polemicist
(pəlemɪsɪst)
Word forms: polemicists
countable noun
A polemicist is someone who is skilled at arguing very strongly for or against a belief or opinion.
Life in a small state can be confining. In that respect there’s only a small difference between my own country of Switzerland, and my home of choice, Estonia. Neither environment reacts well to people rocking the boat, and one of the most common responses barked back at their more plain-spoken political and social critics typically goes something like, ‘Well if it’s so terrible, why don’t you just leave?’
Or, better yet—they’re told that since they [have no degree in the subject matter in question; make no better suggestion how to solve the problem they’re talking about—substitute at leisure any cheap excuse not to have to debate the troublemaker], they might as well keep their mouth shut.
There’s an argument to be made in favour of both polemicism and populism, at least up to a point: if a democratic state’s public discourse can’t handle a degree of discontent—and a number of malcontents that keep pointing to the less than enthusiastically discussed problems, whether of a political, economic, or social nature—it is, quite plainly, done for, at least in democratic terms.
If we take the notion of democracy and debate seriously, then every single individual has both the right and the duty to speak up and call fraud and bullshit whenever they encounter it. Without these canaries in the coal mine, a creeping decline of democracy, and an increasingly rigid attitude leaning towards indoctrination rather than dialogue will inevitably follow.
A polemicist, in that sense, isn’t just a bothersome loudmouth, but tends to expose both the weaknesses in the opposing side’s reasoning as well as attempts at keeping uncomfortable topics quiet.
Which is why they’re needed—even more so in today’s Western society, where the requirement to be nice to one another is slowly becoming the most important tool of those trying to silence opposing points of view.
