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Cancel Culture Is Just Another Dog Whistle for White Supremacy
Just like free speech, law and order, or states’ rights, the newest Republican catchphrase is nothing but racist doublespeak
The modern incarnation of the Republican Party was born during the 1968 presidential election. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, Nixon saw the rising popularity of segregationist candidate George Wallace in the Deep South and capitalised on it through what GOP strategists dubbed the Southern Strategy. They had understood that to win elections in America, a right-wing party needed to be on the side of white supremacists but couldn’t say it outright. The times they were a-changing, and the language too.
Expert in semiotics and linguistics tend to analyse the world and our relation to it through core tropes, or fundamental figures of speech that characterise the public discourse of an era. As a matter of progression, societies tend to move from metaphors to metonymies to synecdoches and end up with irony.
What Republicans saw in 1968 that nobody else did is that the era was moving away from past metaphors and into the age of irony. Irony happens when the speaker voluntarily creates a disconnect between a signifier (a word, a sentence, a whole speech) and a signified (the true meaning…
