Jacob Christensen

When I was a young student – back in the early 1980s – leftists has a favourite term they used when they wanted to denounce something or someone: It or he was fascist.

Deciding what was meant with fascist was a trickier matter. It often seemed to me that anything which didn’t adhere to the Marxist fashion of the day could qualify as fascist. Hitler, Mussolini and Franco – okay. But was Pinochet really a fascist? There were many reasons why I didn’t like the Chilean dictatorship but most of mine had with human rigths abuses to do and I was never convinced that Pinochet by close inspection would qualify as anything else than a military dictator.

Mogens Glistrup – a fascist? No, rather a confused right-wing libertarian who at a later stage embraced a rather distasteful form of xenophobia. Reagan as fascist? No, that misses the point completely.

The point of all of this is to send a message to the editor of Berlingske Tidende: Using the term kulturradikal to denounce people you don’t agree with may make you feel better, but please remember you’re not actually saying anything as long as you haven’t provided a reasonably precise definition of cultural radicalism. If you took the effort to do that, you would find that what is presented as cultural radicalism has very little to do with real-world phenomena in Danish politics.

And the same goes for Mainstream Media aka MSM, by the way.

Just as I would categorise anyone using the term fascism indiscriminately as a lazy Marxist, anyone using the terms kulturradikal and MSM are hereby awarded the status of intellectually lazy Conservative.

PS: If you’re familiar with discourse analysis, you will of cause know that terms such as fascist, kulturradikal and Mainstream Media can be seen as empty signifiers.