Breaking Down the Radlib Playbook
Some Cursory Explanations for Why and How Radlibs Think
(CW for discussions of the politics of rape and child sexual assault)
The most common critique against radlibs I've heard from leftists, broadly, is that radlib “theory,” if it could be called that at all, has no political substance. It's a regurgitation of the liberal status quo because it has no politics beyond superficial idealisms about “social justice” and “support for rights” (usually natural). While I agree with that critique, I feel like really getting into the details of why and how radical liberalism specifically appeals to people—and not just how liberalism or bastardized leftist ideologies like bourgeois socialism appeals to people—is important in order to help radlibs and would-be radlibs unpack and take a more critical approach towards their own thinking. This essay will break down two tactics that I've noticed radlibs rely on over the past few years: one, the desire to avoid being bad, and two, minoritarian equivocation.
1. The Desire to Avoid Being Bad
The most infamous line I've seen used to summarize your own politics on a radlib's social media profile is “don't be a dick.” Also known as Wheaton's Law, “don't be a dick” is an English phrase about etiquette that became popularized as a generally accepted form of netiquette, the etiquette specific to online interactions. On its face this doesn't really have anything to do with politics at all—“don't be a dick” is just common sense—not that “common sense” itself is an unproblematic framework to rely on. “Common” cannot be defined without a corresponding “uncommon”—so who gets to decide who gets to be marginalized as “uncommon?” And what is the “sense” under “common sense” except a hegemonic sense that relies on marginalizing the sense of the so-called uncommon people in order to exist? And regardless of how inclusively you define “common,” how will you deal with senses that are fundamentally incompatible with yours? What is your end goal—to get everyone to agree with each other (or at least avoid going to extremes in disagreement with each other), to get rid of “wrong” (almost always treated synonymously as harmful and oppressive) reasonings, to personally develop the “most correct” (treated synonymously as most unharmful and unoppressive) reasoning, to socially develop a community that only has people with the “most correct” reasoning, to socially exclude all people with “wrong reasonings?” In the course of dissent or responding to dissent, I've seen radlibs imply a mix or all these things.
So what does it mean, in the context of radical liberalism, to “be a dick?” As far as I have observed, two simultaneous things: the first is to be uncivil, which is to violate the principles of liberal civility, and the second is to cause physical or emotional damage, which is to violate the prohibitions of the liberalism of fear.
Defining Badness Through Liberal Civility
In “Liberal Civility and the Civility of Etiquette: Public Ideals and Personal Lives,” Michael J. Meyers argues that liberal civility, which is designed to create a certain political society, and the civility of etiquette, which is designed to create a certain polite society, both illustrate how civility serves as a limit on social conflict. What drives this desire for a limit on social conflict is an expectation of mutual respect for the fellow civilians you would get into conflict with—which is not necessarily respect for their opinions, but respect for them as comrades who have the capacity to offer “good” opinions and share the same social burden of compromise. In this context, “incivility is a kind of rudeness” that's “epitomized by an unwillingness to meet other citizens on reciprocal terms,” “an unwillingness to strive for mutual understanding and compromise.”
Analyzing how this plays out in instances of political dissent, Meyers contrasts the liberal support for non-violent pro-legal civil disobedience versus insurrectionary and illegalist tactics like eco-sabotage. The “civility of civil disobedience is realized in the civil disobedient's acceptance of punishment, which also shows a respect for the rule of law in general, even at the same time it is joined with the intentional violation of a particular (unjust) law.” The civil disobedient begins with a self-imposed imperative for respecting the law because it assumes that the law must also respect them, must have the capacity to be “good” and share the burden of compromise. In contrast, the insurrectionary illegalist eco-saboteur “fails to practice the discipline of public justification. The use of violence, though limited, tends to signal a disruption of dialogue and a choice of conflict over compromise. In addition, the saboteur's unwillingness to submit to punishment”—re: unwillingness to accept the supposedly equal burden of compromise by tolerating political repression by a state which hold grossly unequal power over them—“signals a disdain, or perhaps a studied indifference, toward the law. The saboteur holds himself above the law by pursuing his agenda (say, rendering unprofitable a harvest of old-growth forest) independently of public dialogue. The saboteur is not concerned with the practice of public evaluation but instead with the realization of a particular outcome.” (Emphasis mine).
As I have begun to imply with my interjections in the example of the eco-saboteur, what the liberal expectation for mutual respect among civilians during dissent fails to account for is the power dynamics behind the construction of civility. When there are historical and material hierarchies in a society, and when those hierarchies are entrenched in and enforced by the organs of the state, respect cannot be mutually exercised. Because the cost of oppressed people failing to adequately “respect” their oppressors while expressing dissent against them will always be greater than for oppressors failing to do the same when expressing dissent against those they've oppressed. In fact, a common liberal tactic is for members of an oppressor class to threaten to withhold their support from some oppressed person or group of people dissenting against their own oppression because the oppressed have dissented in too uncivil of a manner, whether that be something as innocuous as an angry tone of voice (or merely a voice that's perceived as angry because it's voicing dissent) or actual acts of violence in self-defense. This is why someone radical or revolutionary like a saboteur is not concerned with the practice of public evaluation but instead with the realization of a particular outcome. A radical or revolutionary knows that the public evaluation under liberalism is a tool used to police and repress resistance against domination and exploitation—and so instead they direct their attention towards creating the end of domination and exploitation by attacking all that serves to dominate and exploit, and defending all that serves to liberate people from domination and exploitation.
We can mutually agree to “not be a dick” and practice individual respect towards each other all we want, but attempts to equalize positions on a predominantly interpersonal level of mutual care and concern do not translate to leveling the hierarchies on wider social, economic, and legal levels, which continue to keep the dominating or exploiting class in power by punishing attempts to change it. While hierarchy still remains, there can be no true “compromise” between the oppressors and the oppressed; the tolerance expected by liberal civility of oppressed people is a tolerance of domination and exploitation by their oppressors. To militantly reject liberal civility is instead a rejection of continuing to enable the norm of tolerating domination and exploitation, to more accurately understand the law and other enablers of domination and exploitation not as comrades of the dominated and exploited, but their enemies.
Defining Badness Through the Liberalism of Fear
The liberalism of fear is a particular model of one kind of liberalism developed by Judith N. Shklar in the titular first chapter of Liberalism and the Moral Life. She characterizes the liberalism of fear in terms of principled aversion towards things that threaten freedom. “For this liberalism the basic units of political life are not discursive and reflecting persons, nor friends and enemies, nor patriotic soldier-citizens, no energetic litigants, but the weak and the powerful. And the freedom it wishes to secure is freedom from the abuse of power and intimidation of the defenseless that this difference invites.” (Emphasis mine.) This is the liberalism of so-called “social justice warriors” and also liberal anarchists (or radibs who call themselves anarchists) who are trying to argue against all forms of hierarchy. This is also the liberalism that I suspect drives the so-called “callout culture” on social media, which generally produces anxieties around what constitutes acting like an abuser, whether that's in the form of literally being abusive towards someone else, allowing an abuser into your social space, or supporting oppression (which can be understood as abuse at the systemic level of one group by another).
Like liberal civility, the goal of the liberalism of fear is to avoid the worst outcome, which is cruelty—“the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible, of the latter”—and the fear it inspires. Even though this gets closer to accounting for unequal power dynamics, the metric of subjective experiences of physical or emotional pain still restricts the analysis to instances of interpersonal conflict. Moreover, within the personal subjective realm, there's no requirement for an individual's understanding of pain and “weak” versus “stronger” group to align with any other reality than that person's subjective understanding. The person can feel like, because they are in pain—because they have been weakened—that they are effectively a member of a weaker group, and those who hurt them are effectively a member of a stronger group. This is the logic of someone who cries “reverse racism” or “misandry.”
And actually, Shklar shows that this is exactly one of the end goals of the liberalism of fear—not to end the existence of hierarchies, but to limit all forms of cruelty no matter which side it comes from. “A mininimal level of fear is implied in any system of law, and the liberalism of fear does not dream of an end of public, coercive government. The fear it does want to prevent is that which is created by arbitrary, unexpected, unnecessary, and unlicensed acts of force and by habitual and pervasive acts of cruelty and torture performed by military, paramilitary, and police agents in any regime.” The goal of the liberalism of fear is not to end violence, but to keep it restricted to the monopolized domain of the state, and then to keep the state's monopoly of violence within reasonable limits. A liberal of fear is interested in cordoning violence off in some area away from them, in locking it up and throwing it away the key, not in addressing its root causes and ending the conditions that led to its reproduction. And for the sake of keeping this violence cordoned, the liberal of fear will make an exception to the avoidance of cruelty in the form of the “unavoidable evil” of cruel punishment by the state allegedly designed to prevent greater cruelties—and in social media spaces, what is imagined as a quasi-state with a monopoly on carrying out punishment for individual abuses of power is “the community.” “You have to be accountable to the community” in radlib-speak on social media generally translates to “you have to accept the community's punishment” and nothing else because there are no mechanisms in place to recover from abuses and abusers of power besides getting rid of anyone who looks like an abuser.
And what about the mechanisms that liberals of fear have in place for avoiding abuses and abusers of power? The “most reliable test for what cruelties are to be endured at any place and any time is to ask the likeliest victims, the least powerful persons, at any given moment and under controlled conditions.” In short, it's to practice what Håkan Geijer aptly calls deference politics, defined in “Affinity Fraud and Exploitable Empathy” as “deference to the marginalized in alignment with a hierarchical inversion” where “instead of removing hierarchy entirely, they flip the pyramid and place the marginalized above the historically dominant groups.” It grants those with the most marginalized identities a monopoly over deciding and enforcing the limits of power through the cruelty of punishment, regardless of what those peoples' political goals actually are. “The position or actions of a deference politiker are held as unassailable not just from criticisms by someone who has fewer or less pronounced axes of marginalization, but also from criticism by others who share their marginalization. Even when a critic of the deference politiker shares all the identities that are relevant to the topic at hand, the critic is labeled as a defender of whiteness or other forms of dominance” for challenging the deference politicker's monopoly.
Let me not mince words—an inverted hierarchy is still hierarchy, is still dominance, is still abuse at the systemic level. Deference politics is a functionally abusive mechanism of “accountability” that solves “bad” domination with “good” domination, that lets the “good” dominators decide what gets to count as “bad.” And if you are someone who is constantly afraid of being “bad,” especially “bad” in the sense of reproducing oppressive dynamics due to your position as a member of an oppressor class, you are exactly the kind of mark that deference politickers seek to exploit. It will certainly not be easy to extricate yourself from that exploitation, especially if the entire community is also in on it, and also if you have a condition like OCD or OCPD that makes you dysfunctionally scrupulous about morality. But know this—while deference politickers can claim you are supporting this or that oppression all they want, their understanding of liberation from oppression is essentially self-serving. Again, they cannot have their monopoly over what counts as legitimate resistance against oppression challenged; they only extend solidarity up to the point it doesn't challenge their monopoly. They are not comrades, but opportunists and affinity fraudsters who leverage their connection to a group in order to exploit that group's trust.
If we cannot yet do away with the moral dichotomy of “good” versus “bad,” let us at least begin at the minimum of accepting that deference politics is bad in the sense that it reproduces hierarchical structures of dominance under the excuse of trying to “defend the most oppressed,” and that it is bad to let fear of being socially abused by deference politickers determine the course of your politics. Rather, the goal should be to end all forms of domination and exploitation, and to that end, it is good to develop a more critical analysis of power that doesn't treat identity as an automatic guarantee of political understanding, but as a position that informs and cannot be separated from political understanding, as a crystallization of the historical and material conditions surrounding you.
2. Minoritarian Equivocation
Something I mentioned while discussing the liberalism of fear was how its definition of cruelty in terms of subjective pain lets people treat the feeling of weakness as proof of being a member of a group that's been historically and materially dominated. Given that deference politics is the fear-based radlib solution to oppression, it's no wonder that another radlib tactic is to claim authority against other minorities based on subjective minority status that isn't grounded in historical or material analysis at the systemic level but personal experiences and feelings of suffering at the individual level. I often see this showing up in arguments where someone is trying to defend their alleged transgression of limits they feel have been unfairly imposed by the quasi-state community on how they can identify. An infamous example is the alleged attempt by (NO)MAPs ((non-offending) minor-attracted persons, that is, pedophiles) to infiltrate the LGBT+ community, which led to MAP and paraphilias in general turning into a regular radlib example of “bad faith” queer identity, with supporters of new queer coalitions like MOGAI (Marginalized Orientations, Genders Alignments, and Intersex) taking an explicit stance against pedophilia and zoophilia and LIOM (Labels, Identities, Orientations, Other Minorities) creating a blacklist of things like pedophilia, nonconsent, zoophilia, incest (including consanguamory relations) and abuse that can't be included in “good faith.” As implied by some of the terms on LIOM's blacklist, there's a tension between the desire to be inclusive and the desire to justify exclusion on a basis of avoiding causing harm against “weak” groups rooted in a liberalism of fear. On one side, there's an insistence on authoritatively settling the limits of harm by defining the limits of discourse, and on the other, there's a pushback against those limits from those viewed as transgressors like radqueers who believe in the radical inclusion of anything non-normative, including all paraphilias, under the queer umbrella.
Before I continue, I want to state that by going into the following discussion of pro-contact-pedophilia arguments in relation to queer liberation specifically, I do not intend to insinuate that all identities are “just as bad” as pro-contact-pedophilia, or that all paraphiles are just like the pro-contact abuse and child sexual assault apologist pedophiles discussed here. I'm going to use historic examples of affinity fraud by rape and child sexual assault apologists with queer liberation movements as a jumping point to explain how instances of affinity fraud like radqueer happen because radlibs have a general problem with understanding the differences between marginalization and oppression.
Framing pedophilia in terms of a marginalized sexuality that shares affinity with homosexuality is a decades-old argument—in La folie encerclée's “Enfermement, psychiatrie, prison” (English: “Confinement, Psychiatry, Prison”) gay theorist Michel Foucault, while infamously arguing against penal reforms punishing the sexuality of rape, also argued against penal law reforms to protect children from allegedly harmful relationships with adults, citing how France's laws of sexual repression against making love in the open air developed into anti-homosexual laws against gay couples kissing in public were an example of what trying to legally limit sexual relations between children and adults could turn into. Writing in support of of “man-boy love” in the Journal of Homosexuality, Theo Sandfort, Edward Brngersma, and Alex van Naerssen state that the gay movement should be allies with pedophiles on the basis of sharing a goal of “broader personal and sexual liberation,” citing support from the Cultureel Ontspannings Centrum (COC) in Netherlands and the existence of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). In an article on the Dutch “pedophile empancipation” movement in Paidika: The Journal of The Journal of Paedophilia, Frits Bernard explicitly uses the terms “sexual minority,” “Vervolgde Minderheid” (Persecuted Minority), “coming out,” “sexual emancipation,” “sense of justice,” and “rejection of prejudice” with regards to describing the movement, and ends by explicitly grouping pedophilia in with queer sexualities, saying: “Heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality and paedophilia should be considered equally valuable forms of human behavior.”
The so-called pedophile emancipation movement's language of being a “minority” and “emancipation” from “prejudice” closely mirrors the language of coalitions like MOGAI and LIOM, which are meant to respectively support the “marginalized” and “other minorities.” This similarity exposes why there ends up being discourse over what constitutes a “bad faith” marginalized minority—it's because minority status works in radlib circles as an automatic indication of marginalization and the necessity to be liberated from oppression. It is very similar to the logic of deference politics where someone “is right because of their marginalized identity, not because of some lived experience that was analyzed through a coherent ideological lens.” I've said before that it feels like this kind of logic works “ass-backwards: i feel socially excluded, and exclusion is a symptom of oppression, so therefore i must be oppressed.” But the problem is more than just a false equivocation between the struggles of historically and materially oppressed groups versus socially marginalized but not historically or materially oppressed minorities—it's not just the problem of who these people want to liberate, but what these people want liberation for.
In “Our Damages and Their Compensation” a feminist critique in response to Foucault's 1977 discussion of rape with other intellectuals in La folie encerclée, Monique Plaza highlights the following statement in that discussion by Jean-Pierre Faye:
“D'un côté, au nom de la libération de la femme, on est du côté « anti-viol ». Et au nom de l'anti-répression, c'est — l'inverse?”
“On one hand, in the name of women's liberation, one is on the antirape side. And in the name of antirepression it's — the reverse?” (Plaza's translation)
“From the point of view of women's liberation, one is on the 'anti-rape' side. And from the point of view of antirepression, it's the opposite. Is that right?” (Sheridan's translation)
“In other words,” says Plaza, “on the other hand one is for rape?!!! But then what repression are they talking about? For if women demand a 'liberation,' it is certainly from the repression, the oppression that they suffer. Let us lay out the terms of the debate: (a) to be 'antirape': in the name of women's liberation (I add here: this demand for liberation only having meaning in a context of oppression being suffered); (b) to be 'the reverse,' thus 'for rape': in the name of antirepression (I add: of men; thus for the maintenance of the oppression-repression that they exercise over women).” (Emphasis mine.) When men “say that it poses a problem for them that a practice [of rape] (which we judge to be completely repressive) be repressed (forbidden and penalized if it takes place), what do they say except that they want to defend the freedom that men have at the present time to repress us by rape? What do they say except that what they call (their) freedom is the repression of our bodies?
In other words, the liberation that members aligned with the interests of the oppressed class argue for is fundamentally not the same as the liberation that members aligned with interests of the oppressor class argue for. In analyzing Foucault's politics of sexuality in the shadow of his 2021 pedophilia allegations, Stuart Jeffries characterized Foucaultian ideas of sexual liberation in terms of American neoliberalism that was a “cult of the self” composed of “French existentialism with an American free-market twist.” I've also personally drawn comparisons between neoliberalism and radqueer-style ideas of liberation: “'there should be no limit to how people identify' is like the same kind of logic neoliberals apply to state-imposed limits on the free market, except in this case, a community is treated as something like an authoritarian state, or at least something that threatens to become like one.”
To the extent that socially abusive deference politics have dominated radlib circles, this radqueer-like liberalism of fear is based in some truth—there is a problem of “the community” attempting to develop an authoritative monopoly over the limits of discourse in the name of preventing the greater cruelties of harm against “the most marginalized” groups. And part of conflating marginalization with minority status means that under deference politics, a deference politicker can argue that those who have the most minority status should get to claim authority over the limits of discourse—those who are marginalized by those who are already accepted by wider society as legitimately marginalized, those who coin new identities and get told they are invalid, should have the most authority. As much as they may claim affinity with projects of liberation by oppressed classes, their project of liberation is fundamentally wrapped up in the issue of wishing to seize (back) the authority that they feel is rightfully theirs from other marginalized people. And that logic, as narcissus of Judith's Dagger explains, closely mirrors that of rapists who feel like they are “taking power back from the object of their desire.” It's the “legitimately” marginalized people's fault for insisting on historically and materially grounded definitions of oppression, to name what an oppressed class' reality is “excluding” the oppressor class, don’t you know authority over the knowledge that constitutes reality is something we are all “equally” entitled to, don't you know it's your fault for trying to resist my right to authority, don’t you know I just want everyone to have this right, don't you know I just want “us” all to be free?
Again, free for what? To be as free from other people's authority as we want—nevermind that attempts to historically and materially ground oppression as a starting point of collective resistance, attempts of any oppressed group to call oppression for what it is, counts as authority too. Instead of a monopoly over what oppression is, let's turn oppression into a marketplace of ideas, where each of us will have the free choice of choosing how oppressed we want to feel, where everyone can call oppression whatever the hell they want.
I would wager that social media discourse is the primary arena of liberation for radlibs, and within that arena liberation can't mean anything besides freedom in relation to the limits of discourse. That's another reason why the liberalism of fear and deference politics have taken off so easily in radlib circles, because that's exactly the kind of liberation those politics function to serve—either the freedom to authoritatively cordon off any “bad” takes that fundamentally harm marginalized people, or the reactionary freedom from being defined as harmful to marginalized people in any capacity at all. The problem isn't that everyone or the Internet “sucks”—the problem isn't that everyone is too much of a dick to each other—the problem is that people are deliberately resisting any analysis of oppression beyond the most shallow and superficial understanding of “it's bad” and any oppressed group as “the ones that are good” (and the “most oppressed group” as “the one that is best”). The problem is that people just to be admitted into the category of goodness without having to fight for a place, without questioning whether perhaps it's the overly simplistic framework of goodness that got them there in the first place. Regardless of which hierarchy you align yourself with in order to gain entry into goodness—whether that's deference politics or radqueer-style neoliberalism—this overreliance on defending a status of personal goodness is the stumbling block that radlibs must get over if they wish to move towards radical and revolutionary politics. A radical politics goes to the root of oppression, and a revolutionary politics overturns the soil in which it grows. You must get to the root of what you understand to be “badness,” and you must realize that “good” is not overturning the soil. And once that is done, once you discover you are essentially left with nothing, that is when you can truly begin.
—parrhesia