Chris
08-23-2017, 09:36 AM
Donald Trump and the Sad Triumph of Right-Wing Political Correctness (http://reason.com/blog/2017/08/18/donald-trump-and-the-ultimate-triumph-of): "The president isn't attacking P.C., as he once promised. He's sanctioned its use among his followers."
His base then has no more rational argument for his policies than the left has against them.
Back at the 2015 event at which Donald Trump announced his bid for the presidency, his daughter Ivanka introduced her father as, first and foremost, an implacable foe of political correctness. "My father is the opposite of politically correct. He says what he means and he means what he says," she said.... In the first Republican primary debate, held in August of 2015, Trump himself reiterated that being anti-P.C. would be the hallmark of his political life, declaring, "I don't frankly have time for total political correctness."
It's ironic, then, that perhaps Trump's greatest accomplishment so far as president is to make it OK—or maybe even mandatory—for his followers to engage in the worst excesses of political correctness, especially its attempts to shut down debate and heterodox opinions through bullying, appeals to ad hominem attacks, and unthinking "whataboutism."
Among the Trump faithful, there are never legitimate grounds upon which to disagree with anything the billionaire says or does. If Barack Obama's most strident defenders were sometimes quick to claim any criticism of him was racist, thereby delegitimating honest disagreement, Trump's supporters are equally quick to denounce any dissent as proof positive of secret membership in Antifa, a pro-Hillary voting record, or a desperate attempt to look good among the communists who run the much-discussed-yet-little-seen Washington, D.C. cocktail party circuit.
Is it politically correct to expect the president of the United States to unequivocally denounce the racial theories and violence of neo-Nazis and white supremacists? For Donald Trump and his supporters, the answer is unambiguously yes and so even libertarian critics of the president who are unsurpassed in their contempt for collectivist racial theories and their defense of free speech (something Trump himself is not so good on) must be attacked for calling out Nazis as stupid, bigoted, and, well, definitionally un-American (didn't we fight a war against Nazism?). Don't you understand, Trump's supporters insist, that we need to fight progressives with the same tactics they use? If you hold him to basic standards of decency, competence, or comportment, they continue, you're as bad as the left (typically defined as libertarian-leaning Republican Sen. Jeff Flake and anyone to his left).
...
whataboutism has been covered here: http://thepoliticalforums.com/threads/85902-whataboutism?highlight=whataboutism
His base then has no more rational argument for his policies than the left has against them.
Back at the 2015 event at which Donald Trump announced his bid for the presidency, his daughter Ivanka introduced her father as, first and foremost, an implacable foe of political correctness. "My father is the opposite of politically correct. He says what he means and he means what he says," she said.... In the first Republican primary debate, held in August of 2015, Trump himself reiterated that being anti-P.C. would be the hallmark of his political life, declaring, "I don't frankly have time for total political correctness."
It's ironic, then, that perhaps Trump's greatest accomplishment so far as president is to make it OK—or maybe even mandatory—for his followers to engage in the worst excesses of political correctness, especially its attempts to shut down debate and heterodox opinions through bullying, appeals to ad hominem attacks, and unthinking "whataboutism."
Among the Trump faithful, there are never legitimate grounds upon which to disagree with anything the billionaire says or does. If Barack Obama's most strident defenders were sometimes quick to claim any criticism of him was racist, thereby delegitimating honest disagreement, Trump's supporters are equally quick to denounce any dissent as proof positive of secret membership in Antifa, a pro-Hillary voting record, or a desperate attempt to look good among the communists who run the much-discussed-yet-little-seen Washington, D.C. cocktail party circuit.
Is it politically correct to expect the president of the United States to unequivocally denounce the racial theories and violence of neo-Nazis and white supremacists? For Donald Trump and his supporters, the answer is unambiguously yes and so even libertarian critics of the president who are unsurpassed in their contempt for collectivist racial theories and their defense of free speech (something Trump himself is not so good on) must be attacked for calling out Nazis as stupid, bigoted, and, well, definitionally un-American (didn't we fight a war against Nazism?). Don't you understand, Trump's supporters insist, that we need to fight progressives with the same tactics they use? If you hold him to basic standards of decency, competence, or comportment, they continue, you're as bad as the left (typically defined as libertarian-leaning Republican Sen. Jeff Flake and anyone to his left).
...
whataboutism has been covered here: http://thepoliticalforums.com/threads/85902-whataboutism?highlight=whataboutism