By Robby Soave
Wednesday, November 09, 2016
Many will say Trump won because he successfully
capitalized on blue collar workers' anxieties about immigration and
globalization. Others will say he won because America rejected a deeply
unpopular alternative. Still others will say the country is simply racist to
its core.
But there's another major piece of the puzzle, and it
would be a profound mistake to overlook it. Overlooking it was largely the
problem, in the first place.
Trump won because of a cultural issue that flies under
the radar and remains stubbornly difficult to define, but is nevertheless
hugely important to a great number of Americans: political correctness.
More specifically, Trump won because he convinced a great
number of Americans that he would destroy
political correctness.
I have tried to call attention to this issue for years. I
have warned that political correctness actually is a problem on college campuses, where the far-left has gained
institutional power and used it to punish people for saying or thinking the
wrong thing. And ever since Donald Trump became a serious threat to win the GOP
presidential primaries, I have warned that a lot of people, both on campus and
off it, were furious about
political-correctness-run-amok—so furious that they would give power to any man
who stood in opposition to it.
I have watched this play out on campus after campus. I
have watched dissident student groups invite Milo Yiannopoulos to speak—not
because they particularly agree with his views, but because he denounces
censorship and undermines political correctness. I have watched students cheer
his theatrics, his insulting behavior, and his narcissism solely because the
enforcers of campus goodthink are outraged by it. It's not about his ideas, or
policies. It's not even about him. It's about vengeance for social oppression.
Trump has done to America what Yiannopoulos did to
campus. This is a view Yiannopoulos shares. When I spoke with him about Trump's
success months ago, he told me, "Nobody votes for Trump or likes Trump on
the basis of policy positions. That's a misunderstanding of what the Trump
phenomenon is."
He described Trump as "an icon of irreverent
resistance to political correctness." Correctly, I might add.
What is political correctness? It's notoriously hard to
define. I recently appeared on a panel with CNN's Sally Kohn, who described
political correctness as being polite and having good manners. That's fine—it
can mean different things to different people. I like manners. I like being
polite. That's not what I'm talking about.
The segment of the electorate who flocked to Trump
because he positioned himself as "an icon of irreverent resistance to
political correctness" think it means this: smug, entitled, elitist, privileged leftists jumping down the
throats of ordinary folks who aren't up-to-date on the latest requirements of
progressive society.
Example: A lot of people think there are only two
genders—boy and girl. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe they should change that view.
Maybe it's insensitive to the trans community. Maybe it even flies in the face
of modern social psychology. But people think it. Political correctness is the
social force that holds them in contempt for that, or punishes them outright.
If you're a leftist reading this, you probably think
that's stupid. You probably can't understand why someone would get so bent out
of shape about being told their words are hurtful. You probably think it's not
a big deal and these people need to get over themselves. Who's the delicate snowflake now, huh? you're probably thinking.
I'm telling you: your failure to acknowledge this miscalculation and adjust
your approach has delivered the country to Trump.
There's a related problem: the boy-who-cried-wolf
situation. I was happy to see a few liberals, like Bill Maher, owning up to it.
Maher admitted during a recent show that he was wrong to treat George Bush,
Mitt Romney, and John McCain like they were apocalyptic threats to the nation:
it robbed him of the ability to treat Trump more seriously. The left said
McCain was a racist supported by racists, it said Romney was a racist supported
by racists, but when an actually racist Republican came along—and racists
cheered him—it had lost its ability to credibly make that accusation.
This is akin to the political-correctness-run-amok
problem: both are examples of the left's horrible over-reach during the Obama
years. The leftist drive to enforce a progressive social vision was relentless,
and it happened too fast. I don't say this because I'm opposed to that
vision—like most members of the under-30 crowd, I have no problem with gender
neutral pronouns—I say this because it inspired a backlash that gave us Trump.
My liberal critics rolled their eyes when I complained
about political correctness. I hope they see things a little more clearly now.
The left sorted everyone into identity groups and then told the people in the
poorly-educated-white-male identity group that that's the only bad one. It
mocked the members of this group mercilessly. It punished them for not being
woke enough. It called them racists. It said their video games were sexist. It
deployed Lena Dunham to tell them how horrible they were. Lena Dunham!
I warned that political-correctness-run-amok and liberal
overreach would lead to a counter-revolution if unchecked. That
counter-revolution just happened.
There is a cost to depriving people of the freedom (in
both the legal and social senses) to speak their mind. The presidency just went
to the guy whose main qualification, according to his supporters, is that he
isn't afraid to speak his.
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