Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

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Dear GOP: ‘Not PC’ is just today’s polite way of saying ‘rude’

“Political correctness” might be the most intriguing issue to emerge in the current presidential election cycle, especially for Republicans. Yet it also might be the most under-discussed, perhaps out of fear that it would not be politically correct to do so.

In Friday’s Republican debate in Des Moines, Iowa, for example, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz criticized President Barack Obama for refusing to use the diplomatically inflammatory term “Islamic terrorism,” then attacked “political correctness” as if he had not been practicing a conservative version of PC against Obama.

Earlier, Donald Trump sarcastically tweeted about his least-favorite Fox News anchor, “I refuse to call Meghan Kelly a bimbo because that would not be politically correct.”

What is PC? A mostly pejorative term to describe language, rules and policies intended to avoid offending particular groups in society.

That also is a pretty good definition of what we used to call simply “good manners” and “common decency” before the smart-sounding label “PC” caught on in the early 1990s.

Popularized initially by left-progressives to poke fun at the excesses of their fellow lefties, it soon was embraced and broadcast by the right to express their outrage at the left’s excesses, too.

I agree that PC is a menace when it infringes on free speech; however, contrary to popular mythology, neither left nor right has a monopoly on it.

For example, New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait sounded alarms recently in January under the headline, “Not a Very PC Thing to Say: How the Language Police Are Perverting Liberalism.”

He raised some legitimate points, such as the excesses of leftist students who protest commencement speakers whose views they don’t like.

But as John K. Wilson, author of the 1995 book “The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education,” blogged, Chait said nothing about right-wing calls to censor commencement speakers such as President Barack Obama.

Yet, as much as the PC debate is associated with college campuses, we hear it attacked most often in this presidential cycle by conservatives, particularly Trump, who seems to find boundless joy in violating it.

That’s ironic, given that Trump’s supporters also happen to be the least likely among all of the Grand Old Party’s top-tier candidates to have graduated college.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in December, for example, found only 38 percent of Trump supporters graduated college, compared with 46 percent of “social conservatives,” who tended to back Texas Sen. Ted Cruz or Dr. Ben Carson, and 55 percent of “establishment” Republicans, who support Sen. Marco Rubio or former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

Yet when asked about what motivates them, the Trump supporters tend to lash out most of all against illegal immigrants and political correctness.

Of course, they also hate the media — partly, I’m sure, because journalists often have served as arbiters of manners long before the term “PC” became popular.

A focus group of Trump supporters convened in December by Republican pollster Frank Luntz in Virginia praised their man’s “political incorrectness” along with his business experiences and self-funded campaign.

Why does PC strike such a sensitive nerve?

Certainly, there are some who resent PC because it muzzles their own opportunities to express bigoted opinions.

But you can find some racists and other bigots in every racial, religious, political or ethnic group.

More important, I think, is the invasion Trump supporters see PC “thought police” making into their lives with a new, foreign and often-bewildering etiquette that they have neither the time or ability to learn and practice.

Remember why Trump disdains PC? “It takes too much time,” he says.

I understand what he means. I still receive emails from people asking whether they should use “black” or “African-American” — and what was so bad about “colored” and “Negro” anyway?

Good questions. Talking about the nation’s growing diversity across racial, ethnic and gender lines is how we Americans learn to get along, regardless of our tribes.

Today’s anti-PC rebellion appears to be a response to growing anxiety over our nation’s growing diversity. Political campaigns can be a terrible place to solve such anxieties, but it’s a good time to start talking honestly about them — if that’s not too politically incorrect.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

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