Trump vote was a backlash against political correctness
Donald Trump’s remarkable journey from billionaire political insurgent to president elect has come despite — or perhaps because of — his tendency to speak his mind, even at the risk of offending lots of people.
It is easy to dismiss Trump’s supporters as bigots, racists, sexists — or, to borrow a phrase from Hillary, a “basket of deplorables” — than to address the tough question: Why did so many decent, reasoning, responsible people pave the way for this outrageous person to become our president?
Trump has surely received more than his fair share of support from angry bigots, but bigots don’t constitute half of the electorate. His path to the presidency is fueled by the frustration of millions of everyday Americans.
A Pew Research survey found that the most appealing factors for 20 percent of Trump supporters is his tendency to speak his mind, even if it means offending a lot of people.
The Trump supporters I know — who are educated and otherwise reasonable people — don’t even agree with Trump’s outlandish policies. Their vote for Trump is merely a vote for the businessman turned politician’s war on political correctness and a way to express their frustration with being labelled and silenced by moral police.
Take the transgender bathroom bill for example. There are a lot of people who think there are only two genders. Educating those who are not open to the idea of non binary genders and the struggles of the trans community is a noble pursuit.
But shaming and silencing those who express the slightest hint of discomfort with a self identified trans woman — which is basically anyone who claims to identify as a woman irrespective of physical anatomy — using women’s locker rooms will at best frustrate ordinary Americans about not being able to have their concerns addressed and at worst make them a step closer to actually being trans-phobic.
A poll by Pew Research shows that 59 percent Americans think people are too easily offended these days.
To be sure, our ability to succeed as a society and country depends on our tolerance of other beliefs, faiths and cultures. Had it not been for political correctness, we would be living in a polarized society split into factions on race, gender and every other imaginable trait.
But an overdose of political correctness aggravates the very problem it was designed to solve.
While moral policing hate speech can be understandable, there is a stark difference between dissent and hate. It is possible to disagree on the need for affirmative action and the presence of a rape culture on college campuses without being a racist or a misogynist.
Shaming people for their views, as Brooking scholar William Galston notes, may make people bite their lips but does not change their mind.
Depriving people of their freedom to speak their mind — albeit in a social sense, if not in a legal one — has made millions of Americans vote for a person whose primary qualification purportedly is to speak his mind.
It is time the moral police take a break, and let Americans evaluate President Trump for his policies and not for his bombastic attacks on political correctness