It’s no coincidence that the two loudest, most consequential socio-political forces in America right now are political correctness and Donald Trump. One is at home on college campuses, the other in the world of working people.
Yet they’re already beginning to collide.
At Emory University recently, someone scrawled “Trump 2016” in chalk on steps and sidewalks around campus. About 50 students assembled to protest the outrage, shouting, “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!” Aghast at “the chalkings,” the university president complied.
At Scripps College a few weeks ago, a Mexican-American student awoke to find “#trump2016” written on the whiteboard on her door. The student body president condemned the “racist incident” and denounced Trump’s hashtag as a symbol of violence. A college dean chimed in to scold students for their insufficient outrage.
“While it is true that under most circumstances the mere iteration of a presidential candidate’s name would not be regarded as a form of harassment or intimidation,” she wrote, “the circumstances here are unique.”
The circumstances are always unique.
When PC world and Trump world collide, as these preliminary incidents show, there will be blood, or at least chalkings and whiteboard hashtagging.
But the troubles won’t be confined to the campuses. The left has gotten used to the way it runs the universities — by a powerful, ideological majority so dominant that there is little, if any, opposition.
They enjoy this imbalance; they regard it as natural, advantageous for students and, increasingly, as a model for how the rest of the world should be run.
On campus, the shock troops and deanlets wield the extraordinary power to order atonement and punishment, police the boundaries of speech and distribute benefits and rights by race, sex, gender, politics and ethnicity. This is political correctness, and it’s now the first of the left’s political institutions. It marks a new, ugly stage in liberalism.
Political correctness is also the basso profundo under the left’s anti-Trump argument. Hillary Clinton’s criticism that he’s “a loose cannon” arouses many fears — foreign-policy blunders, the nuclear keys — but running underneath them is the worry that he’s always prepared to say things that offend a group that must not be offended.
But the spirited way Trump has defied the PC mavens has been the key to his success so far. He has taken few conspicuous policy stands — immigration, trade, ISIS and the Muslims, foreign alliances.
Trump has treated the content of his agenda as an afterthought. The crucial thing for him has been to assert a tough position in tough terms, to be as politically incorrect as possible on his selected issues. In this respect, being anti-PC has been the central point of his campaign.
Among the 17 Republican contenders, Trump alone was willing, eager even, to embody political incorrectness, to own it, not merely to patronize it. And most politically incorrect of all, he got people to laugh with him as he did it. It proved a brilliant maneuver.
The Donald is in no hurry to build Trumpism into a political doctrine. If there were a core to Trumpism, however, it would be his insistence on “America First,” a phrase with unfortunate connotations, to say the least.
But there is an older, more venerable basis for this appeal to preferring one’s own people or country to others, even if Trump hasn’t yet found it. The Declaration of Independence, notably, pays “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” but it speaks only “in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these Colonies.”
The Constitution is designed to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our Posterity (emphasis added).” It’s not at all inconsistent with human rights to take care of your own first, and in fact it is a duty to ward off tyranny for one’s own people before attending, to the extent possible, to others.
Trump hasn’t fleshed this out, alas, and he rarely mentions the Constitution or America’s founding principles.
That is shortsighted and a mistake. But his savvy opposition to PC implies something like this defense of America, because there is nothing political correctness stands for so much as the denigration of America, its history and principles.
The worst thing about the Trump phenomenon is that he doesn’t spend his days and nights conscientiously preparing for a job for which everyone — everyone — agrees he is conspicuously unready.
We know pretty well what Donald Trump is against. He will not have much time to decide what he is for. It’s one thing to oppose so-called political correctness. It’s another, and even more important thing, to specify and defend what is actually politically and morally correct.
Charles Kesler is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. This was adapted from the forthcoming spring issue of the Claremont Review of Books, where he is the editor.