Spend enough time around academics, non-profit workers, liberal media people, and the like, and you’re bound to come across a curious social practice: the use of the word “right” as a filler word. I’m not talking about “right” as a form of conversational assent but rather the kind of “right?” that comes after a sentence or between sentences, appended unconsciously almost as rhetorical punctuation.

My sense is that this is indeed a segmented phenomenon: I don’t hear people on the Right or working-class people talking this way—though if you know of some examples, please send them my way. This is a professional-class liberal compulsion, one that is particularly rife in parts of the academy. If you happen to be in a room with academics in the humanities or social sciences in the near future, count how many times you hear ostensible statements end with the question, “right?” You will soon be unable to focus on content, transfixed by form.

“Like” is the filler word that I internalized as a younger person, secondary only to “um” as a verbal tic. My parents always hated it and would criticize it in the same vein as other bad teenage habits—posture, politeness, etc. But I was never so concerned about it, as “like,” if anything, signifies a certain self-conscious inexactitude in thought. It indicates self-doubt, which seems like a fine thing for verbal expression and something you try mostly to eliminate in the written form. A desire to root out “like” is also one to erase the appearance of uncertainty and possibly stupidity, but given how confidently and eloquently stupid ideas are conveyed today, I do wonder if “like” at least serves some protective function from the insipid, fast-talking internet cleverness that poses as intelligence. At least that’s what I tell myself!

“Right,” by contrast, indicates some shared consensus. It’s intrusive, asking one’s audience not for critical assessment (the attitude that academics ostensibly wish to cultivate in their students) but for on-the-spot agreement. In this sense, it’s immediately contradictory, but as with all everyday compulsions, it seems to bely some underlying repression. What is the latent content of the professional-class liberal’s manifest dream consensus?

In my experience, the prominence of “right?” is a phenomenon that’s come to the fore in the last 10-15 years, coinciding with the delegitimation of neoliberalism and increasing skepticism toward academia, the liberal NGOs, and the like. Not that long ago, going to university was seen as an obvious sign of social advancement, and material achievement coincided enough with college education that this belief was perfectly justified. Today, it’s common to see scathing criticisms of the university on both left and right, and that material promise is no longer what it was. “What is going on with/at universities?” is a question that everyone is asking, academics included. Something similar could be asked of the nebulous “third sector,” or anything remotely connected to the Democratic Party establishment.

In this situation of institutional instability and delegitimation, it makes sense that those clinging to its patronage would assert some certainty in fantasy that does not exist in reality. But this perhaps is the easy lesson, one that even an academic fresh off of peppering a fifteen minute talk with fifty “rights?” might assent to.

The more difficult conclusion is that the entire moral worldview of the professional-class liberal is so wildly out of line with existing political and social reality that compulsive self-affirmation is the only way that that worldview can sustain itself. “Right?” might then be seen as the ideological glue that holds together fragile perspectives that would otherwise be overwhelmed by the deluge of “Wrong!” 

Our friends at BungaCast have long diagnosed this illness as Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome (NOBS), an affliction that they primarily analyze in the media sphere but is of course just as applicable to academia and associated worlds. Out of joint with the world but still called to pontificate about it in public, the NOBS sufferer is bound to commit symptomatic parapraxes, of which “right?” seems to be the most intrusive.

At least that’s where I’ll land until I get inundated with clips of MAGA people speaking this way.

Benjamin Y. Fong writes about labor & logistics at On the Seams.