Haley Sweetland Edwards
A new wave of campus revolts and campaign speeches is fueling a
dangerous war on words
Newton’s Third Law holds that
for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, which may provide
the best explanation for what is occurring simultaneously on the left and on
the right, on America’s campuses and the campaign trail. In both cases it’s
enough to make defenders of the First Amendment curl up in despair.
The campus revolts just keep
coming, as students go to ever greater lengths to defend their right not to be
upset. This has now gone well past administrators’ labeling texts with “trigger
warnings” to help students avoid having to read about difficult topics like
racism or rape, or Mount Holyoke’s canceling a performance of The Vagina
Monologues for fear of excluding women who don’t have vaginas.
Students at the University of
Ottawa protested a campus yoga class, charging that yoga was a form of
“cultural appropriation.” At Smith College in November, students associated
with the Black Lives Matter movement asked visiting media to declare their
support for their cause before they were admitted to cover a sit-in.
This wave of political
correctness is born, essentially, of a noble idea. Minority students, facing
bullying or belittlement, argue for the need to protect themselves, to create a
safe space. As one Yale undergraduate put it, “It’s about creating a home
here.” But in creating that space, these advocates risk walling themselves off
from the unexpected, albeit sometimes ugly, reality of engaging in pitched
debate with people with whom they do not see eye to eye. They are rejecting the
sometimes crushing but always formative experience of discovering that you
disagree, deeply and fundamentally, with a friend, and then deciding to stay
friends anyway. It is a crucial lesson for anyone living in a pluralistic
democracy, especially one in which Donald Trump, the human equivalent of a
trigger warning, dominates the Republican field.
Which brings us to the equal
and opposite reaction. It is tempting to see the popularity of Trump, who has
managed in the past four months to insult not only women, immigrants and
Muslims but also the entire nation of China and anyone with a disability, as a
direct response to the rise of political correctness. Trump supporters argue
that, having had to watch carefully what they say and how they say it for years,
there is something liberating about a candidate who seems not only to say
whatever pops into his head but to delight in the possibility that he’s not
supposed to say it. On the campaign trail, Trump often prefaces his most
shocking lines with a confrontational preamble: “Are you ready for this?”
But the idea that Trump’s
front-runner status is a reaction to the renewed burst of political correctness
is also a little too clean. After all, his rhetoric is born of the same
impulse: to jettison intellectual engagement in favor of an emotional response,
to prize feelings over reason, to intimidate, rather than engage with, those
who would disagree.
Conservatives blame what they
see as a liberal “culture of victimhood” for the rise of political correctness.
If everyone is a victim, they argue, everyone must be coddled and no one can
say anything that might offend anybody. But conservatives’ anger at political
correctness often stems from their belief that they too are victimized–by the
liberal thought police, by mainstream media, by lefties on Twitter all too
willing to smear the next luckless pol as racist or sexist or just plain wrong.
Both defenders of PC culture
and its critics argue that in order for democracy to work, everyone must feel
welcome to say what they think, to engage with the issues that bedevil us as a
society. But it’s not enough to restrict speech in order to make people feel
safe, and it’s not enough to be deliberately offensive so that people feel
welcome to say what they want. Our politicians must actually grapple with
solutions. Trump recently lambasted President Obama and Hillary Clinton for
refusing to use the term radical Islamic terrorism: “you can’t solve a problem
if you refuse to talk about what the problem is,” he said, and went on to use
the phrase gleefully, to the delight of the crowd. But when pressed on what he
would actually do about terrorism–radical, Islamic or otherwise–he didn’t need
to give that infinitely complex challenge a second thought. “I’m going to bomb
the sh-t out of them,” he said. The crowd roared.
Haley Sweetland Edwards, TIME, December
14, 2015
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