Henninger:
Donald Trump and Ben Carson popped the valves on decades of pent-up PC pressure.
oon
we’ll all be camped in the fields of primary politics, as that great threshing
machine called the American voter methodically separates the contender wheat
from the candidate chaff. Let’s not go there, though, without recording 2015 as
the year that political correctness finally hit the wall.
Many
thought political correctness lived on in our lives now as permanently annoying
background noise. In fact, it has been more like a political A-bomb, waiting
for its detonator.
On Dec.
7, Donald Trump issued his call for a ban on Muslim immigration into the
U.S.—“until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
It’s hard to recall a statement by a public figure that was met, instantly,
with almost universal condemnation, including from most of the Republican
presidential candidates.
Between
that day and the end of 2015, Donald Trump’s support in the national opinion
polls went up to nearly 37%, a substantial number by any measure.
Welcome
to the revolt of the politically incorrect.
Forget
the controversy over Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. This unique political campaign
is about more than that. Donald Trump and indeed Ben Carson popped the valves
on pressure that’s been building in the U.S., piece by politically correct
piece, for 25 years. Since at least the early 1990s, a lot of the public has
been intimidated into keeping its mouth shut and head down about subjects in
the political and social life of the country that the elites stipulated as
beyond discussion or dispute. Eventually, the most important social skill in
America became adeptness at euphemism. It isn’t an abortion; it’s a “terminated
pregnancy.”
Some
keywords in PC’s history:
Identity,
gender, gender-neutral, diverse, inclusive, patriarchy, workplace harassment,
multiculturalism, dead white males, sexism, racism, organic, “privileged,” hate
speech, speech codes, prayer in schools, affirmative action, respecting our
differences, microagressions, trigger warnings. That’s just the tip of the
iceberg—which political correctness slammed into with the Trump and Carson
campaigns.
Ben
Carson especially made PC an explicit tenet of his campaign. In a 2014 essay
for the Washington Times, Mr. Carson wrote: “Political correctness is
antithetical to our founding principles of freedom of speech and freedom of
expression. Its most powerful tool is intimidation. If it is not vigorously
opposed, its proponents win by default, because the victims adopt a ‘go along
to get along’ attitude.”
The
left found Mr. Carson’s PC concerns almost quaint. But the email traffic I was
seeing last summer suggested the Carson anti-PC critique was a big reason for
his surge among middle-class voters. My favorite Carsonism: When asked in the
Fox News debate if he’d resume waterboarding, he replied, “There is no such
thing as a politically correct war.”
When
Donald Trump’s mostly working-class voters repeatedly said that “he tells the
truth,” this is what they were talking about—not any particular Trump outrage
but the years of political correctness they felt they’d been forced to choke
down in silence.
American
society has never been static. A fair-minded person would concede that many of
these controversial subjects involve legitimate and complex issues. Politics
exists to mediate them.
Mediation?
We should have been so lucky. The left never modulated its PC offensive. The
2006 Duke University lacrosse scandal, a travesty of PC trampling on
individuals, should have been a red flag. Instead the Obama Education
Department imposed what are essentially kangaroo courts on American campuses to
enforce Title IX sexual-abuse cases.
Policies
like that don’t emerge from the marketplace of ideas, much less political
debate. They come from a kind of Americanized Maoism. The left goes nuts when
anyone suggests political correctness has totalitarian roots. But the PC game
has always been: We win, you lose, get over it, comply.
But
people don’t get over it, and they never forget. For a lot of voters now,
possibly a majority, their experiences with enforceable, politically correct
behavior, speech and thought have bred a broad mistrust of elites.
Average
people think individuals in positions of leadership are supposed to at least
recognize the existence of their interests and beliefs. The institutions that
didn’t do that or were complicit include the courts, Congress, senior
bureaucrats, corporate managers, the press, television, movies, university
administrators.
Somehow,
the standard model of political comportment—represented by most of the GOP’s
presidential candidates—just isn’t up to dealing with a degree of voter social
alienation that isn’t particularly rational at this point. So voters turned to
“outsiders”—people more like them.
The
election’s two big issues remain: a weak economy and global chaos. But for many
voters, the revolt against political correctness is on. Hillary Clinton,
hostage to a PC-obsessed base, must mouth politically correct pabulum. Donald
Trump joy-rides the wave. An opening remains for an electable candidate who can
point this revolt toward what it wants—a political win, at last.
