Trumps 'Sh*thole Country' Remarks Are Right-wing Political Correctness Run Amok
By Eric Levitz
@EricLevitz
January 12, 2018
1:39 pm
There’s always been an irony to the right’s obsessive contempt for “political correctness.”
Conservatives relish ridiculing the left for refusing to acknowledge uncomfortable or politically inconvenient truths. Often, these supposed truths are mere assertions of right-wing dogma, like the notion that gender is inextricable from biological sex. In other instances, progressives (like all humans) let ideology or emotion override reason — and conservatives land a punch against, say, anti-GMO hysteria. But while liberals aren’t above substituting comforting fictions for complicating realities, conservatives rely on such substitutions for the very foundations of their ideology. In its quest to rationalize the status quo distributions of wealth, power, and privilege, the right is compelled to elide basic facts about how such disparities are built and sustained.
This willful ignorance was at the heart of our president’s recent reflection on “shithole countries” and the people who live in them. In a meeting with a bipartisan group of senators Thursday, Donald Trump reportedly asked rhetorically why the United States takes in so many immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and “shithole” African countries, instead of bringing in more people from places like Norway.
The unvarnished racism of this sentiment outraged liberals. The (supposed) political correctness of that outrage amused some conservatives. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, the National Review’s Rich Lowry, and Congressman Steve King all delivered variations on the same point: If Haiti, El Salvador, and (various, unspecified) African nations aren’t “shitholes,” then why are progressives insisting that America has a moral duty to indefinitely extend the “temporary protected status” of migrants from those countries?
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