The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Six Words We Can't Agree on Politically

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

Language can feel like a battlefield with words meaning different things to different people. Words such as "woke," "freedom," and even "taxes" have fraught definitions depending on whom you ask. Carol Off, former host of CBC Radio's "As it Happens," writes about all this in her new book: "At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage." She joins Steve Paikin to discuss her insights on the meaning behind six words. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Language can feel like a battlefield, with words meaning different things to different people. Words such as woke, freedom, and even taxes have fraught definitions depending on whom you ask. Carol Off, perhaps best known for hosting CBC radios As It Happens for 16 years, writes about all this in her new book. It's called At a Loss for Words, Conversation in an Age of Rage. And Carol joins us now for more. It's so good to have you in this studio. I'm so glad to be in this studio. You know, we did the math just before starting here,

and this show started in September 2006, same time you started as it happened. That's right, we talked about it at the time of where we were going, what trajectories we were both on, and well, we've spoken since then, but that was the first time, I think the only time we talked about our careers. And here we are.

Still alive. Still, I'm still kicking. Okay, six words that you chose to write about. Freedom, democracy, truth, woke, choice, and taxes. And to that end, here comes the excerpt. I have chosen to concentrate on a list of key words that I believe have been hijacked, weaponized, or semantically bleached vocabulary that's

on the endangered species list when it comes to civil society and liberal democracy. Hijacked, weaponized, and bleached, to what end? Well, it depends on who is doing it and to what end. What I conclude in the book, we're going to jump to the end, is that there are vested interests who would like to see us angry with each other, those who rage farm, I call them the agents of chaos,

those who have a vested interest in having society and government not function because they see a benefit for themselves in that. So that's how I get to, what I get to in the end, what, who's behind this, what interests there are in breaking us down as a society. But a whole bunch of other things happen. There are many other players who contribute to the adversarial nature now of our lives, our political lives, and how we don't talk to each other.

We yell at each other. We're angry with each other. And so what I wanted to get to was that we don't have to live that way. Why don't we reclaim the words and reclaim the conversation? It felt to me, if I maybe permitted this observation, that you shared more of your opprobrium for the extreme right as opposed to the extreme left who also do it.

Is that a fair observation? Fair observation. The reason why is because the script could have been flipped as well. But at this point where the money and the power lies in politics, in the United States especially, but increasingly in Canada, is with the right and with the hard right. And that was the rhetoric that was having the most effect on society that we live in. That was where the rage farming was coming from. What I found was that in this shrinking political space that the left now finds itself in, especially the hard left,

is that they are drawing the wagons into a circle. They are refusing the conversation as well. They have an ideological position where there's no point in talking to them. If you talk to them, you just give them a platform. So I could see that that was a factor. But it didn't have the power and the influence. The money, the political strength on the hard right, especially in the United States,

was so much more dominant than it was on the left. But I guess we should be clear about the consequences you see here, which is that the majority of people who tend to be in the sort of moderate pragmatic middle, they're getting squeezed out on both sides. Is that fair to say? And I call them the frustrated middle. They're people who want to live in a civil society, who want to solve our problems, want to talk to each other, whether they agree with each other or not, want to find a way

to start solving our problems collectively. Because we face enormous problems, whether it's climate change, whether it's wars, and also the possibility of more pandemics. We need to agree with each other. We need to agree to disagree. So we need to reclaim vocabulary that we share, that we agree upon the meanings of, and that we find is clear and unambiguous.

And there are those vested interests who do not want to see us do that. When you listen to someone like Steve Bannon, former aide to Donald Trump, who makes it really clear there's no conversation to be had. They are the enemies, and we are going to eradicate the enemies. And if you take him as the most extreme example, along with Donald Trump himself, you see that this is where people who said, no there's not gonna be a conversation we're gonna get rid of them we're gonna get rid of the woke menace that these people represent and we know work menace is just a code phrase but that so they

cannot have the world they want to live in unless they deny any oxygen to those who who don't share their views. Let's do a clip here. You, I suspect you've interviewed Anand Girdhar Das over the years. He was, well, let's just play this clip here talking about how the left can be equally as exclusionary. Sheldon, if you would, let's roll it. I think in many ways the progressive left sometimes has a problem of being formally committed to an agenda that is, you know is the most inclusive agenda in human history,

if you look at it on paper, but gives off a vibe of being a hard to access movement. If you don't know the right terms, if you don't understand the pronouns thing, if you were kind of socialized as a man 40 years ago, you're not a predator, but you're just socialized at a different time. We're gonna shame you.

You can't quite get in. And the far right in the United States is the opposite. It is formally committed to one of the most exclusionary programs in modern American history. But if you look at something like the Trump rally, the vibe is come as you are, no judgment, get in here. Fair point? Well, there were a lot of points that were made there.

I agree with Hernando on many things. I read a lot of what he had to say as I was writing this book. And one of the things he's also said, he didn't say it there, but that he said that the left is, when it comes to the word woke, he said that there are many people who are in the process of waking up. They may not be sufficiently woke. They may not be completely woke, but they are awakening. And that there isn't enough patience with those who are trying to figure

out how the world is changing, trying to come on board to a rapidly evolving society, whether it's with gender identity, whether it's with medicine, whether it's science, all the different challenges people face, whether it's with immigration and with the changing racial complexion of our country. People are trying to maybe come to terms with it, not everybody. And so there is a tendency in the hard ideological left to not be tolerant of that.

You either are completely, you're just wrong. You don't understand. We won't tolerate your view. Deplorable according to one former. Well, there was one. So it ends up being a silo. But again, I think what happens is that people are pushed into the silos. I think they've drawn the wagons into a circle

because they are against what Ananda is describing there, which is this extremely powerful right. And they're not inclusive. We're now seeing, it's quite interesting how the script is flipped with Kamala Harris. And you're now seeing the Kamala Harris world talking about freedom, talking about freedom to be who you are. Let me pick up on that.

OK, let's go through some of the words here. And freedom is a great place to start. Because when you and I were coming up in journalism, conservatives owned the word freedom. And if you watched the Democratic National Committee presidential convention, when it was two weeks ago, last week, whenever it was, holy cow, that word freedom was all over that convention.

And that was a Democratic convention. How did that happen? You know, it was so surprising for me, because my first word in the book is freedom. And when I was writing it over two years, the very dark years when I thought we had lost this language, when the word freedom had come to me, the freedom from obligation to others,

the freedom to do whatever you want, the freedom to have no government in your lives. And then suddenly, not only did the Democrats and Kamala Harris walk on stage day one and start talking freedom, and Beyoncé singing freedom and owning that word and saying the freedom from what? The freedom from losing your health care if you change your job, which happens in the United States. The freedom to love who you want to love, to marry who you want to be with, the freedom to live in a healthy world, the freedom from need,

which was the old FDR line, the freedom from need, because you can't be free if you feel that you can't even got a roof over your head or you can't feed your children. So this whole concept of freedom, which was originally a left idea, is taken back by the Democrats. And then you see the Republicans, the MAGA Republicans, it's a specific group, who are talking about we're going to take these books out of libraries, we're going to take away people's, we're going to get rid of the woke agenda,

we're going to fire people from universities, we're going to tell which women can't have abortions. We're going to tell what you can do with your body. We're going to tell you that you can't, when you can have children. We're going to tell you how you, JD Vance, we're going to tell you how young you should be to have children. So suddenly you have the script completely flipped. And you have these MAGA Republicans

who are anti-freedom. And you have the Democrats talking about not just to be free, but to have a different kind of freedom. And also owning the MAGA freedom when Tim Walz said it's not you know it's not your damn business I'll live my life the way I want to live it. It's funny how he said that at that convention in 2024. Pierre Trudeau said it in 1968 right? Well Pierre Trudeau said that the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation. But it had no problems being in the wombs of the nation, as I write in this book.

He did have an abortion law at that time, didn't he? And he upheld it, a 100-year-old abortion law that denied women a legal right to get an abortion that could... Although, I hasten to add, the Justice Minister of the day, John Turner, did allow for circumstances under which abortion was legal. Well, yes, except it was, well, very narrow circumstances. It's a baby step. It already existed.

And John Turner also being a Roman Catholic, because it was a very strong Roman Catholic view. And Otto Lange was also another minister. And then all the ministers in Quebec who were against it, too. And took Henry Morgenthau, as they write about in this book, and took him 18 years. And he went to jail. And he went.

He was in prison in Bordeaux. And to get women the right to have reproductive freedom. And we got it for the right reasons, because in Canada, the justices, the Supreme Court justices in Canada said that a woman has the right to choose how her body is being used. In the United States, they didn't get that right. And that's why, that's why they lost it, I think, with the Roe v. Wade. I was going to get to this later. But since we're here right now, and I'm trying to remember now, the story of the conversation you had with a granddaughter

about when she would have children? Yeah. Tell us about that story. Because that was, I can see you right now just getting all tingly about it. Yeah. Well, what happened is that it was just weeks after A Roe v. Wade had been struck down in the United States and even though it wasn't our country I think all women felt this

had the sharp intake of breath like when does it happen here and of course the Handmaid's Tale was kind of this echo through the times that we now live in with Margaret Atwood's story of women completely losing their freedoms and so it was on mind, and I was playing in a playground with my granddaughters. And my one granddaughter, who at that time, she was 10. And she said, Grandma, is it true that there's medicine you can take to not have a baby? Where she heard this, I don't know.

At 10, she knew this. At 10, she'd heard this. And I said, yeah, there is. There is medicine that you can take to have a baby. I didn't tell her all the details. She's too young. And she just thought about that for a second. She says, I'm going to have two children.

And for me, and then my other granddaughter listened. She says, I'm going to adopt. And it struck me. I was so emotional about that because I had grown up. I came of age in the 60s and 70s, still at a time when we didn't have choices. Choices didn't exist. And so they started to emerge.

We started to see women having these rights and freedoms that we now take for granted. But I was seeing the possibility that that could devolve. And so these little girls thought they would have the choice of when and even if to have children. This is so fundamental to a woman's rights. And so they just presumed that that would

happen in their lifetime. And I had this moment of sort of panic when I thought, what if they don't? What if they lose everything we have fought for for these decades? At some point, you'll take them aside and tell them who Gloria Steinem was, et cetera. I will tell them. They'll also find out a lot of other things I didn't want to tell them at that point.

OK, let's do, Sheldon, let's do this graphic on page three here. This is in your democracy chapter. Collective narcissism has the same effect. It exaggerates the importance of your group, usually ethnic or religious. It feeds a paranoid sense that you're surrounded by adversaries, and it justifies destroying perceived enemies before they destroy you. As with narcissistic individuals, the afflicted are unable to see what they are doing to others or understand the hurt they are causing.

In their minds, they are the ones under attack. Keenly aware of humiliation, disrespect, and being ignored, they do not extend that awareness to others. Carol, who are we talking about there, Carol? We're talking in general terms about ethnic nationalism and about nationalism in general. But we all have probably encountered individual narcissists.

And we know they see themselves as victims, and victims can't victimize. What I was coming out of in that particular section was that I had covered the wars in the Balkans, and that I'd seen the ability people had to actually kill their neighbors, and to say that they were doing that in self-defense. That sort of that nationalism, that hyper-nationalism that they relied on,

that was the base of that, gave them this sense that it was us against them and they had to kill their neighbors before they thought their neighbors would kill them. And we've seen this replay so many other times, including we saw this for sure. We see this with the Nazis. We saw this in other totalitarian regimes, in other fascistic regimes, where people say, we are under attack. We have to kill all the Jews because the Jews are coming for us. How could that happen? When we think, how could the Holocaust have happened?

How can you do that to your neighbors only if you think your neighbors are there are your enemies and so this kind of this narcissism this national narcissism I didn't invent this this is a study that has been as you as you merged about ultra-nationalism that that's an illness that creeps into a society and you have to be very aware of the language around you, because you hear that in the language. Let me circle back to this notion of bodily autonomy. And I want you to help us understand how one is different from the other, if in fact you think it

is. Bodily autonomy for women to have children if they want to or when they want to, et cetera, et cetera, versus the bodily autonomy not to get a shot during COVID-19. There were many people in this country arguing that they wanted to experience the same bodily autonomy and not have to get vaccinated, and yet still have the right to go on airplanes,

go to restaurants, go to movie theaters, et cetera. Do you see a distinction? No, that's a weird comparison, because it's my body, and my body's not affecting. My ability to control what it's my body and my body is not affecting my ability to control what happens to my body is not having an effect on you and but if I come into the studio and I have COVID I that is wrong for me to do that to you I have a responsibility to you I don't have a right to bring my disease into your space. How do we relate to people who believed that, many of whom I guess were in the convoy and took over Ottawa for a few weeks way back when?

Well, 50,000 people in this country died in those two years because of COVID. And people who were at the Freedom Convoy yelling that they wanted freedom from this tyranny, be liberated from this obligation. And they, my sense was that I they all didn't share that I think a lot of there was a lot of misguided views in that and I don't blame them for that. I think that they a lot of them were fed a line that that that COVID was was it was malarkey that it was a ho hoax, that they were on QAnon, they were reading conspiracy theories, this disease didn't exist, or that the vaccine would hurt them or their children.

Insecurity is a monster. When you feel insecure, you are so vulnerable to suggestion. And so at that time during COVID, people felt tremendous insecurity. And within that insecurity, people can manipulate your thoughts and feelings very easily. And so we saw a lot of that happening with some of the leaders of the convoy. You saw a lot of that happening even with members of government

who encouraged it without giving them maybe some guidance and say, say look we have obligations to others to feed into that sense of insecurity that people had which I think is is one of the worst things that can that that society faces is when people feel insecure. Let's go for the word woke here. Progressives use it to insist that society become more awakened to the pain of many who have experienced it through generations and so on.

Conservatives spit out the word as if to say, you're forcing us to meet some kind of ideological purity test that none of us can meet, and we're failing. What do you think it means? What the word woke means? Woke originally meant just being aware. And it was Leadbelly and others in the last century who brought this idea to the fore, this idea that black people in the United States

should be aware of what's around them. And then during Black Lives Matter, it evolved into a more political and even ideological view, which was that we have to be aware that there is systemic racism. We have to understand that the racism and not just for, because it evolved eventually to represent not just black people and people of color, but also LGBTQ communities,

and that these minorities were under siege. And so their prejudices, the bigotry against them was deeply into the system and that had to be dealt with. It had to be understood how deep these views were. And so that's what the word woke came to actually mean for them. Does it mean a bad word today? I think well the Black Lives Matter, they've abandoned it. They don't own it anymore, because it's been taken over by this idea of wokeism.

And that wokeism is, I think, a language vector. I think it's a word to accuse someone of being woke, or a woke radical, or having a woke agenda, is a way to smuggle odious ideas into the public space under the guise of being, I'm not against this black community. I'm not racist. I'm not saying anything bigoted.

I'm just against wokeism. But wokeism represents, first of all, diversity, equity, and inclusion. So the three key things that we are still holding on to in this country, but which they are eradicating in many parts of the United States. And these are key things. They needed reform.

There's no question that what they call DEI needed some work. But this was the idea that somehow these woke-minded people were trying to impose their agenda on us, which meant that we're trying to create a space of pluralism, create a space that's inclusive, create a space where people can realize who they are within the society. And so you can't be against that. You can't say I'm against people having their rights, I'm against people being equal. I can say I'm against woke-ism. So it's a way of actually exercising a racist view without actually declaring yourself racist.

We got a few minutes left here, and I want to try, let's see if I can get a couple more of these in here. You and I are both old enough to remember a time when, I'll just call it for what it is, when Jew hatred was a phenomenon on the far right. And it seems today that there's far more Jew hatred on the left, just like the word freedom has kind of migrated. What happened here?

Do you think that's the case? Well, I think there's plenty... Just tell me what's in your mind when you say that to me. Well, I think I'm looking at the same thing everybody else is. I think I'm looking at, for example, a head of CUPE Ontario, Fred Hahn, who's had to apologize twice for anti-Semitic tweets. He's the leader of a public sector union. I see a lot of evidence that there are far more people on the left

today who seem to have a problem with Jews and Israel than people on the right. It looks that way to me. Am I wrong? No, I think there's absolutely a hard ideological left that is anti-Semitic and can be racist. It can be... I think that anti-Semitism... No one has a monopoly over anti-Semitism. It is so pervasive. It is probably one of the most pervasive forms of bigotry and racism. That's why it should have its own name.

We talk about all kinds of racist behavior. But antisemitism is its own specific category. And it just turns up like a bad disease all over the place. I think there is absolutely a hardcore element in the left that is subscribing to those views. And I feel it makes me angry because I think a lot of people who are pro-Israel and want to see two states in the Middle East

are overwhelmed by statements being made from more radical and more extreme elements that have in many ways co-opted the movement. And I'd like to see them just on both sides, the ideologues who are saying extreme things, let's shut them out of the conversation. Let's find a way, that's the whole point of this book about conversation, is that we get for the rage farmers and the agents of chaos to say, you don't want to have a conversation with us. Us in the middle, we want to talk about resolving things.

Is it impossible to win them over? No, I don't think it's possible. I just think we should just cut them out. They don't want to have a conversation. So people, and we know that it's part, this is where I think ambiguity is so important, is that people who are totally sympathetic with what's happening to the Palestinians can also be totally sympathetic to the Jews and to Israel. And most of us are of two minds. They share those two views. We can have two views at the same time.

We don't have to be either way. Absolutely. Justice and understanding. You don't have to be, you don't have to listen to Hamas to care about the Palestinians. You don't have to listen to the warmongers in Netanyahu's cabinet to be totally sympathetic to Israel. And so I think that's where, I think most of us

are in the middle. And yet the loudness, the volume of the voices on those sides amplified by social media and by the rage farmers and the agents of chaos who want those amplified, because they want to see divisions. They want wedges to be driven between us. They want adversarial conditions are ideal for demagogues and for autocrats and wannabes.

And so it's in their interest for us to not be of two minds to see and listen to each other and to have conversations where we listen deeply. Well, in which case, let's finish up on this because I wanted to get to the end of this book and think, oh, here's the path forward, and we're all going to be able to have these reasonable conversations again, and civility will reign supreme.

And then I see you quoting the former governor of the Bank of Canada, Stephen Polos, who says, we're toast. So maybe optimism is misplaced here? What do you think? I was so anticipating this question while I was writing the book. And I thought, oh, I'm going to be talking to Steve Paikin. And he's going to be thinking, she's such a Pollyanna.

If she thinks it's possible for us to have conversations when everything is falling apart. But I think in the past month, two months, I've started to feel this, what they call the politics of joy, politics of hope. Is it possible that we can move back into this area where we, and of course Kamala Harris introduced that idea. I don't know if she will be the president

or if she'll be a good president, but at least she's bringing this idea back to us that we can care for each other again. And so what, in the last chapter, is taxes. And taxes is because unless we have redistribution of wealth, unless we are able to see ourselves as being citizen equals voter equals taxpayer, that those three things are together and we do that in the interest of civil society and and we have to pay we have to pay for that and so I think

it is possible I think we do we can find this place where we start caring for each other again. And that was Steve. And what Poloz said to me, we're toast, was he said that the separation of the classes in Canada, which is growing at the fastest rate in Canada, that's grown at in decades. No one can remember when the separation between rich and poor, just between middle class and upper class, is growing at this rapid rate.

In the United States, 90% of the people have less than the trillionaires at the top. I mean, trillions of dollars have moved their way to the 1% in the US. And that's a trend that has had such an effect on the United States. And I think Canadians are looking and thinking, do we want to go there to say, get rid of taxes, axe the tax, reduce taxes? Well, yeah, but what are we going to lose in our ability to

care for each other and to have a society that is aware of others' needs and can free some people from want. I don't think Canadians want to go in that direction. These and other compelling thoughts, as they say, are in At A Loss For Words conversation in an age of rage. Carol Lough, so great to have you here and thank you very much.

Thank you, Stephen.