The new "political correctness"

Sandy Levinson

Anyone who seriously believes that the Trump "election" does in "political correctness" is simply mistaken.  Instead, we are daily being visited with new forms of political correctness.  In no particular order, let me suggest the following as things that will become a condition for participating in polite public conversation in the all-too-near future, on pain of being thought a political extremist or, even worse, not a "good sport" about being defeated in an election:

1.  Donald Trump is not a narcissist, a totally untrustworthy con-man, a sexual predator, or, ultimately, a sociopath.  Instead, he is a successful businessman who will bring a breath (and breadth) of fresh air to a Washington that is in dire need of disruption.

2.  In addition to overlooking his patent psychological deficiencies, one will also have to deny that he is  entirely without any relevant knowledge about almost all of the actual policy areas where the decision-making buck will stop in the Oval Office.  Horace Greeley, I believe, once said that he would as soon trust the wisdom of his dog as that of Roger Taney.  It would be considered tactless to quote Greeley in the present context.  Or one might quote from King Lear that even "a dog's obey'd in office" as the preface to a discussion about political obligation, though that, too, would be considered politically incorrect.


3.  Donald Trump has not, knowingly and with malice aforethought, legitimized a variety of bigotries, including, but not limited to, hostility to immigrants, Muslims, the disabled, women, urban-dwellers, non-whites, non-Christians (save for right-wing Jews who share the perspective of Christian Zionism that Israel is a sacralized "holy land" that is, therefore, even more exceptional than even the United States).  He is simply attacking some of the sillier aspects of "political correctness" that afflict our public dialogue.

4.  Linked to 3 is the insistence that Steven Bannon as "just" a white nationalist eager to prevent the achievements of whites from being completely hidden by the rise of a more multi-culturealist sensibility and that Breitbart is simply a conservative alternative to the more liberal New York Times.

5.  Linked to 4 is the insistence that one should take seriously Donald Trump's attempts to put distance between himself and, say, David Duke (the person of whom he professed notable ignorance early in his campaign).  A man who feels no compunction at all about lying and misleading us about every aspect of his life is, for once, telling the truth when he professes to be upset that his rise correlates the increasing prominence of bigoted statements and, even more to the point, acts.  He is, after all, exactly the kind of person who would purport not to realize there's gambling going on in Casablanca.

6.  The electoral college, like the Senate, is really a valuable feature of our political system instead of an affirmative action program for the residents of small states (i.e., the Senate) and, with regard to the electoral college, the residents of small states and of those relatively few "battleground" states that get to be pandered (and lied) to every four years.  Opponents of affirmative action, who emphasize the need to judge all persons simply by the content of their character and not by attributes such as skin color, etc., are not roaring hypocrites when they defend the affirmative action aspects of the Senate and electoral college.

7.  The election was a model of "fair play," and we should all rally around the Obama Administration's declaration that there was nothing amiss in the election, including, in addition to the electoral college (see 4), the sheer and utter disdain for any semblance of truth or intellectual integrity by the ostensible "winner" and the intervention in a number of ways by Russia and other more amateur troublemakers who correctly believe that a Trump presidency, should the world survive it, might well fatally weaken the United States as a bastion of any kind of progressive (or, for that matter, respectably conservative) values.

8.  The apparent fact that our statutes regarding conflict of interest do not apply to the President is evidence that We the People see no problem with a businessman-president using the Oval Office as a tool for increasing his personal fortune.  We will pretend that the Emoluments Clause is simply a lawyer's technicality of no relevance to the present situation.

9.  Most fundamentally, that his selection by almost half the American public is not, as Mark Graber suggests, a ringing indictment of our entire political culture that calls into question the continued viability of the American experiment in self-government.

10.   [Just added]  One will have to refer to "President Trump" instead of, say, "the sociopath occupying the White House" or simply "the Master of Mer Lago."

I invite discussants to offer other candidates for "political correctness" in the era of Donald Trump.  It will be like learning a foreign language, but it is, after all, the language that approximately 47% of our fellow citizens appear to speak.



Posted 12:15 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]