I just read Fake Rebels. The excesses of political correctness (Bush Poetry, 2022), by Philippe Bernier Arcand. The author captures a crucial phenomenon in our democracies linked to the fact that the crusade against « political correctness » has freed racist, sexist and xenophobic speech. Under the pretext that there is a left whose ideas reign over the media and public spaces within liberal democracies, the actors of the conservative or even reactionary current develop a discourse and a posture tending to pose as rebels in the face of a supposed order of progressive repression.

The author emphasizes with precise details, which take us from Quebec to the United States via France and the United Kingdom, that the spirit of revolt which once blew in the circles of the extreme left, even of the libertarian left, has now moved to the extreme right by a curious discursive reversal. A process has taken place over time through a long and patient work of deconstruction, to change the dominant Zeitgeist.  

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On the grounds of attacking “political correctness”, the famous “we can no longer say anything”, those whom Philippe Bernier Arcand calls the “new rebels”, journalists, politicians, media columnists, activists, etc. freed the hate speech which now passes almost unfiltered on radio waves, TV shows and websites.

After recalling that historically rebellion meant opposition to tyranny and resistance to oppression, the author shows how the populist current of the right has stolen the word to put it at the service of its ideological fight whose essence is contrary to progressive struggles. We were rebellious to have more freedoms, now we are also rebellious to deprive whole sections of society of freedom while claiming to be victims of the censorship of a dominant ideology called left or even leftist.

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The essay dissects the phenomenon in Western societies; the same phenomenon is visible in a democracy like Senegal where, faced with elites deemed to be libertarian and globalized, being rebellious means going against the current and being, for example, anti-feminist, climatosceptic, opposed to secularism and asking for more order, virility and discipline within society.
This counter-culture movement is noisy and now invades the streets as was the case during anti-vaccine demonstrations during the Covid-19 pandemic, which used the imagination of a protest by the People against a global conspiracy with eugenic aims. Previously the imagination of the demonstration, of the confrontation in the street was attached to the left and to the progressives for more rights and freedoms. Now at the other end of the political spectrum, we also invade the streets using the codes of the progressive current, but with a very conservative protest platform.
Philippe Bernier Arcand cites the movement of yellow vests and the protests for all in France, the demonstrations in Charlottesville for the maintenance of the statue of Robert Lee, the demands against immigration organized in Quebec by far-right groups like The Pack…

Je pourrais également citer dans cette sinistre série les rassemblements au Sénégal du groupe And Samm Jikko yi (Ensemble préservons nos valeurs), contre l’homosexualité, la laïcité et la venue de la chanteuse Rihanna à Dakar, accusée de rouler pour…les Illuminati. Les mêmes ont saccagé des œuvres de la Biennale 2014 jugées contraires aux bonnes mœurs. I could also cite in this sinister series the rallies in Senegal of the group And Samm Jikko yi (Together let’s preserve our values), against homosexuality, secularism and the arrival of the singer Rihanna in Dakar, accused of driving for… the Illuminati. The same ransacked works from the 2014 Biennale deemed contrary to good morals.

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These movements now have global figures who embody them. These offer a political and institutional outcome to demands coming from the street and relayed by the media. With the emergence of speeches and leaders like Trump, Salvini, Bolsonaro, Orban, etc., the authoritarian resurgence around populist leaders says something about the crisis of progressive thought. There is also a revenge of those who call themselves the “ordinary world”, the “real people”, the “silent majority”, the “oppressed majority”. Those who say they are « forgotten », « ignored », « humiliated » by the progressive elites who have refused to defend the Nation in order to accommodate ethnic and cultural minorities, migration, multiculturalism, ‘without-borderism’…

Why this panic and this desire to seek landmarks in view of a return to the past? Their world is collapsing. Scientific and technical progress, the dilution of identities in what Senghor called interbreeding, the notion of gender identity, transhumanism are realities that generate identity anxiety as well as what Laurent Bouvet called cultural insecurity, in order to justify a reflex of defense and rejection of what looks like progress, which sanctifies otherness, and opens up to an elsewhere larger than the strict comfort of the Nation.

It also develops a feeling of nostalgia, a dream of a return to a golden age, a paradise lost and a fantasy of going back to when “it was better before”. The cultural and intellectual left, and everything that refers to periods of progressive fervor such as May 68 in France, the radical sixties in the United States, the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, are thus doomed to public scrutiny.
If excesses of progressivism exist and Philippe Bernier Arcand gives specific examples, the fact remains that the « fake rebels » are rather moved by the reversal of an order of progress, slowly and patiently, to orient the debate on racist, xenophobic, sexist subjects… The enemy of these people is in truth progressivism, especially post-68, as well as anti-racist, eco-friendly and feminist currents, which represent for them the dominant ideology to fight, first by discrediting it and by overwhelming it with names like the new conformism, the party of censorship…

Senegal Will Win Again

The “fake rebels” present taboo subjects that are omnipresent in the public debate. Chroniclers from a television channel in France tease Muslims, feminists, blacks and Arabs on a daily basis, but complain that they can no longer say anything because of the censorship of the progressive “dominant ideology”. Philippe Bernier Arcand rightly recalls that they even denounce a kind of left-wing McCarthyism, which prevents any embarrassing debate and mocks any counter-attack by calling it « wokist » or « Islamo-leftist « .

The « fake rebels », faithful to the tradition of the « New Right » of Alain de Benoist, who used Gramscian tools to feed his racist whims, seized on the concepts of war of movement and war of position to operate a cultural colonization of society through the press, school, the arts…

Thus the right is now associated with secularism, freedom of expression in the face of the alleged repressive tyranny of the left. They summon the word democracy to attack democratic institutions as the populist leader Ousmane Sonko and his supporters do in Senegal.

They try to seize secularism to attack religions linked to cultural minorities, in this case Islam.

Even when they are accused of racism, they reverse the accusation and blame progressives for bringing the word race back into the public debate, for trying to Americanize society and for stigmatizing white people who no one dares to defend.

This essay made me think of Senegal, which is going through a crisis whose similarities I see with the examples of the author, in particular on the term « right-thinking », which becomes a reversal and a reproach made to the cultural and intellectual left. Qualified as giving lessons, being moralizing and conformist, who sees racism, sexism and xenophobia everywhere and who stigmatizes by its posture the real rebels who dare to say things.

In the work everywhere to liberate hateful speech, the author points to the role of the media, the « trash radios » which play subversion against the progressive adversary, in search of permanent buzz and structure a discourse of hate and of rejection of the other, in the eloquent indifference of the intellectuals.

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Progressives everywhere must act and resume the cultural battle because, as Philippe Bernier Arcand says, « political correctness must not lead to the politically abject ».

For about ten years, I have been closely following the work of Philippe Bernier Arcand, who is also my Ena schoolmate.  An Intellectual with a dense culture, political scientist and teacher, Philippe is the author of several books. He is also a prolific chronicler of Canadian society and the Western world. His work on Quebec democracy is decisive in my understanding of the political values of this Nation.

By Hamidou ANNE / hamidou.anne@lequotidien.sn

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH/Serigne S. DIAGNE