s book, Twilight of Democracy, to explain “the seductive lure of authoritarianism.”
Applebaum describes how former friends throughout Europe and the United States — educated people, well-travelled and wealthy — have shifted not to conservatism, which might be understandable, but to illiberalism. There’s a big difference. Conservatism is on the political spectrum of democracy; illiberalism rejects the very nature of democracy. It’s anti-pluralist, intolerant of diversity and suspicious of the views of others.
This is the tragedy of the 2024 US election: that a profoundly undermined, toxic and dysfunctional democratic process brought an anti-democratic leader and party to power. When the mainstream media shouts that democracy delivered a clear verdict, we may well ask, what democracy?
“Radical right Republicans,” says Off, “are at least being honest when they insist that the founding fathers of their nation never intended to create a democracy. If you reject the premise of equality, you can’t lay claim to true democracy, and a large swath of Americans have made it clear that they don’t’ want everyone to have equal treatment in their society.”
Off’s conclusions provoke soul searching. ”The larger fault lies with those who claim to be defenders of liberal democracy but who cleave to a romantic version of democracy.” As a veteran human rights worker, environmentalist, media producer, and hopeless romantic, Off makes me uncomfortable, and I am grateful for the provocation. Like an Old Testament prophet, she exposes the moral turpitude of bourgeois liberals, a very sharp j’accuse. She brings to mind the quote from JFK, which he wrongly attributed to the Divine Comedy: The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
The book is grounded in Off’s personal experience growing up Catholic and female in London, Ontario, extrapolating from the social constraints and values of her parents to the forces at play in the wider world. Addressing the subject of Truth through her own life story is an effective way to show the reader how the degradation of meaning and understanding in the Trump era has been so difficult to believe for those of us in the West who think there are stable norms regarding facts, evidence and integrity. Orwell taught us that this can happen anywhere, but we still didn’t see it coming.
In harrowing detail Off chronicles Trump’s assault on truth, the widespread use of the term ‘fake news’ by more than 50 prime ministers, presidents and government leaders around the world following Trump’s lead, and the corollary of this, the increasingly deadly war on journalists worldwide. She then provides us with a fascinating deep dive into the ways that social media is used to subvert elections — a key factor in the so-called resounding victory of Trumpism. “The death blow to truth would not have been delivered if not for a technology that doesn’t just spread lies but thrives on them.” She follows the money from Silicon Valley to Saint Petersberg, from the Philippines to Macedonia, from Musk and Zuckerberg to Putin and Dutarte, showing how tech companies have allowed their platforms to be used in profoundly influential ways “to manipulate and divide, to set people against each other,” to spread lies, “to separate us from what is true or rational and break down our trust.” Us against them “is social media’s most lucrative narrative.”
Off laments the fact that conventional media is shrinking as we get more and more of our news from social media. She offers ideas to reverse this decline, pointing to the long view provided by Masha Gessen in Surviving Autocracy. “When the time for recovery comes, as it inevitably will, we need to do the work of rebuilding a sense of shared reality.” Some conventional media and courageous individuals are leading the way in the struggle, and we will need their voices more and more as the algorithms give us a narrower range of information sources and shallower content. The phrase on the masthead of the electronic Washington Post is a sign of the times: “Democracy dies in darkness”. Sadly, the owner of the Post, Jeff Bezos, chose to break with tradition by not endorsing the Democratic candidate in the presidential election, fearing retaliation if Trump won.
From Truth, Off moves on to unravel the tangled word Woke. It’s extremely helpful to those of us who remain open to diverse ways of being, although at times the reader may despair that the book will not influence people who don’t already agree with the author. To begin with, she demonstrates that those who have weaponized it can’t explain it.
‘Woke’ has become what the philosopher Ivan Illich called an ‘amoeba’ word, a shapeshifter whose meaning has been so heavily mauled by misuse that it has become problematic.
She looks back to its origins, as advice among black Americans in the early 20th century to watch their backs, to be aware of racist danger. It became a call to action as a rallying cry for Black Lives Matter in the 2010s. Reactions to this movement spawned the anti-woke movement, which now turns the fire hose on any organization or public figure that attempts to be inclusive. Off takes us back to a time when the tactic of turning language into a weapon was normalized in US politics, under the influence of Newt Gingrich. In the 1980s Gingrich developed a glossary of words for Republican candidates “to seed into verbal attacks on rivals, including radical, failure, traitor, decay, crisis, corrupt, permissive, abuse of power, criminal rights, sick and taxes.” Words to claim and own included liberty, freedom, truth, family and prosperity. Sound familiar?
‘Politically correct’ became the neo-conservatives’ most useful term of abuse. The history and uses to which this term, an ‘amoeba’ phrase, as I see it, started with a need for some debate about dogmatism in academia. It soon became a powerful vehicle for shutting down rational discourse on affirmative action, policies to advance minority rights, and all kinds of critical thinking. The sign that it had won the hearts and minds of the American public came long ago in 2016, when Trump was asked on Fox News whether he “was part of a ‘war on women’, given that he’d called them ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs’ and ‘disgusting animals’ and had told a Celebrity Apprentice contestant that she would look pretty on her knees. When Trump responded that he had no time for political correctness, the audience applauded.”
Off tells the story of how “critical race theory” became a catch phrase for everything conservatives love to hate, through the tireless efforts of a man that New York magazine recently called “the most pugnacious, and probably most effective, conservative activist of the Joe Biden era,” Christopher Rufo. Not surprisingly, Gingrich is a Rufo fan, declaring that “the real racists are the people who want to brainwash your child so that they feel guilty about being born white.” Another fan of Rufo (and the feeling is mutual) is Hungary’s Victor Orban, the master chef of a stew that mixes Christian nationalism, populist demagoguery and autocracy, driven by the methods of ‘hostility politics.’ This, Off explains, is the formula that Richard Nixon and later Reagan picked up from a strategist named Arthur Finkelstein, whose clients included Nixon, Reagan, Netanyahu and — surprise — Trump. “Negative, negative, negative, ‘cause you can’t possibly win otherwise.” Of course, Trump learned this long before, from his primary mentor Roy Cohn (a nasty creature well documented in the new movie, The Apprentice, and also in Angels in America – both the play and the miniseries).
Creative uses of the ‘woke’ slur proliferate. Business leaders who dare to take some responsibility for climate solutions and energy transition, who see business as having some social and environmental responsibility, are now accused by pundits and politicians of indulging in “Woke Capitalism.”
Maybe some of us already understand what Victor Orban has done in Hungary, and how inspirational he is not just to Trump but to the Republican agenda; for me, Off’s narrative is a revelation. With his complete dismantling of a robust liberal democracy to establish a white Christian patriarchal political order, Orban has provided radical right Americans with a roadmap. “First, take power through restricted elections, gerrymandered districts and laws that limit the franchise; discredit and suppress the media; and then begin to dismantle the institutions.” We are watching it happen now, as much of the American media brightly chirps about Trump’s selections for the jobs of dismantling, transforming and enforcing.
Moving on from Woke to the word Choice, Off’s narrative becomes much more personal and at the same time more inspirational. She recounts the history of the movement for women’s reproductive health and rights with drama and humour. There’s the story of the motley crew of women who, in the spring of 1970, banded together to drive from Vancouver to Ottawa in an attempt to force Pierre Eliot Trudeau to change the law and make abortion on demand a legal right. “If anyone driving the Trans-Canada highway in April 1970 failed to notice the in-your-face sloganeering [“On to Ottawa. Abortion is our right!”], they couldn’t miss the giant black coffin strapped to the roof of the van.” They met local women’s groups across the country and performed guerrilla theatre featuring the angel of death. By the time they got to Ottawa they were 500-strong. They protested and demonstrated in highly visible ways, but neither the government nor the media were sympathetic. Trudeau was rude and dismissive. It would take another eighteen years to achieve their goals, thanks to the efforts of Dr. Henry Morgentaler and his associates. Off recounts the complex and sometimes violent history of choice and the moral struggle over abortion in Canada and the US, both individual and collective, with sensitivity and compassion. Before the recent election, as the US reality was hovering on the brink of dystopia, Off visited Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood for a chat in her garden. Atwood’s reflection on the post Roe v Wade (1973) environment is particularly helpful to understand how the “reproductive freedom” gained in the past is under threat, and already gone in many states.
“Our vigilance,” says Atwood, “slackens over time.”
Off’s final chapter deals with the dry but oh, so important word, Taxes — the funds that pay for our public services, and the civil society that makes possible our collective and individual freedom, democracy, rights and choice. Or, as Lisbeth Palme, the widow of the assassinated Swedish PM, Olaf Palme, once remarked to me, “It’s such a shame, they don’t understand that it is a privilege to pay tax!” Indeed, most wealthy people in the world would argue, with Trump, that smart people don’t pay tax, and that is their privilege.
There is a movement in America, conducted primarily in the shadows, for the elimination of taxes. Just when you think that Off can’t reveal any more hidden anti-democratic histories, she takes you down into the depths where the dark money of the billionaire Koch brothers flows into the many arms of the Kochtopus. According to history professor and author Nancy McLean, it is “an utterly chilling story of the ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance.”
The Citizens United case in 2008 expanded the scope of corporate influence and the potential of dark money when the US Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the same rights to free speech as individuals. Off describes how a clever conservative, rabidly anti-woke activist named Leonard Leo leveraged dark money donations to successfully stack the Supreme Court with enough conservative justices to overturn Roe v Wade. Leo’s $1.6 billion endowment comes from Barre Seid, also a key funder behind the forces of climate change denial.
The book often circles back to explain how these forces are at play in Canadian politics and society, lest Canadians should feel complacent with our self-image as a socially liberal, fiscally conservative oasis of peace, order and good government. She describes former Prime Minister (2006-15) Stephen Harper’s muzzling of scientists as well as his legal war on the charitable status of environmental groups and other NGOs, and points to major funding from the Kochtopus to Canadian think tanks such as the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute. Of course, Harper is a long time mentor and close advisor of anti-woke leader of the Progressive Conservative Party in Canada, ‘soon-to-be’ Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre.
Revelations about the real reasons for the widening gap between rich and poor, driven by the tax avoidance of corporations and wealthy individuals (the “one percent”) makes this dry subject compelling. “The aim of the Charles Kochs and the Leonard Leos of this world,” she warns, “is to have people accept their lot as the subjects of anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-government oligarchs… In such a state there are no citizens or society, just consumers and workers.” Many of us have issues with paying too much tax, and some readers may not agree with all of Off’s views on the subject as the admiring daughter of a man who worked for Revenue Canada. Nevertheless, she rightly points to the urgent need to restore confidence in the formula citizen=voter=taxpayer and to heed the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.”
Off shows in detail how “a loosely knit circle of wannabe oligarchs are funding the assault on democracy, truth, equality and wokeness through well-endowed foundations, striving toward a future driven by markets and profits — one with little regulation, environmental protection, public education or health care and fewer fair and free elections.” She offers a ray of hope, but not much. “It’s unlikely that they will achieve the full scope of their vision, but these anti-democratic forces are likely to cause a great deal of damage to our societies before they’re done.”
With darker times on the horizon, I am grateful for this book. If you are thinking of reading it, read it now because, as the German statesman and Nobel Peace laureate Willy Brandt once said, “The words grow old in our mouths.”
@2024. Society for the Preservation of Wild Culture & Individual Contributors | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
