Interesting piece. I was going to complain about your use of the term “anti-foundationalist” precisely on the grounds that Habermas would probably qualify, but is not a radical of the sort you describe. I think the term “postmodernist” is closer to the mark. Rorty, in a different way, illustrates the point that you can be an anti-foundationalist without giving up on liberal politics—his takedowns of the academic left are some of the best in memory.
Anyway, I think you’re missing a massively important part of the transmission belt, without which it would be impossible to make sense of what has happened to us. Postmodernist/critical theory has never dominated among the faculty, but it has been very influential among undergraduates and particularly in framing and shaping their political engagement, especially in campus activist groups. Among the student population, the balance shifted in their direction, and then that bled out into young professional circles in the real world. Mainstream liberals either dwindled in number or became quiet. And then this whole structure met with social media, which heavily empowered the more fringe voices.
Some sort of parallel radicalization was already happening on the right but, those same right fringes saw what was happening on the left, and the way it was becoming empowered not just in the media but in important institutions. They saw this and decided that leftists were abandoning the bounds of the liberal game—which, unfortunately, was completely true—and that they should rush to do the same. And so they did.
This was always a moronic approach for leftists to take. The right wing has several in built advantages over the left when it comes to illiberal movements. This is a minor repeat of the same follies as the interwar period. No lessons learned.
Thanks for this thoughtful response. Yes, perhaps "postmodernist" would have been a better term, though candidly any single rubric is contestable. You make a particularly excellent point about how "postmodernist/critical theory has never dominated among the faculty, but it has been very influential among undergraduates and particularly in framing and shaping their political engagement, especially in campus activist groups."
I don't have all the receipts on this, but I suspect that is also how these ideas migrated to the activist/MAGA right: not because a lot of rightwingers were reading Judith Butler and trying to figure out how to turn her ideas towards their own goals, but because they saw their leftist student rivals activating some of these ideas and figured out how to use the same methods to their own ends. But I haven't researched this point in any depth, so this is just a hypothesis.
I’ve found that naming the post-structuralist, anti-enlightenment… anti-epistemic movement is always hard because, well, they deny the very categories that a name implies. The fully-metastasized version denies that communication and categorization is even possible.
See DeBoer’s essay about “please just let me know what name to call this” justified rant, for example
Anti-vax shows that point where far-left meets far-right in it's anti-rational anti-authority oroborous, to use a clunky metaphor (and it was a Lefty thing bubbling up here in Cali well before the pandemic catalyzed it into an anti-gov position)
Horseshoe theory only works when you look at how the extreme ends of a political spectrum identify problems. Of course they will have issues with the centre, they would be at the ends if they didn’t. They can never be allies though because they will always have radically different solutions to the problems they agree on.
On the spectrum of authority, they will agree that the wrong people have authority, one group will want to centralize the other will want to distribute.
In terms of the anti-vax movements, I haven’t encountered one from the left in Canada the way you have in Cali. Our left seems more collectivist in orientation generally as opposed to individualist. The left’s opposition to vaccination has more to do with the private interests of pharmaceuticals rather than bodily autonomy. We’d rather see the companies come under democratic control and be directly accountable to the public in more ways than just market discipline.
The idea that there was a big leftwing antivax movement rests largely on a single data point (RFK, Jr whose status as a leftist depended entirely on sharing his name with his father) and a bunch of mostly apolitical people (the Cali types) mentioned above, whose general cultural vibe was leftish.
Perhaps the greatest irony of our times is that we live in a world in which the overwhelming majority of people are emphatically not and never have been imbued with post Enlightenment epistemic values. Most beliefs and values are not held for reasons so much as absorbed with mother's milk.
The Enlightenment critical mode of thinking and its powerful companion science transformed the world. It spawned all modern technology for good and ill - medicines and pollutants. As an on the ground reality and practice however for most people most of the time Reason is not a guide.
In this context Habermas's public sphere has always been, and still is, an elite mode of participation, almost a hobby, of a sub section of the well educated. This too proved influential but just as science changed the world without changing the structure of most minds, so did liberalism.
Crazy leftists who read too many French philosophers and get confused are indeed a distinct group. And they have undermined some academic disciplines (eg literary criticism). And they are very different from Marxists. And they don't have a coherent agenda because they are confused, how could they not be? But the key point is that whilst the form of their irrationality has pseudo intellectual underpinnings which 'informs' their newspeak The deeo structure of their irrationality is shared by the overwhelming majority of people on the planet. They can't actually argue their way out of a paper bag. For most people around the world this 'doesn't matter' and never had because they hold their unsubstantiated beliefs in common with others in their community.
What we are really facing is a presents revolt. Irrationality supercharged by online communications that explodes it beyond immediate context. This irrationality in the public sphere could not be exploited if it did not already exist in the private sphere. And today's mandarins didn't give a shit.
But can you establish a causal link between what “anti-foundationalists” were saying and what rightwingers are doing? Has Bannon read Derrida? If no, then shouldn’t the convergence of their ideas with dysfunctional current discourses be taken as an observation of a trend that turned out accurate rather than a cause of a social ill? And doesn’t more responsibility lie with the people who were in charge (liberals as you say) and (not too be too Marxist) forces that made tuition go up, the profession get adjunctized, etc.? Feels strange to minimize the agency of the roughly 80% of faculty and admin who weren’t radicals. But as a liberal myself, I think there’s a more productive way to look at how that enlightenment discourse was co-opted or purposefully blinded… and a more interesting historical question is in the divisions WITHIN the liberal order itself, which, again, was actually ascendant at this time
Thank you. This is an excellent summary of histories and positions.
However, I believe you are missing some points regarding what happened within certain STEM disciplines (my own: Computer Science), Economics and, above all, Business Administration.
IMHO, the debates you mentioned were and are mostly unknown in those places. Let us not forget what the overall discourse is in Business Schools, but, in several CS and Tech surroundings the ... myths of meritocracy (in the Young's sense) and of the "objectiveness" of technology are deeply rooted. Not that I object to objectiveness, but the indifference of many people in these fields to the wider world was always worrying to me.
"BigBalls" is a consequence of what you recounted and of this indifference.
I do think that this is unfair sorta to a lot of the work of the "epistemic radicals"; Derrida in particular cares a lot about truth and Enlightenment (see Christopher Norris' works on this), as are Deleuze and Lacan. A lot of that stuff was from popular misreadings in the 1990s, the new trend even in Continental philosophy is really a return to mathematics (Badiou) and natural science (the speculative realists like Brassier), even those treated like literary critics, like Derrida, now are read for their work on science eg. Derrida's Life Death
My feeling (which in your categorization would I suppose make me a Marxist) is that in the 50s/60s/70s academia was generally helping American capitalism/imperialism: physics majors working on nukes, aerospace people working on missiles, computer science people on missile guidance systems, biologists on growth hormones for farm animals, civil engineers building interstates, english profs on why the western canon was the best, etc etc. Then as the next generations of educated people saw how all this stuff was killing and exploiting people like crazy, they reacted against it (some more productively than others). And yet the same capitalists and imperialists still have all the money and now instead of getting cutting-edge technocrats out of universities they're getting people criticizing their whole project, so of course they would want to cut it loose.
I am looking back amazed. I read all of these forms in grad school, and learned under faculty associated with liberals and Marxists alike. I read Eliot and Eagleton and Pound and Fish and Fieldler and Furnas with equanimity. I understood their ideological pathways and just sort of took it in, dispassionate. It never once occurred to me that having engaged with these made me a representative of one or all, or in fact anything but a learner, because I naively thought that I was going to be an educator and teach "about" all of them the same way that, in Comparative Religion, I taught "about" religion without teaching religion. I taught undergraduates, and the project there seemed to be a widening of awareness rather than an inculcation of method. It was startling subsequently to be accused of being "one of those Marxist college professors." (Side note: now that I administer Federal funds in a non profit community health center, I was accused of being a Marxist bureaucrat by no less than Russ Vought himself, in a recent memo.)
In sharp contrast to those days, now I can't read substack posts from any of these viewpoints without feeling dismayed and upset. Almost as if I'm thinking, sh, sh, don't let THEM see that we have arch positions or even flirt with deconstruction; play the calm small-l liberal and they'll let us keep the undergraduate programs at least, right? Right? To my credit I only THINK this and don't write it.
Excellent framework. I can't help but think that the liberals are going to be taken down with the radical ship. I write a lot on AI's impact on higher ed, and one things is clear: there is no group that is standing up to defend and fight for the existence of university. The colliding crises from left, right, AI, budgets, demographics needs a defender but who? Not even the admin that run these places are willing.
Nils, why is the activist identitarian minority able to see the bullhorn so to speak?
Are the more mainstream academics afraid of them? Lacking in confidence or courage? Or do they just see that kind of academic political brawling as beneath them?
Brexit was a classic example of this.. the irresponsible virtue signalling left attacking a liberal institution, hoping to ride the populist wave but just being used as the weaker arm of a a rightist pincer.
Have a look at the origins of the neo-reactionary darling Nick Land in the mid-90s at Warwick University. The CCRU were 100% part of that radical activist-scholar stream, prone to quoting Deleuze and banging on about deterritorialisation, but with added doses of HP Lovecraft, cyberpunk, and drug / dance music culture. Exactly the kind of posturing most reactionaries and conservatives would hate - especially those who think post-modern theory is Communist.
It’s worth noting that the bulk of universities are not humanities departments. Science, medicine, engineering, business are largely uninterested in these debates. Most chemical engineers have not heard of Bruno Latour. I’m sure that someone somewhere is trying to “decolonize” Accounting & Finance 101 but, again, this is a niche concern.
Yes, among the scientists, liberalism is the overwhelming norm. They’re not going to be anti-scientific reactionaries…. But the culture war over academic radicalism doesn’t really implicate those fields, except now as collateral damage because of the false narrative that the Right has about universities now becoming the basis for a wholesale detonation of the funding structure
It would be niche, if not for the general education curriculum which is the menu of non-major courses every student must take. These can account for a year’s worth of college credit and they are not so much philosophically leftist as they are just plain-old low-rigor classes. Those teaching these courses often embrace Postmodernism because it offers a sophisticated way to mask a disdain for “Western” lesson plans and grading.
That’s a very sweeping claim that probably needs a bit of evidence to support it. Do most business studies graduates come out parroting Lyotard?
My experience is the UK and Australia so American may be different. But I don’t think it’s that different.
Shawn - It just sounds like there’s a bunch of people in your college that you don’t rate. Which is fine but, like I said, probably requires a bit more evidence to generalize from.
I enjoyed the essay, and think you tap into an underappreciated angle. I too was a graduate student in the 90s, and I find it remarkable and disorienting how the right has usurped the transgressive energy that was once the sole province of the left. No surprise, I guess, since it’s hard to be transgressive when you’re culturally and institutionally powerful and stuck defending the status quo. You mention lots of critical-theory types on the left. It’s also the science of philosophy literature that is being recycled. Even the replication crisis is a building block of the anti-establishment right (Yarwin uses it as a larger-than-life piece of his jigsaw puzzle). I’m not an historian, but perhaps for the first time in a hundred years the young right has the adrenaline-pumping transgressive energy on their side. I recently listened to Rufo being interviewed by Douthat. His critique of the CRT-left is perfectly reasonable, if a bit overblown. But now that he’s “advising” an actual administration, I am reminded of various communist projects from the not-too-distant past. Collectivist farms failed to meet their quotas not because central planners didn’t understand how the world works, but because the “deep state” somehow and somewhere were trying to sabotage things. I would bet on continuity rather than radical change, once the dust settles, but it’s impossible to know how much damage will be done before the new-right radicals are “consumed by their own politics.”
Nils: thank for this excellent essay. It describes well the kind of intellectual “laying down of arms” that I experienced in Australia, the U.S. and China (my area of interest) during the 1990s and thereafter. Friends of the “critical inquiry” persuasion rejected my alarm as they relativised and problematised themselves into intellectual impotence while at the same time some of them strived to become neoliberal academic managers. Many of my concerns were also informed by my work on intellectual history in the Chinese Republic (1920s to 40s) and the collapse of liberal humanists during the war and following the rise of the Communists, one that has dominated China ever since. You might get a kick out of my Contra Trump series:
Interesting piece. I was going to complain about your use of the term “anti-foundationalist” precisely on the grounds that Habermas would probably qualify, but is not a radical of the sort you describe. I think the term “postmodernist” is closer to the mark. Rorty, in a different way, illustrates the point that you can be an anti-foundationalist without giving up on liberal politics—his takedowns of the academic left are some of the best in memory.
Anyway, I think you’re missing a massively important part of the transmission belt, without which it would be impossible to make sense of what has happened to us. Postmodernist/critical theory has never dominated among the faculty, but it has been very influential among undergraduates and particularly in framing and shaping their political engagement, especially in campus activist groups. Among the student population, the balance shifted in their direction, and then that bled out into young professional circles in the real world. Mainstream liberals either dwindled in number or became quiet. And then this whole structure met with social media, which heavily empowered the more fringe voices.
Some sort of parallel radicalization was already happening on the right but, those same right fringes saw what was happening on the left, and the way it was becoming empowered not just in the media but in important institutions. They saw this and decided that leftists were abandoning the bounds of the liberal game—which, unfortunately, was completely true—and that they should rush to do the same. And so they did.
This was always a moronic approach for leftists to take. The right wing has several in built advantages over the left when it comes to illiberal movements. This is a minor repeat of the same follies as the interwar period. No lessons learned.
Thanks for this thoughtful response. Yes, perhaps "postmodernist" would have been a better term, though candidly any single rubric is contestable. You make a particularly excellent point about how "postmodernist/critical theory has never dominated among the faculty, but it has been very influential among undergraduates and particularly in framing and shaping their political engagement, especially in campus activist groups."
I don't have all the receipts on this, but I suspect that is also how these ideas migrated to the activist/MAGA right: not because a lot of rightwingers were reading Judith Butler and trying to figure out how to turn her ideas towards their own goals, but because they saw their leftist student rivals activating some of these ideas and figured out how to use the same methods to their own ends. But I haven't researched this point in any depth, so this is just a hypothesis.
I’ve found that naming the post-structuralist, anti-enlightenment… anti-epistemic movement is always hard because, well, they deny the very categories that a name implies. The fully-metastasized version denies that communication and categorization is even possible.
See DeBoer’s essay about “please just let me know what name to call this” justified rant, for example
Anti-vax shows that point where far-left meets far-right in it's anti-rational anti-authority oroborous, to use a clunky metaphor (and it was a Lefty thing bubbling up here in Cali well before the pandemic catalyzed it into an anti-gov position)
Horseshoe theory only works when you look at how the extreme ends of a political spectrum identify problems. Of course they will have issues with the centre, they would be at the ends if they didn’t. They can never be allies though because they will always have radically different solutions to the problems they agree on.
On the spectrum of authority, they will agree that the wrong people have authority, one group will want to centralize the other will want to distribute.
In terms of the anti-vax movements, I haven’t encountered one from the left in Canada the way you have in Cali. Our left seems more collectivist in orientation generally as opposed to individualist. The left’s opposition to vaccination has more to do with the private interests of pharmaceuticals rather than bodily autonomy. We’d rather see the companies come under democratic control and be directly accountable to the public in more ways than just market discipline.
The idea that there was a big leftwing antivax movement rests largely on a single data point (RFK, Jr whose status as a leftist depended entirely on sharing his name with his father) and a bunch of mostly apolitical people (the Cali types) mentioned above, whose general cultural vibe was leftish.
Terrific piece
Perhaps the greatest irony of our times is that we live in a world in which the overwhelming majority of people are emphatically not and never have been imbued with post Enlightenment epistemic values. Most beliefs and values are not held for reasons so much as absorbed with mother's milk.
The Enlightenment critical mode of thinking and its powerful companion science transformed the world. It spawned all modern technology for good and ill - medicines and pollutants. As an on the ground reality and practice however for most people most of the time Reason is not a guide.
In this context Habermas's public sphere has always been, and still is, an elite mode of participation, almost a hobby, of a sub section of the well educated. This too proved influential but just as science changed the world without changing the structure of most minds, so did liberalism.
Crazy leftists who read too many French philosophers and get confused are indeed a distinct group. And they have undermined some academic disciplines (eg literary criticism). And they are very different from Marxists. And they don't have a coherent agenda because they are confused, how could they not be? But the key point is that whilst the form of their irrationality has pseudo intellectual underpinnings which 'informs' their newspeak The deeo structure of their irrationality is shared by the overwhelming majority of people on the planet. They can't actually argue their way out of a paper bag. For most people around the world this 'doesn't matter' and never had because they hold their unsubstantiated beliefs in common with others in their community.
What we are really facing is a presents revolt. Irrationality supercharged by online communications that explodes it beyond immediate context. This irrationality in the public sphere could not be exploited if it did not already exist in the private sphere. And today's mandarins didn't give a shit.
Too much too long
Sorry
Once again great piece
Very much respect your work
But can you establish a causal link between what “anti-foundationalists” were saying and what rightwingers are doing? Has Bannon read Derrida? If no, then shouldn’t the convergence of their ideas with dysfunctional current discourses be taken as an observation of a trend that turned out accurate rather than a cause of a social ill? And doesn’t more responsibility lie with the people who were in charge (liberals as you say) and (not too be too Marxist) forces that made tuition go up, the profession get adjunctized, etc.? Feels strange to minimize the agency of the roughly 80% of faculty and admin who weren’t radicals. But as a liberal myself, I think there’s a more productive way to look at how that enlightenment discourse was co-opted or purposefully blinded… and a more interesting historical question is in the divisions WITHIN the liberal order itself, which, again, was actually ascendant at this time
Thank you. This is an excellent summary of histories and positions.
However, I believe you are missing some points regarding what happened within certain STEM disciplines (my own: Computer Science), Economics and, above all, Business Administration.
IMHO, the debates you mentioned were and are mostly unknown in those places. Let us not forget what the overall discourse is in Business Schools, but, in several CS and Tech surroundings the ... myths of meritocracy (in the Young's sense) and of the "objectiveness" of technology are deeply rooted. Not that I object to objectiveness, but the indifference of many people in these fields to the wider world was always worrying to me.
"BigBalls" is a consequence of what you recounted and of this indifference.
I do think that this is unfair sorta to a lot of the work of the "epistemic radicals"; Derrida in particular cares a lot about truth and Enlightenment (see Christopher Norris' works on this), as are Deleuze and Lacan. A lot of that stuff was from popular misreadings in the 1990s, the new trend even in Continental philosophy is really a return to mathematics (Badiou) and natural science (the speculative realists like Brassier), even those treated like literary critics, like Derrida, now are read for their work on science eg. Derrida's Life Death
Alcoholics can do lot of damage before they go sober.
My feeling (which in your categorization would I suppose make me a Marxist) is that in the 50s/60s/70s academia was generally helping American capitalism/imperialism: physics majors working on nukes, aerospace people working on missiles, computer science people on missile guidance systems, biologists on growth hormones for farm animals, civil engineers building interstates, english profs on why the western canon was the best, etc etc. Then as the next generations of educated people saw how all this stuff was killing and exploiting people like crazy, they reacted against it (some more productively than others). And yet the same capitalists and imperialists still have all the money and now instead of getting cutting-edge technocrats out of universities they're getting people criticizing their whole project, so of course they would want to cut it loose.
You might find this argument of interest: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/abs/cold-war-as-intellectual-force-field/69CAA8ADE3DF2EA57121B87E284BC67E
I am looking back amazed. I read all of these forms in grad school, and learned under faculty associated with liberals and Marxists alike. I read Eliot and Eagleton and Pound and Fish and Fieldler and Furnas with equanimity. I understood their ideological pathways and just sort of took it in, dispassionate. It never once occurred to me that having engaged with these made me a representative of one or all, or in fact anything but a learner, because I naively thought that I was going to be an educator and teach "about" all of them the same way that, in Comparative Religion, I taught "about" religion without teaching religion. I taught undergraduates, and the project there seemed to be a widening of awareness rather than an inculcation of method. It was startling subsequently to be accused of being "one of those Marxist college professors." (Side note: now that I administer Federal funds in a non profit community health center, I was accused of being a Marxist bureaucrat by no less than Russ Vought himself, in a recent memo.)
In sharp contrast to those days, now I can't read substack posts from any of these viewpoints without feeling dismayed and upset. Almost as if I'm thinking, sh, sh, don't let THEM see that we have arch positions or even flirt with deconstruction; play the calm small-l liberal and they'll let us keep the undergraduate programs at least, right? Right? To my credit I only THINK this and don't write it.
Save me from myself
Excellent framework. I can't help but think that the liberals are going to be taken down with the radical ship. I write a lot on AI's impact on higher ed, and one things is clear: there is no group that is standing up to defend and fight for the existence of university. The colliding crises from left, right, AI, budgets, demographics needs a defender but who? Not even the admin that run these places are willing.
This post very much brings to mind the following quote on the nature of the philosophical enterprise.
https://bsky.app/profile/lastpositivist.bsky.social/post/3lamsd652pc2t
Nils, why is the activist identitarian minority able to see the bullhorn so to speak?
Are the more mainstream academics afraid of them? Lacking in confidence or courage? Or do they just see that kind of academic political brawling as beneath them?
Mainstream academic liberals prefer to just win rather than wrestle with the pigs.
Brexit was a classic example of this.. the irresponsible virtue signalling left attacking a liberal institution, hoping to ride the populist wave but just being used as the weaker arm of a a rightist pincer.
Have a look at the origins of the neo-reactionary darling Nick Land in the mid-90s at Warwick University. The CCRU were 100% part of that radical activist-scholar stream, prone to quoting Deleuze and banging on about deterritorialisation, but with added doses of HP Lovecraft, cyberpunk, and drug / dance music culture. Exactly the kind of posturing most reactionaries and conservatives would hate - especially those who think post-modern theory is Communist.
Well, Lovecraft was a reactionary, cyberpunk was liberal or leftist, but what they really had in common was being loved by nerds.
It’s worth noting that the bulk of universities are not humanities departments. Science, medicine, engineering, business are largely uninterested in these debates. Most chemical engineers have not heard of Bruno Latour. I’m sure that someone somewhere is trying to “decolonize” Accounting & Finance 101 but, again, this is a niche concern.
Yes, among the scientists, liberalism is the overwhelming norm. They’re not going to be anti-scientific reactionaries…. But the culture war over academic radicalism doesn’t really implicate those fields, except now as collateral damage because of the false narrative that the Right has about universities now becoming the basis for a wholesale detonation of the funding structure
It would be niche, if not for the general education curriculum which is the menu of non-major courses every student must take. These can account for a year’s worth of college credit and they are not so much philosophically leftist as they are just plain-old low-rigor classes. Those teaching these courses often embrace Postmodernism because it offers a sophisticated way to mask a disdain for “Western” lesson plans and grading.
That’s a very sweeping claim that probably needs a bit of evidence to support it. Do most business studies graduates come out parroting Lyotard?
My experience is the UK and Australia so American may be different. But I don’t think it’s that different.
Shawn - It just sounds like there’s a bunch of people in your college that you don’t rate. Which is fine but, like I said, probably requires a bit more evidence to generalize from.
I enjoyed the essay, and think you tap into an underappreciated angle. I too was a graduate student in the 90s, and I find it remarkable and disorienting how the right has usurped the transgressive energy that was once the sole province of the left. No surprise, I guess, since it’s hard to be transgressive when you’re culturally and institutionally powerful and stuck defending the status quo. You mention lots of critical-theory types on the left. It’s also the science of philosophy literature that is being recycled. Even the replication crisis is a building block of the anti-establishment right (Yarwin uses it as a larger-than-life piece of his jigsaw puzzle). I’m not an historian, but perhaps for the first time in a hundred years the young right has the adrenaline-pumping transgressive energy on their side. I recently listened to Rufo being interviewed by Douthat. His critique of the CRT-left is perfectly reasonable, if a bit overblown. But now that he’s “advising” an actual administration, I am reminded of various communist projects from the not-too-distant past. Collectivist farms failed to meet their quotas not because central planners didn’t understand how the world works, but because the “deep state” somehow and somewhere were trying to sabotage things. I would bet on continuity rather than radical change, once the dust settles, but it’s impossible to know how much damage will be done before the new-right radicals are “consumed by their own politics.”
Nils: thank for this excellent essay. It describes well the kind of intellectual “laying down of arms” that I experienced in Australia, the U.S. and China (my area of interest) during the 1990s and thereafter. Friends of the “critical inquiry” persuasion rejected my alarm as they relativised and problematised themselves into intellectual impotence while at the same time some of them strived to become neoliberal academic managers. Many of my concerns were also informed by my work on intellectual history in the Chinese Republic (1920s to 40s) and the collapse of liberal humanists during the war and following the rise of the Communists, one that has dominated China ever since. You might get a kick out of my Contra Trump series:
https://chinaheritage.net/contra-trump-american-tedium/
Have you engaged with "epistemic radical" thought? Why would you call them relativists?
For my sins, I have spent a lot of time with that body of theory.
Relativist isn't quite an accurate label then, don't you think?