Lingua Franca | Is Bad Writing Necessary?

These are trying times for the left in America, which may be one reason why a bitter debate has erupted among avowedly left-wing academics and intellectuals over a venerable topic–”Politics and the English Language,” to borrow the title of George Orwell’s famous 1946 essay. Must one write clearly, as Orwell argued, or are thinkers who are truly radical and subversive compelled to write radically and subversively–or even opaquely, as if through a glass darkly? That is the question.