I was interested to see Wells note the inherent subjectivity and effective unfalsifiability, of offense-based standards; and the fact that cries of offense are generally a tool to shut up whoever is offending you; but even after quoting David Duke’s (more or less transparent; but not obviously incorrect) restatement of his goals in warm-and-fuzzy terms; not really go further on the troubling potential there(and, arguably, dismiss it “this populist perversion of reality”).
Once you appeal to subjective, unfalsifiable, emotional experience; particularly if it’s said to be only truly accessible to one of the correct life and cultural experience; you have a standard that is about as flexible as one could possibly want; and as easily accommodates your enemies as your allies. In many cases, it’s actually more useful for people defending positions of privilege; because the valorization of emotion allows you to shove any inconvenient factual issues into a shouting match over who has more and deeper feelz.
The intellectual honesty of people doing this can…um…vary widely; but it works: think of the “All lives matter” thing that arose as a counter to “Black lives matter”. It has the virtue of being true, reasonably noble sounding; can be demanded by anyone who is ‘offended’ by the narrow exclusivity of BLM; all while conveniently eliding the fact that we were talking about black lives specifically because they are the ones who get executed by the cops at a notably higher rate, specifically. If you had to argue the point; that would be a problem. If you can just be offended; and demand the adoption of a more inclusive phrase instead, you can ignore all those tedious empirical details while remaining fully in the language of inclusion. And, since trying to falsify people’s emotions is hard(and probably offensive in itself), questions about the honesty of your belief in this argument can be deflected by simply asserting the emotional strength of your attachment to it.
If you are interested in redressing the assorted real disadvantages of people really on the shit end of assorted power imbalances, adopting a subjective, emotional, standard might have been a good tactic at some point; but it’s hard to think of a worse strategy: since people often don’t care(or actively prefer) things that way; trying to hammer on the facts is an arduous business; but at least you have them. If the standard is affective experience, you might get a stronger case in the short term; but you are also appealing to something that everyone is well placed to make a claim to; and if someone has enough superior position to enjoy overt superiority in resource allocation, state force, etc. do you want to bet that your ability to get your feelings cared about will exceed his?
