In December of last year, at a town hall in Wisconsin with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Bernie Sanders was asked why Donald Trump had been so successful in the 2016 election. Sanders, regarded by many to be the savior of the Democratic Party (of which he is not formally a member), gave a surprising answer: “I think he said he will not be politically correct. I think he said some outrageous and painful things, but I think people are tired of the same old politically correct rhetoric.”
Pushed on the definition of “politically correct,” Sanders continued: “It means you have a set of talking points which have been poll-tested and focus-group-tested and that’s what you say rather than what’s really going on. And often, what you are not allowed to say are things which offend very powerful people.”
Implicit in Sanders’ answer, whether he meant it or not, is an endorsement of Trumpism. If political correctness is calculated and disingenuous, then those who condemn political correctness are saying things that, somewhere deep inside, we all believe to be true but are afraid to say.
Donald Trump isn’t afraid to call it how we all apparently see it: most Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals. In this world, all men think about sexually assaulting women, only the courageous say it out loud. This framework renders the claims of one side to be objective realities, while the claims of the “politically correct” side, mere political calculations.
The implications and irony of Sanders’ definition of political correctness might have been lost on him, but they cannot be lost on us. If political correctness means constructing a national dialogue (or simply lying) to serve one’s political goals, then Donald Trump is the most politically correct person in America.
Further still, the party which yielded a record number of votes for him, which failed to repeal or replace the Affordable Care Act after spending seven years in belligerent protest to it (because it polled well), and which has stoked identitarian divides for decades to build a constituency around otherwise unpopular ideas, is the party of political correctness.
The term political correctness, as we use it today, is a rhetorical trick. It is a tool designed to undermine the foundation of legitimate political debate, particularly those debates which center on issues of social justice and identity. It does so by implying, through the qualification of the word correct with an adverb, that the positions of those who are “politically correct” are not just politically motivated, and thus inauthentic, but also incorrect at their core. As such, politics ceases to be a debate or dialogue at all; instead it becomes a battle between those who seek to pervert society to serve their personal designs and those who wish to defend it.
The legacy of this rhetorical trick, which first surfaced in the early 1990s and experienced a resurgence after the 2012 election, is a political dialogue that is significantly less honest, less connected and less intelligent. The specter of political correctness, often represented by “fragile” college students and cosmopolitan elites, permeates nearly every aspect of modern American politics.
When students at Middlebury protested Charles Murray, an opportunity for a profound civil debate about discourse and democracy instead became a national lecture on the dangers of political correctness in which many faculty, administrators and journalists severely misrepresented the positions of students.
“The purpose of college is not to make faculty or students comfortable in their opinions and prejudices” postulated over 100 Middlebury College professors in the Wall Street Journal, countering a straw man argument that not one of their students ever made. Frank Bruni of the New York Times worried out loud that our colleges are not “preparing [students] for constructive engagement in a society that won’t echo their convictions the way their campuses do.” Nevermind that the students had just finished planning a protest based on a complex, nuanced and controversial premise, with which he and his colleagues failed to engage in any meaningful way.
The toxic assumptions that undergird political correctness were in full effect at Middlebury after Murray’s visit, even when political correctness itself was not directly invoked. The argument that students advanced through protest was fundamentally intellectual and democratic. Why should our school academically consider whether impoverished communities (particularly those of color) are pathologically disposed to poverty?
Charles Murray’s body of work is ahistorical, poorly sourced and thoroughly discredited. Engagement with it has made the world an uglier place in concrete, measurable ways. This claim was almost systematically ignored. Instead, many of the adults in the room decided to focus on a symbolic defense of free speech, an objective and unoffensive principle which was never under attack, and uncritical stereotypes of students as fragile or in need of ideological conformity.
Perhaps their true “political” position, that such a hypothesis deserves to be considered in an academic community, would not have garnered such sweeping public support.
When the Democratic Party failed at every level in the 2016 election, a similar logic was applied to national politics. A host of noteworthy politicians (Obama, Sanders) and journalists (Lilla, Chait, Bruni) rushed to blame a reliance on “identity politics” for Trump’s rise and to declare an end to “identity liberalism.”
The underlying assumption, that the focus on the needs of historically underrepresented and oppressed groups was a strategy for winning rather than a values system rooted in equity and justice, must have thrilled the Steve Bannons of the world. It also signaled the degree to which Democrats have internalized the doctrine of political correctness, to their own disadvantage.
The idea of political correctness is as corrosive as it is inaccurate. It creates and enforces a power structure in which entire communities are silenced, their perspectives rendered inauthentic and invalid. Meanwhile, those who decry political correctness tend to be those with the loudest voices in the room, or with the least courage of their own convictions.
So, for those of you who take to the pages of this or a different paper, to blogs or journals, to private conversations or public forums, and complain about a culture of political correctness: you might not be a racist, a sexist or a bigot, but you are certainly carrying their water.
