The language of dissent and the politics of power

There is something deeply uncomfortable about watching political protest spill into language that is coarse, mocking or deliberately offensive. Many of us who have grown up believing that disagreement should be expressed with civility instinctively recoil from it. We may even agree with the grievance being expressed and yet find ourselves asking: must political dissent really sound like this? That reaction is understandable. Public language matters. Abuse is not an argument, and humiliation is not a substitute for persuasion. A democracy cannot function if every disagreement descends into personal insult. But there is another question worth asking before we dismiss the language of protest altogether: who decides what constitutes acceptable political language? History suggests that the answer is more complicated than we might think.

Every society develops conventions about how dissent should be expressed. Some are formal; most are not. We learn, often without being explicitly told, what constitutes a respectable political argument and what crosses the line into vulgarity, insolence or unacceptable speech. There is nothing inherently wrong with civility. Indeed, democratic disagreement requires a measure of it. But the boundaries of acceptable political language are not always politically neutral. They can reflect the social position, education and institutional access of those who have traditionally been permitted to speak.

The political theorist James C. Scott offers a useful way of thinking about this in Domination and the Arts of Resistance. He distinguishes between the “public transcript” – the language of deference and conformity performed in the presence of power – and the “hidden transcript”: the jokes, mockery, anger and criticism that people express away from power. Scott argues that subordinate groups develop such private languages precisely because speaking openly can carry costs. Occasionally, however, the hidden transcript enters the public square. And when it does, it rarely arrives dressed for a parliamentary debate. The language of protest is often emotional rather than measured, mocking rather than deferential, and deliberately transgressive rather than decorous.

This does not make every insult legitimate, any more than anger makes every political claim correct. But it does make the language itself worth examining rather than simply condemning. There is, after all, a distinction between the right to dissent and the obligation to dissent politely. The educated classes may possess a particular vocabulary of political disagreement – restrained, sophisticated and institutionally acceptable. There is nothing wrong with that vocabulary. The danger arises only when it becomes the implicit standard by which the legitimacy of other people’s political expression is judged. A protester who lacks the vocabulary of the drawing room may still have something important to say. Indeed, history suggests that some of the great expansions of political participation have occurred precisely when politics escaped the established conventions of respectable discourse.

Consider England in the 1640s. The English Civil War produced an extraordinary explosion of political printing. The Thomason Collection, held by the British Library, contains around 22,000 pamphlets, newspapers, manuscripts and other printed works from the period of political upheaval between 1640 and 1661. It provides an extraordinary record of a society suddenly engaged in political argument on an unprecedented scale. The Levellers were among those who used this new political print culture to challenge established authority and advocate a wider conception of political participation. Their pamphlets and petitions were aimed not merely at traditional political elites but at a much broader public. The language was not always measured. Political print could be partisan, satirical, angry and deliberately provocative.

That is important because politics was beginning to move beyond those who traditionally possessed the authority to conduct it. The pamphlet became a means of taking political argument to people who had previously been spectators rather than participants. A century and a half later, Thomas Paine would take this process considerably further. His Rights of Man, published in 1791–92, was written in an accessible and combative style and circulated widely in Britain and beyond. Paine was not simply making a political argument; he was addressing a new political audience. His importance lies partly in the fact that he helped make political ideas accessible beyond the traditional literary and political elites.

This was a profound change. The pamphlet was, in its time, a new technology of political democratization. Newspapers subsequently widened the circle; radio and television widened it further. Social media has taken the process to an entirely different level. The gatekeepers have largely disappeared. That has democratized political speech — but it has also democratized ridicule, anger, misinformation and abuse. Perhaps that is an unavoidable consequence of allowing more voices into the public square.

When authority becomes a target of ridicule

The French Revolution offers an even more dramatic illustration of what happens when political language changes. Long before the Bastille fell, the French monarchy was beginning to lose something less tangible than territory or military power: its aura. One instrument that contributed to this erosion was the proliferation of libelles – illicit pamphlets attacking the monarchy and, particularly, Marie-Antoinette. Much of this material was obscene, sexually explicit and vicious.

It would be historically simplistic to suggest that such pamphlets caused the French Revolution. The Revolution had deep political, economic, social and intellectual causes. But the pamphlets mattered for another reason: they made it possible to laugh at what had previously been treated with reverence. That is politically significant. Authority depends partly on institutions, but also on symbols, distance and legitimacy. When people stop treating those symbols as sacred and begin treating them as objects of ridicule, the relationship between authority and society has changed.

Ridicule can therefore be politically consequential without necessarily being politically constructive. This distinction matters. The fact that political change has historically been accompanied by coarse or transgressive language does not mean that coarse language is inherently virtuous. Nor does it mean that every person who uses it is expressing some deeper social truth. Sometimes vulgarity is simply vulgarity. But sometimes it is also a symptom. It can reveal that the language of formal politics no longer captures the emotional vocabulary of a section of society. The challenge is to understand which is which.

This brings us to our own streets and smartphones. There are today protests whose language many find crude, abusive or offensive. One can quite legitimately object to that language without dismissing the right to protest. Equally, one can disagree with the protesters’ claims without pretending that their manner of expression is the entire story. The temptation, particularly among the literate elite, is to focus on the vocabulary: How can anyone speak like this? Perhaps the more interesting question is: Why are people choosing to protest like this?

Sometimes the answer will simply be that social media rewards outrage and provocation. Sometimes it will be deliberate political theatre. Sometimes it may reflect youthful exuberance. And sometimes coarse language may be an expression of accumulated frustration that has found no respectable vocabulary through which to express itself. We should not romanticize any of these possibilities. Civility remains valuable. Democracies need disagreement without dehumanization. Free speech protects the right to say something; it does not require everyone else to admire the way it is said.

But neither should we confuse civility with legitimacy, decorum with truth, or respectable language with respectable politics. Every age develops its own definition of acceptable political speech. Those definitions are rarely entirely neutral. They reflect, in part, the institutions and social groups that have historically possessed the power to define what sounds reasonable.

The living room in one’s home has its vocabulary; Parliament has another; the street has another. And today, the smartphone has created an entirely new political vernacular. A mature democracy should be capable of listening to all four. That does not mean accepting every word that is spoken. It means resisting the easy temptation to dismiss the message merely because we dislike the language in which it arrives.

Political history contains a recurring lesson: when people who feel unheard finally find a public voice, they do not always speak in the language that those already being heard consider respectable. Sometimes the first sign of political change is not a new argument. It is a change in the language in which people are prepared to speak.

And perhaps that is why, rather than asking only whether today’s protesters are speaking politely enough, we should occasionally ask a more uncomfortable question: are those sitting comfortably in their living rooms listening to what is being said outside?

Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp

Download the TNIE app to stay with us and follow the latest