By David French
Tuesday, July 12, 2016
In the aftermath of both the Orlando and Dallas
massacres, millions of Americans have been absolutely dumbfounded at the
response of the Obama administration. In one instance, a Muslim man openly and
repeatedly pledged allegiance to ISIS. In the other, a black radical openly and
repeatedly declared his intention to kill police officers as retribution for
alleged police abuse. In both cases, the administration stated that it may be
difficult to discern the attacker’s true motives. Yet when Dylann Roof murdered
nine black Americans in Charleston, there was no reluctance to ascribe motive.
Why?
The obvious answer is “political correctness,” the
short-hand term not just for silly progressive rules of speech but also for the
persistent progressive habit of viewing all world events through the prism of
identity politics, with the white western (Christian) world the grand villain
of contemporary history.
The gut-instinct response to jihadist violence or, say,
violence at a Black Lives Matter event is to ask, “What did we do to trigger
this?” The gut-instinct response to violence or oppression perpetrated by white
authority figures such as police officers is to take it as confirmation of the
evils inherent in the system. This is why the truly politically correct are
never persuaded by those who complain of the double standard described above:
If you view the world as a conflict between villains and victims – between
oppressors and the oppressed – holding everyone to the same standards of
judgment and behavior merely perpetuates the oppression. To a certain kind of
progressive, white westerners have already proven that they can’t be trusted
with power, consumed as they are with racism, sexism, and homophobia.
While conservatives demand that progressives evaluate
similar situations using similar principles, many progressives believe that the
situations aren’t similar – that immediately granting the motives of men such
as Omar Mateen and Micah Johnson will feed the racist beast, while immediately
exposing the motives of men such as Roof will shame a racist culture. In either
case, the true villain remains the same.
It is difficult to overstate the extent to which this
world view depends not just on selective and false readings of history –
readings that ignore the power and true nature of non-western cultures and
empires – but also on large-scale stereotyping of the America (or Britain or
Europe) that exists outside progressives’ urban and academic strongholds. For
all too many progressives, “flyover country” is the home of the unthinking
conservative reactionary – the person who hates and fears “the other” and is
primed to explode in rage and violence when exposed to cultural or political
change. We are the seething mass.
The most effective response to the unreason and ignorance
of political correctness has always been reason and truth. The politically
correct reading of history is so staggeringly wrong, its assessment of man so
grotesquely off, that true debate feels almost unfair. For the politically
correct progressive, true debate is
unfair – so they do their best to shut it up and shout it down. When I was in
law school I once heard free speech derided as one of the “master’s tools” used
to build the “master’s house.” Can’t win a debate? End it.
The worst response to political correctness – one that is
tempting to the intemperate and seductive to the actual racist – is trolling,
by which you become the stereotype you claim to fight against. This is the
ethos of Donald Trump and his most loyal supporters: Infuriate your foe, never
back down from a fight, and never, ever apologize.
The result is a movement built on spite, in which the
desire to enrage progressives creates a continuous font of speech and conduct
that works mainly to confirm the progressive world view. In the name of defying
political correctness, Trump and his fans do absolutely nothing to temper the
worst progressive impulses and do much to appall and repulse everyone else.
They leave the American people without a morally defensible choice. It’s the
scold versus the asshole. The scold feels vindicated, the asshole feels
gleeful, and everyone else feels despair.
Make no mistake, Trump is not beating political
correctness; he’s feeding it. Every single time he insults women, attacks a
judge for his Mexican heritage, passes on anti-Semitic images created by white
supremacists, or indulges any of the other truly offensive reflexes that his
fans celebrate as proof of his “fearlessness,” he is doing nothing more than
providing the fuel for yet another decade’s politically correct fire. And by
tying the GOP to his own unreason and disregard for the truth, he’s yanking
from the Party of Lincoln its best tools for combating progressive narratives.
I can’t count the number of people who’ve told me they’re
for Trump because they’re “sick and tired of political correctness.” But
fighting back with vicious, aggressive stupidity won’t make America great
again. Why not answer progressives with our best arguments? Why not be
persistent and fearless in telling the truth? By trolling with Trump, instead,
we’re letting them win.
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