Extract from The Guardian
For
25 years, invoking this vague and ever-shifting nemesis has been a
favourite tactic of the right – and Donald Trump’s victory is its
greatest triumph
Wednesday
30 November 2016 17.00 AEDT
Three
weeks ago, around a quarter of the American population elected a
demagogue with no prior experience in public service to the
presidency. In the eyes of many of his supporters, this lack of
preparation was not a liability, but a strength. Donald
Trump had run as a candidate whose primary qualification was
that he was not “a politician”. Depicting yourself as a
“maverick” or an “outsider” crusading against a corrupt
Washington establishment is the oldest trick in American politics –
but Trump took things further. He broke countless unspoken rules
regarding what public figures can or cannot do and say.
Every
demagogue needs an enemy. Trump’s was the ruling elite, and his
charge was that they were not only failing to solve the greatest
problems facing Americans, they were trying to stop anyone from even
talking about those problems. “The special interests, the arrogant
media, and the political insiders, don’t want me to talk about the
crime that is happening in our country,” Trump said in one late
September speech. “They want me to just go along with the same
failed policies that have caused so much needless suffering.”
Trump
claimed that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were willing to let
ordinary Americans suffer because their first priority was political
correctness. “They have put political correctness above common
sense, above your safety, and above all else,” Trump declared after
a Muslim gunman killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. “I
refuse to be politically correct.” What liberals might have seen as
language changing to reflect an increasingly diverse society – in
which citizens attempt to avoid giving needless offence to one
another – Trump saw a conspiracy.
Throughout
an erratic campaign, Trump consistently blasted political
correctness, blaming it for an extraordinary range of ills and using
the phrase to deflect any and every criticism. During the first
debate of the Republican primaries, Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked
Trump how he would answer the charge that he was “part of the war
on women”.
“You’ve
called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’
and ‘disgusting animals’,” Kelly pointed out. “You once told
a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to
see her on her knees …”
“I
think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,”
Trump answered, to audience applause. “I’ve been challenged by so
many people, I don’t frankly have time for total political
correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have
time either.”
Trump
used the same defence when critics raised questions about his
statements on immigration. In June 2015, after Trump referred to
Mexicans as “rapists”, NBC, the network that aired his reality
show The Apprentice, announced that it was ending
its relationship with him. Trump’s team retorted that, “NBC
is weak, and like everybody else is trying to be politically
correct.”
In
August 2016, after saying that the US district judge Gonzalo Curiel
of San Diego was unfit
to preside over the lawsuit against Trump Universities
because he was Mexican American and therefore likely to be biased
against him, Trump
told CBS News that this was “common sense”. He
continued: “We have to stop being so politically correct in this
country.” During
the second presidential debate, Trump answered a question about his
proposed “ban on Muslims” by stating: “We
could be very politically correct, but whether we like it or not,
there is a problem.”
Trump
and his followers never defined 'political correctness”, or
specified who was enforcing it. They did not have to
Every
time Trump said something “outrageous” commentators suggested he
had finally crossed a line and that his campaign was now doomed. But
time and again, Trump supporters made it clear that they liked him
because he wasn’t afraid to say what he thought. Fans praised
the way Trump
talked much more often than they mentioned his policy proposals. He
tells it like it is, they said. He speaks his mind. He is not
politically correct.
Trump
and his followers never defined “political correctness”, or
specified who was enforcing it. They did not have to. The phrase
conjured powerful forces determined to suppress inconvenient truths
by policing language.
There
is an obvious contradiction involved in complaining at length, to an
audience of hundreds of millions of people, that you are being
silenced. But this idea – that there is a set of powerful, unnamed
actors, who are trying to control everything you do, right down to
the words you use – is trending globally right now. Britain’s
rightwing tabloids issue frequent denunciations of “political
correctness gone mad” and rail against the smug hypocrisy of the
“metropolitan elite”. In Germany, conservative journalists and
politicians are making similar complaints: after the assaults on
women in Cologne last New Year’s Eve, for instance, the chief of
police Rainer Wendt said that leftists pressuring officers to
be politisch
korrekt had
prevented them from doing their jobs. In France, Marine Le Pen of the
Front National has condemned more traditional conservatives as
“paralysed
by their fear of confronting political correctness”.
Trump’s
incessant repetition of the phrase has led many writers since the
election to argue that the secret to his victory was a backlash
against excessive “political correctness”. Some have argued that
Hillary Clinton failed because she was too invested in that close
relative of political correctness, “identity politics”. But upon
closer examination, “political correctness” becomes an impossibly
slippery concept. The term is what Ancient Greek rhetoricians would
have called an “exonym”: a term for another group, which signals
that the speaker does not belong to it. Nobody ever describes
themselves as “politically correct”. The phrase is only ever an
accusation.
If
you say that something is technically correct,
you are suggesting that it is wrong – the adverb before “correct”
implies a “but”. However, to say that a statement
is politically correct
hints at something more insidious. Namely, that the speaker is acting
in bad faith. He or she has ulterior motives, and is hiding the truth
in order to advance an agenda or to signal moral superiority. To say
that someone is being “politically correct” discredits them
twice. First, they are wrong. Second, and more damningly, they know
it.
If
you go looking for the origins of the phrase, it becomes clear that
there is no neat history of political correctness. There have only
been campaigns against something
called “political correctness”. For 25 years, invoking this vague
and ever-shifting enemy has been a favourite tactic of the right.
Opposition to political correctness has proved itself a highly
effective form of crypto-politics. It transforms the political
landscape by acting as if it is not political at all. Trump is the
deftest practitioner of this strategy yet.
Most
Americans had never heard the phrase “politically correct” before
1990, when a wave of stories began to appear in newspapers and
magazines. One of the first and most influential was published in
October 1990 by the New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein, who
warned – under the headline “The
Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct” – that the
country’s universities were threatened by “a growing intolerance,
a closing of debate, a pressure to conform”.
Bernstein
had recently returned from Berkeley, where he had been reporting on
student activism. He wrote that there was an “unofficial ideology
of the university”, according to which “a cluster of opinions
about race, ecology, feminism, culture and foreign policy defines a
kind of ‘correct’ attitude toward the problems of the world”.
For instance, “Biodegradable garbage bags get the PC seal of
approval. Exxon does not.”
Bernstein’s
alarming dispatch in America’s paper of record set off a chain
reaction, as one mainstream publication after another rushed to
denounce this new trend. The following month, the Wall Street Journal
columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz decried the “brave new world of
ideological zealotry” at American universities. In December, the
cover of Newsweek – with a circulation of more than 3 million –
featured the headline “THOUGHT POLICE” and yet another ominous
warning: “There’s a ‘politically correct’ way to talk about
race, sex and ideas. Is this the New Enlightenment – or the New
McCarthyism?” A similar story graced the cover of New
York magazine in January 1991– inside, the magazine proclaimed
that “The New Fascists” were taking over universities. In April,
Time magazine reported on “a new intolerance” that was on the
rise across campuses nationwide.
If
you search ProQuest, a digital database of US magazines and
newspapers, you find that the phrase “politically correct” rarely
appeared before 1990. That year, it turned up more than 700 times. In
1991, there are more than 2,500 instances. In 1992, it appeared more
than 2,800 times. Like Indiana Jones movies, these pieces called up
enemies from a melange of old wars: they compared the “thought
police” spreading terror on university campuses to fascists,
Stalinists, McCarthyites, “Hitler Youth”, Christian
fundamentalists, Maoists and Marxists.
Many
of these articles recycled the same stories of campus controversies
from a handful of elite universities, often exaggerated or stripped
of context. The New York magazine cover story opened with an account
of a Harvard history professor, Stephan Thernstrom, being attacked by
overzealous students who felt he had been racially insensitive:
“Whenever he walked through the campus that spring, down Harvard’s
brick paths, under the arched gates, past the fluttering elms, he
found it hard not to imagine the pointing fingers, the whispers.
Racist. There goes the
racist.
It was hellish, this persecution.”
In an
interview that appeared soon afterwards in The Nation, Thernstrom
said the harassment described in the New York article had never
happened. There had been one editorial in the Harvard Crimson student
newspaper criticising his decision to read extensively from the
diaries of plantation owners in his lectures. But the description of
his harried state was pure “artistic licence”. No matter: the
image of college students conducting witch hunts stuck. When Richard
Bernstein published a book based on his New York Times reporting on
political correctness, he called it Dictatorship of Virtue:
Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future – a title
alluding to the Jacobins of the French Revolution. In the book he
compared American college campuses to France during the Reign of
Terror, during which tens of thousands of people were executed within
months.
None
of the stories that introduced the menace
of political correctness could
pinpoint where or when it had begun. Nor were they very precise when
they explained the origins of the phrase itself. Journalists
frequently mentioned the Soviets – Bernstein observed that the
phrase “smacks of Stalinist orthodoxy”– but there is no exact
equivalent in Russian. (The closest would be “ideinost”,
which translates as “ideological correctness”. But that word has
nothing to do with disadvantaged people or minorities.) The
intellectual historian LD Burnett has found scattered examples of
doctrines or people being described as “politically correct” in
American communist publications from the 1930s – usually, she says,
in a tone of mockery.
The
phrase came into more widespread use in American leftist circles in
the 1960s and 1970s – most likely as an ironic borrowing from Mao,
who delivered a famous speech in 1957 that was translated into
English with the title “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions
Among the People”.
Until
the late 1980s, 'political correctness' was used exclusively within
the left, and almost always ironically
Ruth
Perry, a literature professor at MIT who was active in the feminist
and civil rights movements, says that many radicals were reading the
Little Red Book in the late 1960s and 1970s, and surmises that her
friends may have picked up the adjective “correct” there. But
they didn’t use it in the way Mao did. “Politically correct”
became a kind of in-joke among American leftists – something you
called a fellow leftist when you thought he or she was being
self-righteous. “The term was always used ironically,” Perry
says, “always calling attention to possible dogmatism.”
In
1970, the African-American author and activist Toni Cade Bambara,
used the phrase in an essay about strains on gender relations within
her community. No matter how “politically correct” her male
friends thought they were being, she wrote many of them were failing
to recognise the plight of black women.
Until
the late 1980s, “political correctness” was used exclusively
within the left, and almost always ironically as a critique of
excessive orthodoxy. In fact, some of the first people to organise
against “political correctness” were a group of feminists who
called themselves the Lesbian Sex Mafia. In 1982, they held a
“Speakout on Politically Incorrect Sex” at a theatre in New
York’s East Village – a rally against fellow feminists who had
condemned pornography and BDSM. Over 400 women attended, many of them
wearing leather and collars, brandishing nipple clamps and dildos.
The writer and activist Mirtha Quintanales summed up the mood when
she told the audience, “We need to have dialogues about S&M
issues, not about what is ‘politically correct, politically
incorrect’.”
By
the end of the 1980s, Jeff Chang, the journalist and hip-hop critic,
who has written extensively on race and social justice, recalls that
the activists he knew then in the Bay Area used the phrase “in
a jokey way – a way for one sectarian to dismiss another
sectarian’s line”.
But
soon enough, the term was rebranded by the right, who turned its
meaning inside out. All of a sudden, instead of being a phrase that
leftists used to check dogmatic tendencies within their movement,
“political correctness” became a talking point for
neoconservatives. They said that PC constituted a leftwing political
programme that was seizing control of American universities and
cultural institutions – and they were determined to stop it.
The
right had been waging a campaign against liberal academics for more
than a decade. Starting in the mid-1970s, a handful of conservative
donors had funded the creation of dozens of new thinktanks and
“training institutes” offering programmes in everything from
“leadership” to broadcast journalism to direct-mail fundraising.
They had endowed fellowships for conservative graduate students,
postdoctoral positions and professorships at prestigious
universities. Their stated goal was to challenge what they saw as the
dominance of liberalism and attack left-leaning tendencies within the
academy.
Starting
in the late 1980s, this well-funded conservative movement entered the
mainstream with a series of improbable bestsellers that took aim at
American higher education. The first, by the University of Chicago
philosophy professor Allan Bloom, came out in 1987. For hundreds of
pages, The Closing of the American Mind argued that colleges were
embracing a shallow “cultural relativism” and abandoning
long-established disciplines and standards in an attempt to appear
liberal and to pander to their students. It sold more than 500,000
copies and inspired numerous imitations.
In
April 1990, Roger Kimball, an editor at the conservative journal, The
New Criterion, published Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted
our Higher Education. Like Bloom, Kimball argued that an “assault
on the canon” was taking place and that a “politics of
victimhood” had paralysed universities. As evidence, he cited the
existence of departments such as African American studies and women’s
studies. He scornfully quoted the titles of papers he had heard at
academic conferences, such as “Jane Austen and the Masturbating
Girl” or “The Lesbian Phallus: Does Heterosexuality Exist?”
In
June 1991, the young Dinesh D’Souza followed Bloom and Kimball with
Illiberal Education: the Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. Whereas
Bloom had bemoaned the rise of relativism and Kimball had attacked
what he called “liberal fascism”, and what he considered
frivolous lines of scholarly inquiry, D’Souza argued that
admissions policies that took race into consideration were producing
a “new segregation on campus” and “an attack on academic
standards”. The Atlantic printed a 12,000 word excerpt as its June
cover story. To coincide with the release, Forbes ran another article
by D’Souza with the title: “Visigoths in Tweed.”
These
books did not emphasise the phrase “political correctness”, and
only D’Souza used the phrase directly. But all three came to be
regularly cited in the flood of anti-PC articles that appeared in
venues such as the New York Times and Newsweek. When they did, the
authors were cited as neutral authorities. Countless articles
uncritically repeated their arguments.
In
some respects, these books and articles were responding to genuine
changes taking place within academia. It is true that scholars had
become increasingly sceptical about whether it was possible to talk
about timeless, universal truths that lay beyond language and
representation. European theorists who became influential in US
humanities departments during the 1970s and 1980s argued that
individual experience was shaped by systems of which the individual
might not be aware – and particularly by language. Michel Foucault,
for instance, argued that all knowledge expressed historically
specific forms of power. Jacques Derrida, a frequent target of
conservative critics, practised what he called “deconstruction”,
rereading the classics of philosophy in order to show that even the
most seemingly innocent and straightforward categories were riven
with internal contradictions. The value of ideals such as “humanity”
or “liberty” could not be taken for granted.
It
was also true that many universities were creating new “studies
departments”, which interrogated the experiences, and emphasised
the cultural contributions of groups that had previously been
excluded from the academy and from the canon: queer people, people of
colour and women. This was not so strange. These departments
reflected new social realities. The demographics of college students
were changing, because the demographics of the United States were
changing. By 1990, only two-thirds of Americans under 18 were white.
In California, the freshman classes at many public universities were
“majority minority”, or more than 50% non-white. Changes to
undergraduate curriculums reflected changes in the student
population.
The
responses that the conservative bestsellers offered to the changes
they described were disproportionate and often misleading. For
instance, Bloom complained at length about the “militancy” of
African American students at Cornell University, where he had taught
in the 1960s. He never mentioned what students demanding the creation
of African American studies were responding to: the biggest protest
at Cornell took place in 1969 after
a cross burning on campus, an open KKK threat. (An arsonist
burned down the Africana Studies Center, founded in response to these
protests, in 1970.)
More
than any particular obfuscation or omission, the most misleading
aspect of these books was the way they claimed that only their
adversaries were “political”. Bloom, Kimball, and D’Souza
claimed that they wanted to “preserve the humanistic tradition”,
as if their academic foes were vandalising a canon that had been
enshrined since time immemorial. But canons and curriculums have
always been in flux; even in white Anglo-America there has never been
any one stable tradition. Moby Dick was dismissed as Herman
Melville’s worst book until the mid-1920s. Many universities had
only begun offering literature courses in “living” languages a
decade or so before that.
In
truth, these crusaders against political correctness were every bit
as political as their opponents. As Jane Mayer documents in her book,
Dark Money: the Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of
the Radical Right, Bloom and D’Souza were funded by networks of
conservative donors – particularly the Koch, Olin and Scaife
families – who had spent the 1980s building programmes that they
hoped would create a new “counter-intelligentsia”. (The New
Criterion, where Kimball worked, was also funded by the Olin and
Scaife Foundations.) In
his 1978 book A Time for Truth, William Simon, the president of the
Olin Foundation, had called on conservatives to fund intellectuals
who shared their views: “They must be given grants, grants, and
more grants in exchange for books, books, and more books.”
These
skirmishes over syllabuses were part of a broader political programme
– and they became instrumental to forging a new alliance for
conservative politics in America, between white working-class voters
and small business owners, and politicians with corporate agendas
that held very little benefit for those people.
By
making fun of professors who spoke in language that most people
considered incomprehensible (“The Lesbian Phallus”), wealthy Ivy
League graduates could pose as anti-elite. By mocking courses on
writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, they made a racial
appeal to white people who felt as if they were losing their country.
As the 1990s wore on, because multiculturalism was associated with
globalisation – the force that was taking away so many jobs
traditionally held by white working-class people – attacking it
allowed conservatives to displace responsibility for the hardship
that many of their constituents were facing. It was not the slashing
of social services, lowered taxes, union busting or outsourcing that
was the cause of their problems. It was those foreign “others”.
PC
was a useful invention for the Republican right because it helped the
movement to drive a wedge between working-class people and the
Democrats who claimed to speak for them. “Political correctness”
became a term used to drum into the public imagination the idea that
there was a deep divide between the “ordinary people” and the
“liberal elite”, who sought to control the speech and thoughts of
regular folk. Opposition
to political correctness also became a way to rebrand racism in ways
that were politically acceptable in the post-civil-rights era.
Soon,
Republican politicians were echoing on the national stage the message
that had been product-tested in the academy. In May 1991, President
George HW Bush gave a commencement speech at the University of
Michigan. In it, he identified political correctness as a major
danger to America. “Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our
Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the
United States,” Bush said. “The notion of political correctness
has ignited controversy across the land,” but, he warned, “In
their own Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behaviour crush
diversity in the name of diversity.”
After
2001, debates about political correctness faded from public view,
replaced by arguments about Islam and terrorism. But in the final
years of the Obama presidency, political correctness made a comeback.
Or rather, anti-political-correctness did.
As
Black Lives Matter and movements against sexual violence gained
strength, a spate of thinkpieces attacked the participants in these
movements, criticising and trivialising them by saying that they were
obsessed with policing speech. Once again, the conversation initially
focused on universities, but the buzzwords were new. Rather than
“difference” and “multiculturalism”, Americans in 2012 and
2013 started hearing about “trigger warnings”, “safe spaces”,
“microaggressions”, “privilege” and “cultural
appropriation”.
This
time, students received more scorn than professors. If the first
round of anti-political-correctness evoked the spectres of
totalitarian regimes, the more recent revival has appealed to the
commonplace that millennials are spoiled narcissists, who want to
prevent anyone expressing opinions that they happen to find
offensive.
In
January 2015, the writer Jonathan Chait published one of the first
new, high-profile anti-PC thinkpieces in New York magazine. “Not
a Very PC Thing to Say” followed the blueprint provided by the
anti-PC thinkpieces that the New York Times, Newsweek, and indeed New
York magazine had published in the early 1990s. Like the New York
article from 1991, it began with an anecdote set on campus that
supposedly demonstrated that political correctness had run amok, and
then extrapolated from this incident to a broad generalisation. In
1991, John Taylor wrote: “The new fundamentalism has concocted a
rationale for dismissing all dissent.” In 2015, Jonathan Chait
claimed that there were once again “angry mobs out to crush
opposing ideas”.
Chait
warned that the dangers of PC had become greater than ever before.
Political correctness was no longer confined to universities – now,
he argued, it had taken over social media and thus “attained an
influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of
the old”. (As evidence of the “hegemonic” influence enjoyed by
unnamed actors on the left, Chait cited two female journalists saying
that they had been criticised by leftists on Twitter.)
Chait’s
article launched a spate of replies about campus and social media
“cry bullies”. On the cover of their September 2015 issue, the
Atlantic published an article by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff.
The title, “The
Coddling Of the American Mind”, nodded to the godfather of
anti-PC, Allan Bloom. (Lukianoff is the head of the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education another organisation funded by the
Olin and Scaife families.) “In the name of emotional wellbeing,
college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and
ideas they don’t like,” the article announced. It was shared over
500,000 times.
The
climate of digital journalism and social media sharing enabled the
anti-political-correctness stories to spread
These
pieces committed many of the same fallacies that their predecessors
from the 1990s had. They cherry-picked anecdotes and caricatured the
subjects of their criticism. They complained that other people were
creating and enforcing speech codes, while at the same time
attempting to enforce their own speech codes. Their writers
designated themselves the arbiters of what conversations or political
demands deserved to be taken seriously, and which did not. They
contradicted themselves in the same way: their authors continually
complained, in highly visible publications, that they were being
silenced.
The
climate of digital journalism and social media sharing enabled the
anti-political-correctness (and anti-anti-political correctness)
stories to spread even further and faster than they had in the 1990s.
Anti-PC and anti-anti-PC stories come cheap: because they concern
identity, they are something that any writer can have a take on,
based on his or her experiences, whether or not he or she has the
time or resources to report. They are also perfect clickbait. They
inspire outrage, or outrage at the outrage of others.
Meanwhile,
a strange convergence was taking place. While Chait and his fellow
liberals decried political correctness, Donald Trump and his
followers were doing the same thing. Chait said that leftists were
“perverting liberalism” and appointed himself the defender of a
liberal centre; Trump said that liberal media had the system
“rigged”.
The
anti-PC liberals were so focused on leftists on Twitter that for
months they gravely underestimated the seriousness of the real threat
to liberal discourse. It was not coming from women, people of colour,
or queer people organising for their civil rights, on campus or
elsewhere. It was coming from @realdonaldtrump, neo-Nazis, and
far-right websites such as Breitbart.
The
original critics of PC were academics or shadow-academics, Ivy League
graduates who went around in bow ties quoting Plato and Matthew
Arnold. It is hard to imagine Trump quoting Plato or Matthew Arnold,
much less carping about the titles of conference papers by literature
academics. During his campaign, the network of donors who funded
decades of anti-PC activity – the Kochs, the Olins, the Scaifes –
shunned Trump, citing concerns about the populist promises he was
making. Trump came from a different milieu: not Yale or the
University of Chicago, but reality television. And he was picking
different fights, targeting the media and political establishment,
rather than academia.
As a
candidate, Trump inaugurated a new phase of
anti-political-correctness. What was remarkable was just how many
different ways Trump deployed this tactic to his advantage, both
exploiting the tried-and-tested methods of the early 1990s and adding
his own innovations.
First,
by talking incessantly about political correctness, Trump established
the myth that he had dishonest and powerful enemies who wanted to
prevent him from taking on the difficult challenges facing the
nation. By claiming that he was being silenced, he created a drama in
which he could play the hero. The notion that Trump was both
persecuted and heroic
was crucial to his emotional appeal. It allowed people who were
struggling economically or angry about the way society was changing
to see themselves in him, battling against a rigged system that made
them feel powerless and devalued. At the same time, Trump’s swagger
promised that they were strong and entitled to glory. They were great
and would be great again.
Second,
Trump did not simply criticise the idea of political correctness –
he actually said and did the kind of outrageous things that PC
culture supposedly prohibited. The first wave of conservative critics
of political correctness claimed they were defending the status quo,
but Trump’s mission was to destroy it. In 1991, when George HW Bush
warned that political correctness was a threat to free speech, he did
not choose to exercise his free speech rights by publicly mocking a
man with a disability or characterising Mexican immigrants as
rapists. Trump did. Having elevated the powers of PC to mythic
status, the draft-dodging billionaire, son of a slumlord, taunted the
parents of a fallen soldier and claimed that his cruelty and malice
was, in fact, courage.
This
willingness to be more outrageous than any previous candidate ensured
non-stop media coverage, which in turn helped Trump attract
supporters who agreed with what he was saying. We should not
underestimate how many Trump supporters held views that were sexist,
racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic, and were thrilled to feel that
he had given them permission to say so. It’s an old trick: the
powerful encourage the less powerful to vent their rage against those
who might have been their allies, and to delude themselves into
thinking that they have been liberated. It costs the powerful
nothing; it pays frightful dividends.
Trump
drew upon a classic element of anti-political-correctness by implying
that while his opponents were operating according to a political
agenda, he simply wanted to do what was sensible. He made numerous
controversial policy proposals: deporting millions of undocumented
immigrants, banning Muslims from entering the US, introducing
stop-and-frisk policies that have been ruled unconstitutional. But by
responding to critics with the accusation that they were simply being
politically correct, Trump attempted to place these proposals beyond
the realm of politics altogether. Something political is something
that reasonable people might disagree about. By using the adjective
as a put-down, Trump pretended that he was acting on truths so
obvious that they lay beyond dispute. “That’s just common sense.”
The
most alarming part of this approach is what it implies about Trump’s
attitude to politics more broadly. His contempt for political
correctness looks a lot like contempt for politics itself. He does
not talk about diplomacy; he talks about “deals”. Debate and
disagreement are central to politics, yet Trump has made clear that
he has no time for these distractions. To play the
anti-political-correctness card in response to a legitimate question
about policy is to shut down discussion in much the same way that
opponents of political correctness have long accused liberals and
leftists of doing. It is a way of sidestepping debate by declaring
that the topic is so trivial or so contrary to common sense that it
is pointless to discuss it. The impulse is authoritarian. And by
presenting himself as the champion of common sense, Trump gives
himself permission to bypass politics altogether.
Now
that he is president-elect, it is unclear whether Trump meant many of
the things he said during his campaign. But, so far, he is fulfilling
his pledge to fight political correctness. Last week, he told the New
York Times that he was trying to build an administration filled with
the “best people”, though “Not necessarily people that will be
the most politically correct people, because that hasn’t been
working.”
Trump
has also continued to cry PC in response to criticism. When an
interviewer from Politicoasked
a Trump transition team member why Trump was appointing so many
lobbyists and political insiders, despite having pledged to “drain
the swamp” of them, the source said that “one of the most
refreshing parts of … the whole Trump style is that he does not
care about political correctness.” Apparently it would have been
politically correct to hold him to his campaign promises.
As
Trump prepares to enter the White House, many pundits have concluded
that “political correctness” fuelled the populist backlash
sweeping Europe and the US. The leaders of that backlash may say so.
But the truth is the opposite: those leaders understood the power
that anti-political-correctness has to rally a class of voters,
largely white, who are disaffected with the status quo and resentful
of shifting cultural and social norms. They were not reacting to the
tyranny of politically correctness, nor were they returning America
to a previous phase of its history. They were not taking anything
back. They were wielding anti-political-correctness as a weapon,
using it to forge a new political landscape and a frightening future.
The
opponents of political correctness always said they were crusaders
against authoritarianism. In fact, anti-PC has paved the way for the
populist authoritarianism now spreading everywhere. Trump is
anti-political correctness gone mad.
