The Meaning of Trump’s Cult of Political Incorrectness

[applegrove]

The Meaning of Trump’s Cult of Political Incorrectness

By Ed Kilgore at NY Magazine

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/trumps-cult-of-political-incorrectness.html#

"SNIP..............


In other words, there's a tendency in Trumpland to view what most of us consider common decency as "political correctness," which is to be avoided at all costs, most especially when the opprobrium of liberal elitists is involved. It's no accident, then, that Trump sometimes seems to court the appearance of impropriety, and defend examples of rudeness, crudeness, and bigotry even when he's not personally guilty of perpetrating them.

Trump did not invent this strange mindset, of course. Right-wing talk-radio types have made a living from baiting liberals and women and minorities and then inciting listeners to express umbrage at the resulting outrage. Trump's former rival and current supporter Dr. Ben Carson could not go five minutes on the presidential campaign trail without attacking "political correctness" as the source of all evil and as a secular-socialist stratagem for silencing the Folks by shaming them.

For the generally decent Carson, "political correctness" remained something of an abstraction. It's taken Trump to paint it in garish realism. To use a phrase beloved of Trump's great predecessor in political sin George Wallace, the mogul does not "pussyfoot around" in offending his detractors and those people — the pushy feminists and entitled minorities whose very presence profanes America in the eyes of many Trump supporters. Trump tells it like it is, which means he is not inhibited by a civility that masks nasty but essential truths.

Inevitably, this nasty but essential explanation of Trump's appeal will annoy supporters and enemies alike, who insist on ascribing purely economic motives to those who have lifted him so shockingly high in American political life. Sorry, but I don't think uncontrollable rage at having to "press 1 for English" or say "Happy Holidays" can be explained by displaced anger over wage stagnation or the decline of the American manufacturing sector. As Saunders said in another of his insights into Trump supporters:


.............SNIP"