January 19, 2017
Want to Know Why Trump Won? Just Ask His Supporters
By Robert Oscar Lopez
Few things should have been easier to predict than Trump's victory in the Electoral College. Recall where things stood by 2015: political correctness had become a mix of psychological warfare and threats of institutional punishment. Here was something ever present in people's daily experience, and about which almost no leaders were willing to speak frankly. Along comes a liberator without bloodshed.
Trump had an easy solution to P.C.: resist it by speaking truthfully, and endure the backlash until enough people rebel against it, so it crashes and burns.
For all their waking hours, Americans listened to P.C., a language that is phony, detached, and highly annoying. "Hate" was the new "terror," a vague force that people had to sacrifice all other concerns to fight or else risk being branded un-American. On the radio, at their jobs, among their social networks, even at family gatherings, here and there it popped up again: "you can't say that!" "I'm hurt by that." "You're bullying me." "You're a bigot." Celebrated causes and favored groups mattered – Hollywood stars, LGBTs, the right kind of racial minorities, sexually adventurous women – while other groups were expected to engage in nothing but sacrifice and atonement so those P.C.-approved classes could make all their dreams come true. That these classes are trapped in a nightmare of their own design should not be shocking.
Half of Buffalo has moved out of the city since the 1950s? A wave of suicide is decimating middle-aged white men? Meth has taken over life in a small Wisconsin river town? Divorced veterans are languishing in soup kitchens and homeless shelters across Tennessee? Political correctness has no answers to these problems. In fact, P.C. forbids answers to those problems, because acknowledging them as problems would take away from the focus on "hate." Only "hate" matters, and none of those tribulations can be credibly attributed to hate. It is more important to think about asylum for trans Salvadorans, a boy named Ahmed with a strange clock, and Lena Dunham's foggy memories of being mistreated as an Oberlin student.
If it were true that hatred drove most of what happens in society, then it would be sensible to focus, as the left does, so overwhelmingly on eradicating prejudice. But most of the problems that require political attention deal with things other than people hating other people for their identities, so most of left-wing politics is at best a huge waste of time.
Political correctness not only rendered America unable to address, let alone fix, its most widespread and serious problems. Even worse, it made everybody paranoid, petty, distracted, bitter, and miserable as they suffered their paralysis in silence.
What many take for granted will likely go down in history as one of the ugliest chapters in the history of ideas. Political correctness was arguably cobbled together from the Frankfurt School and Michel Foucault's theories of power (broadly misapplied), projected through the lenses of Judith Butler, Edward Said, and 1980s critical race theory plus early queer studies. By the late 1990s, it was ascendant, functioning as the invisible fuel for not only colleges, but also the courts, corporations, media, intelligence, and finally government.
Some far-left critics condemned this encroaching totalitarianism as "neo-liberalism" or "neo-conservatism," but they were too attached to the identity politics they wanted badly to transcend. On contrarian sites such as CounterPunch, they never found a way to break with it. That is a major reason why Trump had to rise up on the right, not on the left. The left was ultimately entangled too much with the overgrown tendrils of academia, which relied on state and federal funding.
If you have never been publicly accused of bigotry, you may have a difficult time understanding what political correctness means for the ordinary citizen who cannot afford to be fired, does not retain a personal lawyer, has no publicist, and lacks the resources to rescue his reputation from the onslaught of a left-wing character smear.
To be called "antigay," for instance, and to end up on lists like GLAAD's Commentator Accountability Project or the Human Rights Campaign's "Export of Hate," one may do nothing more than simply believe (as I stated publicly) that children ought to have a mother and father, therefore gays should not adopt. Once you get on such lists, you cannot get off them. Try to engage your critics, and they use everything you say against you. Apologize, and they get worse.
Smears are pushed to the top of Google rankings and seem to appear on Facebook news feeds whenever articles with your name appear. Everywhere you go, a mob awaits you. People at your job find strange reasons to get you called into human resources. And you cannot get rehired anywhere – you are "blacklisted" like union organizers in the Gilded Age. You go home, face your wife and children, and wonder if you will lose your home and go hungry as a family.
These are not small matters. These are fears that people feel in companies all across America, from major media companies to basic workplaces like a bank, a nursery, or a metals processing plant.
"Bigot! Hater!" These used to be allegations that might make one less attractive on the social scene, but nowadays they are as deadly as being accused of sorcery in 1690 in Massachusetts, or of sodomy in 1890 in London, or of Communism in 1953 in Washington, D.C. The social contexts for such allegations broadened, from professional moments like a job performance review ("can you explain what we found when we Googled you?") to simple settings like a chat on a ride home from a party ("Dude, it's not okay that you said that in front of my gay friends."). Even more than Joe McCarthy or Queen Victoria's scouts or the Puritans of Hawthorne's imagination, the enforcers of political correctness were willing to weaponize every milieu from the most public to the most intimate.
Want to Know Why Trump Won? Just Ask His Supporters
By Robert Oscar Lopez
Few things should have been easier to predict than Trump's victory in the Electoral College. Recall where things stood by 2015: political correctness had become a mix of psychological warfare and threats of institutional punishment. Here was something ever present in people's daily experience, and about which almost no leaders were willing to speak frankly. Along comes a liberator without bloodshed.
Trump had an easy solution to P.C.: resist it by speaking truthfully, and endure the backlash until enough people rebel against it, so it crashes and burns.
For all their waking hours, Americans listened to P.C., a language that is phony, detached, and highly annoying. "Hate" was the new "terror," a vague force that people had to sacrifice all other concerns to fight or else risk being branded un-American. On the radio, at their jobs, among their social networks, even at family gatherings, here and there it popped up again: "you can't say that!" "I'm hurt by that." "You're bullying me." "You're a bigot." Celebrated causes and favored groups mattered – Hollywood stars, LGBTs, the right kind of racial minorities, sexually adventurous women – while other groups were expected to engage in nothing but sacrifice and atonement so those P.C.-approved classes could make all their dreams come true. That these classes are trapped in a nightmare of their own design should not be shocking.
Half of Buffalo has moved out of the city since the 1950s? A wave of suicide is decimating middle-aged white men? Meth has taken over life in a small Wisconsin river town? Divorced veterans are languishing in soup kitchens and homeless shelters across Tennessee? Political correctness has no answers to these problems. In fact, P.C. forbids answers to those problems, because acknowledging them as problems would take away from the focus on "hate." Only "hate" matters, and none of those tribulations can be credibly attributed to hate. It is more important to think about asylum for trans Salvadorans, a boy named Ahmed with a strange clock, and Lena Dunham's foggy memories of being mistreated as an Oberlin student.
If it were true that hatred drove most of what happens in society, then it would be sensible to focus, as the left does, so overwhelmingly on eradicating prejudice. But most of the problems that require political attention deal with things other than people hating other people for their identities, so most of left-wing politics is at best a huge waste of time.
Political correctness not only rendered America unable to address, let alone fix, its most widespread and serious problems. Even worse, it made everybody paranoid, petty, distracted, bitter, and miserable as they suffered their paralysis in silence.
What many take for granted will likely go down in history as one of the ugliest chapters in the history of ideas. Political correctness was arguably cobbled together from the Frankfurt School and Michel Foucault's theories of power (broadly misapplied), projected through the lenses of Judith Butler, Edward Said, and 1980s critical race theory plus early queer studies. By the late 1990s, it was ascendant, functioning as the invisible fuel for not only colleges, but also the courts, corporations, media, intelligence, and finally government.
Some far-left critics condemned this encroaching totalitarianism as "neo-liberalism" or "neo-conservatism," but they were too attached to the identity politics they wanted badly to transcend. On contrarian sites such as CounterPunch, they never found a way to break with it. That is a major reason why Trump had to rise up on the right, not on the left. The left was ultimately entangled too much with the overgrown tendrils of academia, which relied on state and federal funding.
If you have never been publicly accused of bigotry, you may have a difficult time understanding what political correctness means for the ordinary citizen who cannot afford to be fired, does not retain a personal lawyer, has no publicist, and lacks the resources to rescue his reputation from the onslaught of a left-wing character smear.
To be called "antigay," for instance, and to end up on lists like GLAAD's Commentator Accountability Project or the Human Rights Campaign's "Export of Hate," one may do nothing more than simply believe (as I stated publicly) that children ought to have a mother and father, therefore gays should not adopt. Once you get on such lists, you cannot get off them. Try to engage your critics, and they use everything you say against you. Apologize, and they get worse.
Smears are pushed to the top of Google rankings and seem to appear on Facebook news feeds whenever articles with your name appear. Everywhere you go, a mob awaits you. People at your job find strange reasons to get you called into human resources. And you cannot get rehired anywhere – you are "blacklisted" like union organizers in the Gilded Age. You go home, face your wife and children, and wonder if you will lose your home and go hungry as a family.
These are not small matters. These are fears that people feel in companies all across America, from major media companies to basic workplaces like a bank, a nursery, or a metals processing plant.
"Bigot! Hater!" These used to be allegations that might make one less attractive on the social scene, but nowadays they are as deadly as being accused of sorcery in 1690 in Massachusetts, or of sodomy in 1890 in London, or of Communism in 1953 in Washington, D.C. The social contexts for such allegations broadened, from professional moments like a job performance review ("can you explain what we found when we Googled you?") to simple settings like a chat on a ride home from a party ("Dude, it's not okay that you said that in front of my gay friends."). Even more than Joe McCarthy or Queen Victoria's scouts or the Puritans of Hawthorne's imagination, the enforcers of political correctness were willing to weaponize every milieu from the most public to the most intimate.
