Why Trump may be winning the war on ‘political correctness’
Cathy Cuthbertson once worked at what might be thought of as a command post of political correctness — the campus of a prestigious liberal arts college in Ohio.
“You know, I couldn’t say ‘Merry Christmas.’ And when we wrote things, we couldn’t even say ‘he’ or ‘she,’ because we had transgender. People of color. I mean, we had to watch every word that came out of our mouth, because we were afraid of offending someone, but nobody’s afraid of offending me,” the former administrator said.
All of which helps explain why the 63-year-old grandmother showed up at a recent Donald Trump rally in Hilton Head Island, S.C., where she moved when she retired a year ago. The Republican front-runner is “saying what a lot of Americans are thinking but are afraid to say because they don’t think that it’s politically correct,” she said. “But we’re tired of just standing back and letting everyone else dictate what we’re supposed to think and do.”
In the 2016 Republican presidential primary season, “political correctness” has become the all-purpose enemy. The candidates have suggested that it is the explanation for seemingly every threat that confronts the country: terrorism, illegal immigration, an economic recovery that is leaving many behind, to name just a few.
Others argue that growing antipathy to the notion of political correctness has become an all-purpose excuse for the inexcusable. They say it has emboldened too many to express racism, sexism and intolerance, which endure even as the country grows more diverse.
“Driving powerful sentiments underground is not the same as expunging them,” said William A. Galston, a Brookings Institution scholar who advised President Bill Clinton. “What we’re learning from Trump is that a lot of people have been biting their lips, but not changing their minds.” One thing is clear: Trump is channeling a very mainstream frustration. In an October poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University, 68 percent agreed with the proposition that “a big problem this country has is being politically correct.”
It was a sentiment felt strongly across the political spectrum, by 62 percent of Democrats, 68 percent of independents and 81 percent of Republicans. Among whites, 72 percent said they felt that way, but so did 61 percent of nonwhites. “People feel tremendous cultural condescension directed at them,” and that their values are being “smirked at, laughed at” by the political and media elite, said GOP strategist Steve Schmidt.
“ ‘Political correctness’ are the two words that best respond to everything that a conservative feels put upon,” added pollster Frank Luntz, who has advised Republicans. The label is, he said, a validation that what many on the right see as legitimate policy and cultural differences are not the same as racism, sexism or heartlessness. “Allegations of racism and sexism have turned into powerful silencing devices,” Galston agreed. “You can be opposed to affirmative action without being a racist.”
The edgy liberal comedian Bill Maher, who for nearly a decade hosted a talk show called “Politically Incorrect,” has said that Trump’s ideas sound “a little Hitler-adjacent.”
But he has also noted a yearning for “somebody to say, ‘You know what, I just don’t bend to your bull----.’ And Donald Trump, I’ve got to say, I don’t agree with him on a lot, but I kind of get him. We’ve been doing the same thing.”
Trump is “the voice of an aggrieved cohort in our society — lower-middle-income working whites who have taken the hit from the big changes in the economy, and are angry about it,” Axelrod said. “He creates a permission structure for others.”
Cuthbertson, for instance, made a connection between her frustrations over political correctness and the other things she sees going on around her.
“I look at what I get every month — and thank God, I was financially savvy and saved. I can’t live off Social Security. And you look at these people who have never worked and they’re having babies and they’re getting free rent and free food stamps and free medical care,” she said. “I couldn’t afford what they have on my Social Security, and I worked 50 years.”
“Something has to be done because we’re shrinking, we’re being taken over by people that want to change what America is,” she added. “You can’t say it nicely.”
^Maybe if you'd sign up for unlimited Bandwidth and get off that Gigabyte plan you could enjoy them too... Oh, I forgot, you're a flat-ass broke trucker who just thinks he's a member of the oligarchy...Mr. big biz
-------------- History is no more than the lies agreed upon by the victors.
^^ no, they load up just fine, it's just that I find your vids time wasting and irritating.
Careful now, we're not suppose to name call or be insulting. It makes some folks sad pandas.😩
-------------- JESUS DID THE ORGANIZING for His church and whenever men go beyond that pattern (found only in the New Testament of Jesus Christ) they do so at their own peril. One needs to only read the New Testament to see the problem that has been created over the last two centuries within the churches.
Remember boys and girls,
