When Political Incorrectness Becomes Politically Correct

When Political Incorrectness Becomes Politically Correct August 1, 2016

Photo via https://www.goodfreephotos.com.
Photo via https://www.goodfreephotos.com.

I’ve already shown how an ideological critique of “political correctness” can, and in today’s GOP indeed has already, become a form of politically correctness. This shows that any political inflection of value on what is correct will always fall into a form of political correctness. But what about the other side of the expression? The correct side?

Donald Trump has recently received an enormous amount of criticism for his treatment of the Khizr and Ghazala Khan, parents to an Army captain who died in combat. What us interesting in this case is that Trump and his followers do not seem to object to this criticism on the grounds of political correctness. No one seems to say that these mourning parents are being “politically correct.”

What seems obvious to both sides is that there are unobjectionably “correct” claims to be made: Captain Kahn is a war hero and the Kahn’s are a Gold Star family (which also happens to be Muslim). In this case Trump is being rebuked not only for his tone and substance, but also for the implication of his sloppy rhetoric that threatens the truth-value of these two basic facts.

In other words, sometimes being incorrect means you are wrong. Crazy, I know. And being wrong about something, political or otherwise, should never be celebrated as a political virtue. After all, sensible critics of political correctness use the word “correctness” in an ironic way precisely to show that what is being asserted as true is in fact less than true and perhaps false.

What has been lost in the recent inversion of values–or perhaps the simple loss of values–that resulted in a Trump presidential candidacy in the party that once defended the truth of abolition and anti-slavery, is not only the fact that a critique of “political correctness” has now become a politically correct form of rhetoric, it is also the fact that a base level respect for correctness has been lost as well.

To listen to Trump is not only to see the party of so-called “family values” descend into self-parody, it is also to see the pure narcissistic relativism which has no purchase on what is correct or incorrect anymore. This form of postmodern political populism, in my view, is only a few steps away from outright nihilism.


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