I have come to believe that it is not merely that people on the left have become enveloped by the part of neoliberal discourse that we call “progressive” because of our long-term locked alliance with liberals in popular front movements known as the “third way” like Tony Blair’s New Labour, Bill Clinton’s New Democrats and Mike Harcourt’s NDP but because conservatives are actively sabotaging our discourse in order to make us more stupid and divided every day.

The redefinition and decontextualization of the term “punching down,” is a great example of this but just one of many examples of my suspicions. The term was developed, very sensibly, by late twentieth-century satirists who wanted to avoid satire becoming a form of structural violence against already-oppressed people. So, satirists asked themselves whether the individual jokes in their satire engaged with oppressive stereotypes in ways that reinforced them or that challenged them. If they reinforced stereotypes of women being flighty and emotional, black people being lazy and foolish, Jews being greedy and scheming, gay men being cowardly, etc. these jokes were examples of “punching down” and were replaced with jokes that did not reinforce bigotry or oppressive structures.

But in the recent past, this term has been taken up by practitioners of left Identitarianism in ways that are highly problematic. “Punching down” has ceased to refer to a kind of joke and has come to refer to a kind of relationship. In progressive Identitarianism, every person is subject to what we might term an “oppression calculus.” Progresive Identitarians look at the various identity categories to which a person belongs and determine how oppressed the person is by the various kinds of identity they have.

So, if a person is black, they start with a high oppression quotient but if they are female, their quotient goes higher; if they are trans (as opposed to cis), the quotient is higher still. Because whoever is most oppressed in any situation is often used to determine who is morally correct in that situation, this calculus is very important. A black woman is more oppressed and therefore wiser and more correct about what is just than a black man; but if the person we see as a black man is revealed only to have a black male gender performance but has a black female gender identity, then the oppression calculus may have to be re-evaluated.

As with patriarchy, nobody claims to believe that oppression calculus is how moral and now political questions should be solved and nobody claims to use it as an intellectual tool. Nobody claims to believe in patriarchy; nobody claims to believe in oppression calculus, either. It is just that patriarchy structures most people’s decisions and intuitive sense of right and wrong. The same is true of oppression calculus within Identitarian movements on the political left, in large measure because they are the same thing.

Today, when people use the term “punching down” it typically refers to a person of a lower oppression quotient attacking the actions, character or position of a person with a higher oppression quotient. This can then effectively neutralize the substance of what the attacker is saying. While their argument might be empirically correct, progressive etiquette practices render its facticity moot because the attack becomes a thing that should not have been said and whose veracity, therefore, need not be considered.

And because one’s oppression quotient is typically based on forms of self-identity and social identity rather than material oppression, it can, for instance, be argued that a white male minimum wage earner is punching down when going after a racialized lesbian millionaire. Furthermore, not only is the substance of the attack dismissed, irrespective of its contents, the attack itself is recast in Identitarian terms. In this way, a fifty-year-old white man working at a remote gas station in Northern Canada is not only unable to go after his boss personally if she is a woman of colour; his criticism of her labour practices or environmental practices can be recast as racism.

We see this contradiction every day in our politics, every time a Bernie Sanders surrogate attacks Kamala Harris, they are “punching down” on behalf of a white man when Harris is a racialized woman. The problem is that as much as this discourse stymies those on the left and produces unjust outcomes, the political cost of calling out this problem prevents anyone within the left from doing so. The consequence is that the only people calling it out in the public square are vile, alt-right faux intellectuals like Jordan Peterson.

And this is all fine with the right. Let me count the ways.

First of all, every time a working class person or one with a mainstream gender identity loses an oppression calculus contest, they increasingly identify with the alt-right, the only game in town that presents itself as both anti-elite and opposed to this absurd discourse. So, the right gains new recruits from the working class. So the fascists recruit working class men and the Christian Right recruits more TERFs.

Second, this oppression calculus reinforces capitalism, patriarchy and racism because it represents a hierarchy of races, classes, genders and sexual orientations governed by a complex system of etiquette. In this way, we are creating a neo-baroque Great Chain of Being, which organizes the diversity of human beings into a hierarchy so complex and elaborate that only the most privileged people can successfully negotiate it. Furthermore, it reinforces a key element of liberal elite class politics, noblesse oblige. In the noblesse oblige worldview, it is beneath a person of high rank to interact with a person of lower rank as an equal. If a lower-rank person says something wrong, it is best to pretend they have not said it or to actively misinterpret it as agreeing with you. It’s the least one can do for one’s social inferiors. You can gently remind them of what you knew they meant to say.

In other words, the “punching down” discourse acknowledges a hierarchical order to society with rich, white men at the top who will only deign to enter into true debate or dialogue with other rich, white men. And like all such hierarchical theories of etiquette, it casts this profound elitism as a favour one is doing the lower orders in society. There is a place for everyone and everyone is in their place, not permitted to enter into vigorous debate or discourse with anyone other than a person of commensurate social rank.

Third, it motivates people on the left to defend themselves by incorporating more features into their public identity in order to survive oppression calculus face-offs. I know I have wriggled out of a few confrontations by mentioning that my mother was black or I was taking anti-depressants or that my grandma grew up on an Indian Reserve—but never that I was on welfare or EI or precariously housed. In other words, we are encouraged to describe our identities increasingly not in terms that generate solidarity but terms that show difference; we are encouraged to describe our identities in ways that show us to be pathological or sick rather than resilient. And millionaires like Elizabeth Warren rush off to get genetic tests so as to reinforce these narratives, resurrecting eugenics that we thought we buried with the war dead.

Fourth, “punching down” allows the right to sow disunity among those on the left, presenting one’s place in the debate as either endorsing bigotry or denying the material nature of oppression. It creates false splits and division, all while building a system of etiquette that reduces to the smallest possible number the people with whom one can think critically aloud without fear of condemnation for an etiquette breach. And that is what the right really wants to do. We used to be the smart side but now, we are the dumb side because the right has convinced us that thinking aloud together, through vigorous debate is, in and of itself, an act of oppression.