- Hello, everyone, and welcome to this
very special Spiked U.S. Unsafe Space tour event,
"Is Political Correctness Why Trump Won?"
My name's Tom Slater.
I'm Deputy Editor of Spiked, the online magazine.
I'm coordinating this tour,
and I'll be moderating this evening.
Thank you all for coming,
and thank you, of course, as well
to Conor Healy and all of his team
at the Open Campus Initiative for making this happen
against all odds, it's fair to say.
So, thank you very much to them.
For those of you who might not know,
Spiked is a radical humanist magazine,
and we argue and campaign for more freedom
in all areas of life.
It's because of that and the fact that
it seems like freedom, and in particular
freedom of speech seems so under attack,
not just on campus but throughout society,
that we launch this tour.
But the question that all begs is
what does that have to do with Trump,
and really that's what we're going to be
discussing here tonight 'cause one year on
from Trump's inauguration I think it's still
fair to say that a lot of commentators and pundits
are still grappling with what the rise of Trump,
the support for him, really means.
Amongst people who campaign for freedom of speech,
who care about freedom of speech,
a common explanation is that it had something to do
with political correctness, however defined,
the kind of demonizing of certain viewpoints,
the kind of hysteria that often confronts people
who might transgress P.C. etiquette,
had something to do with fueling the desire
for someone who would just break all of those rules.
What we want to discuss tonight is
did P.C. get Trump elected,
or is there something more going on,
and is, indeed, that just one of
the many kind of pat explanations
that we want to fall down on rather than
actually grappling with this problem.
Also, looking at the question of whether Trump's rise
represents a real challenge to political correctness,
or, indeed, whether it's the case
that considering this backlash has delivered
President Trump, someone who blithely dismisses
the First Amendment and who is probably
as thin-skinned as any Women's Studies major
(audience laughs) or have we just replaced
one form of authoritarianism with another.
So, all of those things we'll be getting into tonight.
I'm delighted to say that I'm joined by
really the perfect panel to be discussing this with.
I'm gonna introduce them in the order
in which they'll speak, and then we'll get going.
First off, to my immediate left we have Wendy Kaminer.
Wendy is a lawyer and social critic.
She's written about law, liberty, feminism for
The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal,
Spiked, also, I'm pleased to say,
and the author of eight books, including,
"Free For All: Defending Liberty in America Today."
Speaking after Wendy, we have Robby Soave.
Robby is the Associate Editor at Reason Magazine.
He's also a columnist for The Daily Beast.
He's written for The New York Times,
New York Post, CNN, many others,
and, most pertinently for this evening,
he's currently on sabbatical writing a book
about protest in the age of Trump.
So, it'll be fascinating to hear his thoughts.
After Robby, we'll be hearing from Brendan O'Neill.
Brendan is the Editor of Spiked
and a regular columnist for Reason,
as well as The Spectator.
He's written for The L.A. Times, The Sun,
The Australian, many more.
This year he was named Best Online Columnist
at the MAGGIE Awards,
and he's the author of the book, "A Duty to Offend,"
which we've got some copies of here as well.
Finally, on my far left there,
we have Professor Steven Pinker,
known to many of you, I'm sure.
Steven is a Johnstone Family Professor in
the Department of Psychology here at Harvard University.
He's written for The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic,
and is the author of ten books, but, most excitedly,
he's got a book coming out very soon called,
"Enlightenment Now," which is out February next year.
Each of the speakers are gonna speak
for about eight to ten minutes max,
and, panel, I'm gonna be quite tight on those times
'cause as soon as possible we're gonna bring it out
to the audience for questions and comments from the floor.
So, without further ado, Wendy,
would you like to kick us off?
- Thank you.
I'd like to start us off with a caveat.
At the risk of stating the obvious,
elections are over-determined.
There are multiple reasons for Trump's victory
and Clinton's defeat, not the least of which
are their respective personalities and reputations.
Even for people who try to isolate one factor,
one controlling factor, like, say,
Comey's last minute letter of intent
to re-open the email investigation,
they still have to contend with quite a lot of what-ifs.
What if Clinton had simply been a better candidate,
a more polished candidate, a more appealing candidate?
What if she had campaigned harder in Wisconsin?
What if she hadn't given talks at Goldman Sachs
for lots of money?
What if she hadn't used a private email server?
What if voters on the Left paid as much attention
to federal court appointments,
especially the Supreme Court, as voters on the Right?
What was the role of sexism in the election?
There was a fairly substantial gender gap,
and I think you can talk about sexism,
not just in terms of possible resistance
to a female President, but also in the embrace
of a retrograde notion of masculinity that Trump embodied.
What was the role of racial tensions
that was evident in controversies over
Black Lives Matter, over police shootings,
and the festering resentment of the Obama presidency?
What do we think about Democratic pollster
Stanley Greenberg's critique of the Clinton campaign
for focusing too much on identity
and not enough on economics?
Now, of course, that ties into our theme here.
If she focused too much on identity,
that might have something to do with
a backlash against political correctness.
What was the role of Russian propaganda in social media,
which we now learn also reached into very respectable
mainstream publications like The Washington Post.
So, there are a great many factors
that contributed to this election.
I expect that historians will be debating it years from now.
That being said, I still think that
we can confidently speculate about contributing factors.
I do believe that a backlash to political correctness
from the Left to progressive notions
of offensive speech and identity politics
played a not insignificant role in Trump's election.
I do want to note, though, that I think this term
political correctness is decreasingly useless.
I prefer to talk about political phobias
because I think we're now seeing real phobias
about hearing certain words uttered or even quoted
in any context about hearing disagreeable ideas,
just hearing these ideas,
hearing these words is considered traumatic.
Expressing them might be considered an act of violence.
As I say, I prefer to talk about political phobias
and language phobias.
I think that's what we're dealing with now,
but I'll use the term political correctness
simply because it's the one that we are all familiar with.
Now there is some polling evidence about
attitudes towards political correctness,
and I'll read you just a few of the findings,
if you'll excuse my reading for a moment.
I should add, though, another caveat,
which is that if polls were reliably accurate
Hillary Clinton would be President,
but let's go with what we have.
A recent Cato survey on free speech and tolerance,
which I recommend to all of you,
it's got a lot of very interesting findings in it,
found that some 70% of Americans agree
that P.C. is a big problem and say that
it silences important discussions.
58% of people surveyed felt that
they couldn't say what they believed.
Cato found striking differences between
the impulse to self-censor among
Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.
A small majority of Democrats, 53%,
said they did not feel the need to self-censor,
as opposed to a strong majority of Republicans, 73%,
and 58% of Independents, who said that
they do self-censor, keeping some of
their political opinions to themselves.
Maybe these are the people to whom
Trump was speaking when he said,
I'm so tired of this politically correct crap.
The Pew Research Center has also
some survey evidence on attitudes towards P.C.
It found that most Americans, 59%,
say too many people are easily offended these days
over the language that others use.
Like Cato, Pew found some notable differences
between Democrats and Republicans,
and also between Trump voters and Clinton voters.
78% of Republicans say people are too easily offended,
as opposed to 37% of Democrats.
83% of Trump supporters say people are too easily offended,
as opposed to 39% of Clinton supporters.
Pew also found that Democrats with more education
were more worried about offensive speech
than Democrats who are less educated,
which is not surprising considering trends on campus.
Finally, and how much time do I have?
How am I doing on time?
- [Tom] You've got a whole three minutes.
- I've got a whole three minutes.
I wanna provide just a little context
for political correctness.
Keep in mind that, while it's gotten a lot of attention
in recent years because it's become, I think,
quite extreme, it dates back 25 years easily.
There's a book on my shelf called, "Debating P.C.,"
which was published in 1992.
But, as I say, it's gotten extreme.
Now it applies to civil expressions of
what might be mainstream opinions,
opinions that a lot of Americans harbor,
like America is a land of opportunity,
America is a meritocracy.
Statements like that were considered microaggressions
by the University of California,
though Cato found that a majority of
African-Americans and Hispanics
weren't actually offended by them.
But, again, a lot of people harbor these opinions.
They probably don't like being called racist.
Trump told them that they were not racist.
Now I do think, though, I just wanna add one more,
a couple more, points that when people complain about
being censored by political correctness,
or when they talk about being self-censored,
I think that we should ask whether or not
they are abdicating their own responsibility to speak up,
instead of quietly submitting to the loudest voices
or to whatever they consider the majority view.
I think we should consider whether P.C.
and a backlash to P.C. is, in some ways,
being scapegoated for individual timidity,
and I think we should also consider that
while Trump made his attack on political correctness
it was central to his campaign,
probably resonated with a lot of people
who also felt sick and tired of
this politically correct crap.
But I think we should ask what were they tired of
not being able to say.
What was it that they felt constrained to say?
At the end of the day, I think it might be
difficult to separate progressive notions
of offensive speech and the backlash to that,
that I think contributed to Trump's election,
from the white identity politics that also fueled it.
Thank you. - Thank you, Wendy.
(audience applauds)
Robby, your thoughts, please.
- I agree very much with almost all of Wendy's comments,
but I have some different sources,
some different evidence to make the case,
which I believe that political correctness
did certainly play a role in helping
Donald Trump become President.
I think it's helpful to try to define political correctness,
though it's very hard to do.
Some people will define it in such a narrow way
that you would say, well, maybe that didn't
actually have much of an effect on the election.
I think one way that many Americans
who don't like political correctness think of it
is articulating an idea, the content of the idea,
the message of the idea, might actually
not be insensitive or offensive.
It might be a perfectly fine message,
but the way you said it,
there was something about the form
of how you articulated it, that isn't current,
that isn't considered polite or acceptable
amongst the highly educated or the media
or our societal elites, and you don't know that.
So, what you say is politically incorrect,
even though the message might be fine.
It's probably useful to try to have an example here.
A member of my grandfather's generation
might make a statement about racial equality,
but say it like, "The blacks are okay," or something.
The sentiment is actually fine.
I'm glad that that person thinks that
people of different races are a-okay,
but the way they would say it, obviously,
is tin ear to me.
I would kind of groan.
I would go, "Well, don't say it like that."
But then, you know, if you call out someone like that,
they feel like you've made them feel
racially insensitive, not with the times, behind,
and it creates a definite sentiment of dislike.
I think this has happened to a lot of people,
to a lot of Americans who were really fed up with it,
and I think that because many of them told me that
when I asked people why they voted for Trump.
So many of them have said this to me.
It's probably helpful to share a little bit more
of my background.
I've been writing about college campuses,
the free speech issues on college campuses
for many years now, and many of you in here are students
and have probably encountered incidents like these,
but it certainly seems to be the case
that over the last few years
there have been increasing numbers of incidents
that touch on political correctness
that involve people being punished,
either formally or, in many cases, informally
for saying something that was just not quite
perfectly right or articulated.
Many times from a position of ignorance,
from coming from a background that is
less privileged than the people who said
that's insensitive, that's politically incorrect.
An incident that really brought my thinking,
made me think that this was much worse,
that kind of encapsulates what I'm talking about,
at Oregon, I was going through a list of things
that students had reported to the university
using its bias reporting system,
which is a new tool in place at a hundred different
colleges and universities for students
and professors and people on campus
to basically report politically incorrect statements
called microaggressions, which you were talking about.
This one was someone had reported
a sign in the cafeteria that had triggered them,
that had made them feel microagressed.
The sign said, "Please clean up after yourself.
"We are not your mother."
Can anyone guess why this was offensive?
It was offensive because it relies on
the patriarchal assumption that only mothers
clean up after people,
that it would not be the equal father's right.
I'm sure the person who posted this flyer
was a minimum wage paid, perhaps not college educated
cafeteria worker who has more things to worry about
than learning the latest P.C. lingo
to appease the very privileged students of Oregon.
That and hundreds more incidents like that
made me think that, hey, there might be
a political correctness problem on college campuses,
and then there was a backlash to it on campus.
In fact, the people who didn't like this
increasingly began relying on people like
Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter and Lauren Southern
and bringing them to campus
and wanting to hear from them
solely for the reason that these people
were against political correctness,
and really for almost no other,
not for the depth of their ideas,
not for their interesting conservative philosophy.
These are empty characters who are solely defined
by their opposition to political correctness.
I watched this happen very inaugurally on college campuses,
and I wondered, could the same thing
happen to the nation at large
if political correctness is also a problem
in the lives of people who are not on college campuses.
I very much think, I thought, at the time last year,
that that helped explain why Donald Trump was elected.
I wrote an article right after the election
elaborating on the parallels between this
and the campus situation,
and it was the most popular article I've ever written.
People emailed me, dozens of people.
People never email me about articles.
Dozens of people emailed me to say, you're right.
That is why I voted for Trump.
I will read you a few of their emails.
They're fascinating.
This was from somebody who emailed me.
My reasons for voting for him were as you stated.
Political correctness is one term for it.
Lying is another.
If people can't use plain language and honesty
to refer to things, we are done.
Another said, I too am sick of the antics
of the P.C. crowd telling me what to think
while they cheerfully dismantle freedom of speech.
Best regards for a Merry Christmas, happy holiday,
or whatever our betters tell us to call it.
(audience laughs)
It goes on and on.
Another person said, I am not by any stretch
of the imagination your target audience.
I am old.
I'm a Tennessee hillbilly.
I'm not affluent.
So, what I say has no real value in your world.
That said, your article hits the nail on the head.
I try to be a good person,
to treat everyone I meet with respect.
The problem is I did not grow up the way young people did,
and I do not know the things they know.
I don't have the time to educate myself.
I have three jobs.
(audience laughs)
Another said, I am always kind.
I have impeccable manners.
What political correctness is to me
is an unreasonable expectation on your fellow man
to expect him to arrive where you are,
while having had completely different experiences.
It says that it's okay to be different
in the way they are, but not in any other way.
I've taken these things to heart because
when enough people tell you that
that's why they voted for Trump, you have to concede,
okay, maybe that's why you voted for Trump.
There is evidence beyond just the anecdotes.
A mathematician, Spencer Greenberg,
found that people who thought we are too P.C.,
people who thought we are too P.C. as a country,
that was the second most reliable indicator
for whether you were likely to vote for Trump.
The only more powerful indicator
was whether you were actually Republican.
It's also important to note that Trump was
the candidate of resistance to political correctness,
not just as a general election candidate,
but as a primary candidate.
He was the one who tells it like it is.
His response to the horrific Pulse shooting was to say
we can't afford to be politically correct anymore.
He complained that he was named Person of the Year,
rather than Man of the Year.
The woman who emailed me about
not being able to say Merry Christmas,
that's the kind of, you know, these are similar things.
We're talking about tens of thousands of voters
in two states, essentially, that changed the course
of the election, in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
I'm from Michigan.
I'm from Macomb County,
a county that voted twice for President Obama,
and this time for Trump.
This is the county that both Eminem
and Kid Rock are from actually. (laughs)
The kinds of voters that Trump did better with,
the white working-class,
are the exact kind of voters I would expect
to like the appeal to destroy political correctness.
I cannot claim that this is the sole factor
or even the most important factor,
but in an election that was very close
in, essentially, just two states,
I think the evidence strongly suggests,
we can certainly make the claim that political correctness
is among the four or five reasons, most important reasons,
for why Trump was elected,
and this should inform how we,
for those of the audience, myself included
who don't like President Trump and didn't vote for him,
it should inform the resistance to him
because if you're going to send Lena Dunham
to white working-class voters to tell
them why they're racist for voting for Trump,
we will have him in office a lot longer.
(audience laughs)
- Thank you, Robby. (audience applauds)
Brendan, your thoughts, please.
- Yeah, I still think that if you want to know
why Trump won, you only have to look at
the response to Trump's winning.
You only have to look at the meltdown of the media,
the ongoing meltdown of the media
that descend into daily hysteria.
They've slightly given up on the return to fascism,
return of Hitler thing, which they indulged for months.
They've kind of drifted away from that,
but they're still staying quite hysterical.
You only have to look at the Twitterati,
which every day is pumping out endless
hand-wringing tweets about Trump and his voters
and how ridiculous they all are,
or you only have to look at the constant search
by Hillary, her team, and all those people
who like Hillary for some neat explanation
for why Americans went so mad
and voted for someone so unpalatable.
There's this real mystification among those
who are supposed to know about politics,
this real sense of confusion among those
who are supposed to have their pulse
on the political realm about why Trump won.
I think that tells us a lot about why Trump won.
They have no ability to read the public,
no sense of connection with large sections of the public,
no understanding of what might be driving
some of these people and what they might be thinking.
The very tone in which they ask that question,
how on Earth did this happen,
actually starts to explain why this happened.
I think this has got to be the longest hissy fit
in history, and it so grating.
It is so incredibly grating, and you can just imagine.
I don't support Trump.
I would never vote for Trump,
but can you imagine how this sounds to people
who did vote Trump and who do support Trump?
This ceaseless, daily Nazi talk and the return of fascism,
and the worst thing that's ever happened in America,
or the worst thing.
He's the worst President ever.
Worse than the people who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Worse than Richard Nixon,
who decided at three o'clock in the morning
to bomb Cambodia and kill thousands of people?
We need some perspective,
and their lack of perspective is,
in itself, incredibly revealing.
I think the most revealing thing about this
longest hissy fit in history is their search for
an explanation for why people voted for Trump,
and it's very interesting.
If you read the media coverage,
if you read the kind of pro-Hillary hand-wringing
over what's currently going on,
they will say thinks like, well,
the nation is still beset by misogyny.
Lots of people just don't like the idea of
women being in power.
There's lots of sexism.
Or, they describe the support for Trump
as a white-lash, all these white people
lashing out against Black Lives Matter,
or all the developments of civil rights,
or whatever else it might be.
Some commentators refer to internalized misogyny
as their way of explaining why women voted for Trump,
this deeply disturbingly patronizing idea,
Victorian idea, in fact, that women
don't really know their own minds
and have kind of been brainwashed by the culture
to think that they're inferior,
and then they kind of just follow their men
into the voting booth and do as they tell them.
This argument, ironically, was being made by feminists,
and it's most anti-feminist argument you can ever think of.
Of course, they say we live in a post-truth era.
All these people have been sucked in by post-truth.
They believe demagogues. They believe lies.
They're gullible, and so on.
What all these explanations have in common
is this incredible instinct, this constant instinct,
to pathologize what people think,
to pathologize people's political beliefs,
to pathologize their voting habits.
It was really summed up for me by
someone on one of those anti-Trump demos
that happened shortly after his inauguration.
Someone held up a placard that said,
your vote was a hate crime,
and I thought that really summed up
where we're going with this,
which is that, you know, this sense that
you suffer from a pathology if you like Trump
or you vote for Trump.
It's the only explanation.
You're effectively mentally ill.
You have some deep-seated racial
or psychological disturbance,
and that's what you're expressing,
and, in fact, we've seen with all these analyses
of the psychological personality of the Trump voter,
as if they were an indistinguishable mass of people
whose brains could be investigated
like rats in a laboratory.
That kind of commentary has been going on for a long time,
and I think that really cuts to the heart
of the problem with political correctness
and of the problem with the way in which
the Trump phenomenon is being understood,
or, in my view, misunderstood because I think
both Wendy and Robby have touched on
the fact that it actually is quite difficult
to define what political correctness is.
I completely agree with Wendy that
the phrase is not particularly useful,
and the way it's used can differ from one person to another.
We tend, often, to focus on the extreme expressions
of political correctness, like, for example,
in Britain there was recently a new publication
of nursery rhymes, and the old classic,
what should we do with a drunken sailor,
was changed to what should we do with a grumpy pirate
(audience laughs) on the basis that you
couldn't possibly have children singing about drunkenness.
That would be terrible.
It's those kind of things we focus on
because they're hilarious and actually do
tell us something about the society we live in,
but it's so much more than that.
The policing of language is never just about
the policing of language.
The policing of language is always,
and you can trace this back to what Orwell wrote
and even before that.
The policing of language is always about
the policing of minds.
It's always about the policing of attitudes,
and it's fundamentally about the policing of behavior.
The transformation of words or the invention
of new words or the outlawing of certain phrases
is always about controlling how you view the world itself
and how you interact with the world.
It's never so straightforward as simply
replacing bad words with good ones.
There's always something else going on,
and I think that something else going on,
in my view, is pathologization.
If I had to sum up what I think P.C. is,
I think it is the increasing, growing,
long-standing pathologization of certain people's views,
which means the pathologization of their beliefs,
their values, and their lifestyles,
and I think that's the kind of thing
that Trump voters are reacting against.
I think the two definitions of P.C. we are normally given,
which is one comes from the Left and one comes the Right,
and particularly from the alt-right,
both are unsatisfactory.
So, the one from the Left,
and particularly the apologetic Left,
is that P.C. is simply good ideas gone wrong.
So, it's anti-racism and feminism and so on
gone too far or gone a bit off track,
and good intentions are at the roots of it,
but it's a bit too over zealous.
I don't buy that definition of P.C.
because, in my mind, P.C., in terms of identity politics,
and certainly the kind of stuff
we're seeing on campus at the moment,
runs entirely counter to those values.
It runs entirely counter to anti-racism and feminism.
Identity politics, the celebration of difference,
particularly racial difference,
the institutionalization of racial difference,
the way in which you can be described as a white man,
or the way in which black people
are said to suffer from some kind of
historical burden, historical determinism.
Identity politics rehabilitates the racial imagination
in a very ugly way, whereas anti-racism,
those good values of the old Left or the old Liberals,
was about destroying the racial imagination
or overcoming the racial imagination.
Then the Right's description of P.C.
is not very useful either.
The Right's description is that what we have
is basically pinkos marching through the institutions.
They use the phrase cultural Marxism,
which is my least favorite phrase in the whole world,
as I say to every single person
of every friend of mine who's on the Right.
If it's Marxism you're worried about,
you should be delighted by what's happening
on campuses right now because this
celebration of female fragility,
this stoking up of differences between the races,
this is the overriding of any question of class
so that everyone is just described as white
or black of whatever it might be.
That is the opposite of Marxism.
That is proof, hard proof, of the death
of the Marxist imagination, so you should be happy
if it's Marxism you're worried about.
So, neither of those definitions are satisfactory.
What I think P.C. really represents over time
through politics, through institutions in everyday life,
is the increasing alienation of a whole sway
of the society and the pathologization
of what they think and what they believe.
You can really see this with Trump voters
on various different issues.
So, the three issues I think are most telling
in relation to this are climate change,
gay marriage, and concern about terrorism.
Those are three issues on which Trump voters
have different views to Clinton voters.
They are a bit more skeptical about climate change.
They are more likely to be opposed to gay marriage,
and they are more concerned about terrorism
and the threat it poses to America.
What happens if you discuss these issues now?
If you're skeptical about climate change
or a climate change denier, you're pathologized
as anti-expertise, anti-intellectual, anti-science.
You're wrong.
You should be expelled from public life.
If you oppose gay marriage,
or rather defend traditional marriage,
you are homophobic, a bigot.
Instantly. No discussion.
It couldn't possibly be down to religious views
or something legitimate.
It's utterly illegitimate.
If you're concerned about terrorism,
or if you're concerned about Islamism,
or if you're concerned about Islam, you're Islamophobic.
You're instantly written off as someone
who has this phobic, i.e. mentally ill, take on the world.
So, I think a lot of the support for Trump
is a reaction against not simply the extremes
that us guys write about all the time,
the extreme expressions of P.C.,
but it's a struggle against the relentless
pathologization of an entire sway of American society
and an entire sway of Western society
by a new technocratic elite
that is increasingly intolerant of
not only other people's point of view,
but points of view in general,
and now wants to run everything in an incredibly technical,
managerial, supposedly expert-led fashion.
That's really what this revolt represents,
but the great tragedy, as Tom indicated
in his opening remarks, is that if they think
Trump will challenge this culture,
then they're in for a rude awakening,
and that's where, I think, those of us
who still do hold onto enlightenment values
need to step in and provide them with
some of the arguments that Trump certainly won't.
- Thank you, Brendan.
(audience applauds)
Finally, Steven.
- A number of the points that I intended to make
have already been made, so I'll try to
just stick to some ideas that have not been voiced so far.
One of the reasons that I think that
Trump's victory was legitimately shocking to many of us
is the degree of contempt for accuracy,
objectivity, facts, often common sense,
ordinary norms of civility, and decency.
I don't think this is an overreaction.
I don't think it's a hissy fit.
Organizations that try to monitor the
simply number of lies and false statements
have shown that Trump is quite an outlier.
All politicians lie.
That's 'cause all human beings lie.
All politicians bend the truth.
All humans bend the truth,
but Trump is clearly an extreme outlier.
The question is of the people who might be persuadable,
that is, the people who are not already bound by
political tribalism to the Democratic
or the Republican tribe,
and most of the variance is simply accounted for
by whether people consider themselves to be
Republican or Democrat.
The actual figures from the 2016 election
are not a whole lot different from
those from the 2012 election.
I mean, a couple of states flipped
by margins of a few tens of thousands of votes,
but generally the vast majority of people,
the positions that are advanced by candidates
made no difference whatsoever.
Most people, when asked, have no idea
what positions their favorite candidates espouse,
but they know that a particular candidate
represents their kind of people,
and that's really what pushes the numbers around.
The question is in those few tens of thousands
of people who are not already committed
to voting Democrat come what may
or Republican come what may,
what pushed them in this particular election
over to the side of a candidate who is
by many criteria patently unqualified to be President.
Imagine, and I would never want to overestimate
the overall level of rationality
or respect for truth or objectivity of homo sapiens,
but just imagine that there are some
small number of people who are really
affected by common sense, ordinary norms of respect,
civility, decency, fact, respect for truth, and so on.
You'd think that it would be kind of
a foregone conclusion to what they would vote for.
On the other hand, when you have these
outrages on the Left that match,
at least superficially, the outrages from Donald Trump,
it makes it kind of a toss-up for those people
who are simply going to vote for the less crazy tribe.
So, when you have the Chief Economist
of the World Bank who is dis-invited
from giving a commencement address
or Ayaan Hirsi Ali called Islamophobic,
when you have statements like
America is the land of opportunity
branded as microaggressions,
when you have a residential dean at an Ivy League College
circulate a memo saying maybe we should all
chill out about Halloween costumes,
and then you've got an angry mob
that confronts her and her husband,
Erika and Nicholas Christakis,
screaming obscenities at them,
when you have examples of white people taking Yoga classes
being denounced as cultural appropriation,
then these are all risible.
They're patently absurd.
They're not as consequential as having
a vindictive mendacious bully with nuclear codes.
So, I actually don't mean to equate them
in terms of the seriousness.
For all of the silliness on campus,
the old saying that academic debates are fierce
because so little is at stake,
when it comes to politics, a great deal is at stake,
and so, ultimately, we should be far more concerned
with the absurdity of Donald Trump
than we are of campus follies.
But, nonetheless, in the eyes of people
who are trying to decide which tribe
they want to affiliate with,
I think the politically correct Left
has made it a toss-up.
You think that it would be impossible
to out-stupid Donald Trump,
but a lot of the politically correct Left
has been doing their best.
It should've been a slam dunk.
They've made it into a toss-up.
The other way in which I do agree with
my fellow panelists that political correctness
has done an enormous amount of harm
in the sliver of the population that might be,
I wouldn't want to say persuadable,
but certainly whose affiliation might be up for grabs,
comes from the often highly literate,
highly intelligent people who gravitate
to the alt-right, internet savvy, media savvy,
who often are radicalized in that way,
who swallow the red pill, as the saying goes,
the allusion from The Matrix.
When they are exposed the first time
to true statements that have never been voiced
in college campuses or in The New York Times
or in respectable media,
that are almost like a bacillus
to which they have no immunity,
and they're immediately infected with
both the feeling of outrage that these truths
are unsayable, and no defense against taking them
to what we might consider to be
rather repellent conclusions.
Let me give you some examples.
Here is a fact that's gonna sound ragingly controversial
but is not, and that is that
capitalist societies are better than communist ones.
If you doubt it, then just ask yourself the question,
would I rather live in South Korea or North Korea.
(audience laughs) Would I rather live in
West Germany in the 1970s or East Germany or in the 1960s?
I submit that this is actually not
a controversial statement, but in university campuses,
it would be considered flamingly radical.
Here's another one.
Men and women are not identical in their life priorities,
in their sexuality, in their tastes and interests.
This is not controversial to anyone
who has even glanced at the data.
The kind of vocational interest tests of the kind
that your high school guidance counselor gave you
were given to millions of people,
and men and women give different answers
as to what they wanna do for a living
and how much time they wanna allocate
to family versus career and so on.
But you can't say it.
A very famous person on this campus did say it,
and we all know what happened to him.
(audience laughs) (audience member claps)
He's no longer, well, he is on this campus,
but no longer in the same office.
(audience laughs)
Here's a third fact that is just not controversial,
although it sounds controversial,
and that is that different ethnic groups
commit violent crimes at different rates.
You can go to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Look it up on their website.
The homicide rate among African Americans
is about seven or eight times higher
than it is among European Americans.
And terrorism, go to the Global Terrorist Database,
and you find that worldwide the overwhelming majority
of suicide terrorist acts are committed by
Islamist extremist groups.
If you've never heard these facts before
and you stumble across them or someone mentions them,
it is possible to come to some extreme conclusions,
such as that women are inferior,
that African Americans are naturally violent,
that we all ought to be Anarcho-capitalists
and do away with all regulation and social safety nets,
that most terrorism in this country is the fault of Muslims.
These are unwarranted conclusions because
for each one of these facts
there are very powerful counterarguments
for why they don't license racism and sexism
and Anarcho-capitalism and so on.
The fact that men and women aren't identical
has no implications for whether we should
discriminate against women for a number of reasons.
One of them is for any traits in which
the sex is different, and two distributions
have enormous amounts of overlap,
so that you can't draw a reliable conclusion
about any individual from group averages.
Number two, the principle of opposition
to racism and sexism is not a factual claim
that the sexes and races are
indistinguishable in every aspect.
It's a political and moral commitment
to treat people as individuals, as opposed to
pre-judging them by the statistics of their group.
Third, we know that some of the statistical generalizations
about races and sexes change over time.
So, what is true now may not necessarily
be true in 10 or 20 years.
These are all reasons why you can believe
that the sexes are different
and be a very strong feminist,
why you can believe that differences between
the races exist and be very strongly opposed
to any form of racism.
In the case of, say, rates of violent crime,
it used to be, go back 100 years,
the rate of violent crime among Irish Americans
was far higher than among other ethnic groups.
That obviously changed.
There's no reason that that can't change
in the case of current racial differences.
In the case of terrorism,
the majority of domestic terrorism
is committed by Right-Wing extremist groups,
not by Islamic groups within this country.
Of course, through much of its history
Islam was far more enlightened than Christendom.
There was no equivalent of the Inquisition.
There was no equivalent of the wars of religion
in the classical history of Islam.
Finally, in the case of the fact that
capitalism is really a better system than Marxism,
every successful capitalist society has regulation,
has a social safety net, and, in fact,
some of the countries with the strongest social safety nets
are also the countries that are most market-friendly,
that have the greatest degree of economic freedom.
These are all reasons why you can believe all of these
and not necessarily drift toward extremist positions.
In fact, why you can be a Progressive,
a Centrist, a Liberal, even a Leftist,
and believe all of these because you're exposed
not only to the facts but how to put them in context.
Now let's say that you have never even
heard anyone mention these facts.
The first time you hear them, you're apt to say,
number one, the truth has been withheld from me
by universities, by mainstream media,
and, moreover, you will be vindicated
when people who voice these truths are
suppressed, shouted down, assaulted,
all the more reason to believe that
the Left, that the mainstream media,
that universities can't handle the truth.
So, you get vindicated over and over again,
but, worst of all, you're never exposed
to the ways of putting these facts into context
so that they don't lead to racism and sexism
and extreme forms of Anarcho-Libertarianism.
So, the politically correct Left
is doing itself an enormous disservice
when it renders certain topics undiscussable,
especially when the facts are clearly behind them
because they leave people defenseless
the first time they hear them against
the most extreme and indefensible conclusions possible.
If they were exposed, then the rationale
for putting them into proper political
and moral context could also be articulated,
and I don't think you would have
quite the extreme backlash.
- Thank you very much, Steven.
(audience applauds)
At this point, whilst we rearrange Steven's microphone,
we're going to go out for audience questions.
I'm gonna take a handful at times,
so, panel, don't feel the need to jump straight in,
even if something's addressed to you,
and then we'll bring it back.
So, let me see some hands.
Who wants to be--
Cool, so, mic man, let's go to this gentleman here.
Have we got someone on this side?
There's someone also there in a black shirt.
- The guy in the back was the first person
to raise his hand. - Going back, cool.
Yes? - Wendy, you mentioned
political correctness had a previous peak in the 90s,
and I was just wondering if there's any
pattern you see why it's back,
and why is it social media?
- Thank you very much.
Let's go here, and then can you just take the mic
up to the gentleman up about there.
Yeah? Shoot.
- My question is where do we go from here?
I'm already convinced that this was the reason
and you guys just said the same thing.
You know?
So, I'm like, where do we go from here?
What is the next step?
- Thank you very much.
Yep, up there.
You, yeah.
- Thank you.
What I find more and more these days
is the sorts of people who you mentioned
who might state that one of the reasons
that they voted from Trump was political correctness.
Often, the critiques that they applied to
the culture of suppression and of thin-skinned snowflakes
can be very easily reflected back on them.
Do you not think that a lot of the time
when people identify political correctness
as the source of their grievance
they're often people who resort to the same
protections against offensive speech,
and that it can often be used as a cover
for naked identitarianism?
You know, people on the Right are often
offended by speech that offends their,
say, white male, red-blooded American identity too.
- Excellent. Thank you.
I'm gonna grab two more quickly.
So, let's take this gentlemen here
and then this gentlemen here,
and then we'll come back.
- Hi, so, sadly I don't think that most voters
in the Midwest were working-class.
Respect. - It was a pity.
- Maybe some reason, not many probably read Campus Reform.
So, my question is of all these controversies on campus,
how much of it filters out into the consciousness
of the average American?
Some of us may be concerned about political correctness
on campus 'cause we experience it,
but how much does that affect the average voter,
who we're talking about?
Related to that, what has changed with
the internet and social media?
Has that allowed, say, the consciousness
of what's going on in campus to migrate
to people who otherwise would've been unaware,
perhaps because they didn't even go to college, for example.
- Thank you very much, and just here.
- I'm curious about how norms around
political correctness bleed into the conversation.
I'm sorry, bleed into the conversation
around free speech, and there's this sort of
natural politicization of free speech
whenever it's brought up in a politically correct context
and that's already sort of student,
different travel directions, and so there's this
also sort of unfortunate fragility to it
where free speech is only brought up
in a context where it's defending a position
that somebody thinks is unsavory.
So, there's this question around how to
avoid its politicization so that it can be maintained,
as well as sort of propagate better norms.
So, I guess from a practical point of view
I wanna know how to sort of improve that.
- Thank you very much.
Right, so there's a lot there, panel.
Most of these come back on everything,
but, Robby, I wanna start with you,
particularly this question about
how much does this actually fuel as a feud.
Does your average Rustbelt trucker
actually know there's people with blue hair
running around calling him privileged.
I mean, how much does that actually--?
- I actually think the answer to that is yes,
not because they read Spiked or Reason or Campus Reform,
but they listen to Talk Radio, they watch Fox News,
and these two outlets in particular
have been blasting this issue out to their listeners
for the last few years at a volume
you could not possibly understand,
unless you ask grandpa what he's listening to these days.
Then it becomes a question of, well,
is political correctness only a problem
because we're telling people about it,
and they're so outraged, and maybe if we would
censor ourselves we wouldn't get into it.
But I think it's worth covering anyway
because I do think it's a problem on college campuses,
but then it's over-hyped by these people,
and, also, there are people who, you're right,
have never heard of any of this
but then encounter it in their daily life,
encounter it with a neighbor or with a client
or customer or a boss or a coworker.
You don't hear about those incidents
because there's not a corporate life reform website.
I absolutely do think the voters are
more educated on this issue for these reasons.
- Can I answer that? - Yeah, of course.
- I think that the Cato and the Pew surveys,
which I cited, also give you some evidence of that.
They really do find a lot of awareness
in the general public about political correctness,
and I think what was most interesting to me
were the differences in the way Democrats and Republicans
thought about political correctness
and the need to censor themselves.
There was a question directed to me
about political correctness in the 90s.
I think you asked why it reemerged recently.
I don't think it reemerged.
It never went away.
I would date what we now think of as
political correctness or speech and language
and idea phobias back to the late 1980s, early 90s.
We saw the notion that speech is
the equivalent of an act of violence
coming out of popular therapies,
popular personal development movements in the 1980s.
We saw, to some extent, reflected in the
anti-porn movement, the feminist anti-porn movement
of the 1980s, and then in the early 90s
we have universities beginning to experiment
with speech codes and beginning to implement
and enforce speech codes.
We also see them trying to welcome
much more diverse student populations
and not really knowing how to do it,
and I think speech codes were partly a reflection
of the move to diversify American campuses.
So, we start off with, I would say,
more contained notions of offensiveness in the 1990s,
but as this grows over a decade,
the notion of what's offensive becomes broader and broader.
The notion of what constitutes bigotry
or racism or homophobia or sexism
becomes broader and broader,
and starts to embrace a lot of mainstream ideas.
This list of microaggressions that
the University of California issued,
it involved criticizing affirmative action.
It involved saying things like
if in America you work hard, you can get ahead.
It involved asking people where they're from.
It's now considered offensive to ask someone
where they're from, and it's interesting
the way people react to that question.
I was in a hotel in Miami recently,
and there was this very nice guy helping us out.
I said, where are you from,
meaning what part of the country of you from.
Where did you grow up?
Did you grow up in Florida?
Did you grow up in California?
He said something like, well, I'm an American.
Well, that was my assumption was that he was an American,
but that question, where are you from,
has become so loaded now.
Political correctness has never gone away.
It's just gotten worse and worse for a number of reasons,
not the least of which are probably the proliferation
of Student Life Administrators on campuses.
- (laughs) Definitely, and Steve, sorry,
was there something you wanted to say?
- As someone who's plotted an awful lot of graphs
tracking things quantitatively over time,
I'm always suspicious of any argument
that something is bad now, therefore,
it's worse than it used to be
because often those claims don't survive fact-checking.
I'm not getting any younger,
but I have a good enough memory of
what things were like in the 1970s
when I was a college student,
and things were pretty bad then as well.
I remember my first week on campus at a junior college.
I was only 17. This was 1971.
There was a guy behind a table,
several people selling or giving away
some sort of the Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyist,
People's Workers United Manifesto Party circular
with a picture of Mao and Stalin and Lenin,
and he was getting into an argument with
someone who was trying to engage him in argument,
and I remember him shouting him down,
screaming, "Fascists don't have the right to speak."
This was 1971.
Most people here weren't born yet.
So, this syndrome goes back a long way.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of psychologists
who mentioned claims that by now are fairly unexceptionable,
like evolution might have something to do with behavior,
like there may be some genetic differences
among individuals, were shouted down, often assaulted.
E.O. Wilson, Emeritus Professor, still here,
was shouted down by chanting students
who said, "Racist Wilson, you can't hide.
"We charge you with genocide."
Dick Hernnstein was shut down when
he tried to lecture on pigeons back in the 1970s
because of his Atlantic Monthly article,
which did not mention race.
This was well before the bell curve.
These attempts at shutting down
unpopular beliefs goes back at least 40 years.
I think one of the things that happened
is that the generation that
first tried to shutdown speech,
namely, we Baby Boomers, got into power.
We expanded the Student Life bureaucracy,
and we created something of an invitation to
students who I believe are getting far too much
blame for this movement.
The idea that millennials are snowflakes
that can't handle unpopular beliefs
I think is totally wrong.
It's really our generation that has kind of
welcomed this, rewarded it, and used it.
I think a better analogy than snowflakes
who are traumatized might be the cultural revolution
in China in the 1960s in which one faction
of the adult generation mobilized the students
to attack another faction of their generation.
A lot of the enabling was done by,
not by the students, but by the factions that egged them on.
So, what's to be done?
I would certainly like to see,
I would like to find out how much
we are seeing a case of pluralistic ignorance,
where everyone assumes that everyone else is offended,
and no one actually is offended.
(audience laughs)
Everyone assumes that everyone else
has these dogmatic politically correct beliefs,
but it may not necessarily be a majority who do,
and to crack this pluralistic ignorance
you really do need people who announce
that the emperor has no clothes,
who say in public what everyone else
might be believing in private.
That's gonna be a crucial step in making it happen,
in response to your question.
- I wanna disagree with you just a little bit, Steven,
your description of what it was like
on campus in the 60s and 70s, 'cause I was there too.
I'm probably a little older than you,
even though my hair isn't gray,
(audience laughs)
and will never be.
(audience laughs)
- But I can't ask you your age.
- You can ask me my age.
My age is not a secret.
Of course, there are always people
who are extremely intolerant of speech.
That's human nature, and there are always
probably only a minority of people
who are really strong free speech advocates
when it comes to protecting the speech they don't like.
There are always people who indulge in heckler's veto.
I think the difference on campus is that
there are now administrative systems
that are devoted to shutting down
whatever somebody complains of
as what we might think of as a minor offense.
- I agree. - You didn't used to
get disciplined for telling a joke that offended somebody.
- The guy who said, "Fascists have no right to speak,"
is now a dean. (audience laughs)
- But I also think that it's not our generation
as much as it is, you know, most of these
Student Life Administrators are not in their sixties.
I think most of them tend to be,
I don't know, what? In their forties?
What I'm seeing is a real generational divide
that, I don't know, I think the cutoff
is probably 45 or 50, and that younger faculty,
and by younger I mean under 45,
and administrators are people who were raised
under these speech code regimes.
They were educated under speech code regimes,
and that's why it's important to remember
that they date back to the early 90s.
So, the people who graduated from college
in the early mid-90s are now middle-aged,
and somebody can shut that phone off.
(audience laughs)
And they're the people who are enforcing these things.
I also wanted to--
- I just wanna quickly bring Brendan in,
little bit of Robby, and then we'll go back out
'cause I wanna get some more questions in.
- Yeah, so, I agree actually
that this is not particularly new,
and looking at the British context,
the exact thing that you described, Steven,
in relation to people wanting to ban fascism
was happening on British campuses since the 70s onwards.
That's really important because
it really proves the argument that
if you don't challenge censorship at the very start,
then it will swallow you up eventually.
When I was at university in the early 1990s,
I spent a lot of my time arguing
against the censorship of fascists,
and you were called a fascist for doing that.
You would be branded a racist and so on,
even if you were involved in anti-racist
campaigns at the same time.
The argument that we made, students made at that time,
was that if we allow the campus police
or the university administration or student unions
to ban fascists, then we're opening the door
to censorship more broadly,
and we were proved right on that
because as soon as it was okayed for them
to ban fascists, then they moved on to banning Zionists.
That was their next target because
Zionism was seen as this racist ideology.
Then they moved on from Zionists to banning homophobes,
and then misogynists and all the other people
that the student campaigners and
certain university workers don't like.
A really important turning point in Britain
was in 2002, I think it was,
when a campus banned Eminem's music.
They banned Eminem's music on the basis
that he uses the word faggot.
So, the fact that they had a policy
that meant that they could ban homophobia
meant that it was perfectly logical
that they could ban Eminem.
You can trace it historically,
this spread from censorship that was targeted
just on fascism to one that now can ban
Germaine Greer because she thinks there are
men and women and a man can't become a woman,
or Maryam Nemazee because she escaped
the Iranian regime and is very critical of Islam.
All these people are being swallowed up
by a logic that was there at the very beginning.
I think the logic is the key thing.
Just one quick point on what to do next,
I mean, it'd be really interesting to hear
other people's views on that,
but I think, I completely agree with Steven.
I dislike this word snowflake so much
and, in fact, we recently banned its use on Spiked,
(audience laughs) not that we're in favor
of censorship, but it's such an useful term
in terms of describing what's going on,
and this idea of uniquely fragile millennials and so on,
I think that's a real cop out
because what we really face is not simply
a new generation that's quite intolerant,
and not simply campus craziness, in fact,
but it's really a counter-enlightenment,
and then the challenge to all the ideals
of the enlightenment, the ideal of universalism,
the ideal of self-government,
the ideal of freedom of thought and freedom of speech,
of course, the ideal of using moral reasoning
to negotiate your way through the world.
It's all those things that are under attack.
You can't blame that on some 20 year-old
who thinks you shouldn't wear a costume
of Bruce Jenner on Halloween.
They're not responsible for this.
It goes back much further than that.
The reason they express it so keenly
is because they've been socialized
through childhood in school and so on
into this new counter-enlightenment,
into this new culture that devalues freedom of speech,
devalues due process, sacralizes self-esteem,
and so on and so on.
So, they are only the end products of a culture
that I think has been growing probably before the 70s,
going back maybe even to, you know,
I'd like to blame everything on the 60s
'cause I'm quite anti 1960s, but maybe even before that.
These students strike me as the foot soldiers
of the West's own self-doubt,
and I think unless we grapple with the origins of that,
then we will just end up shouting at young people,
which is not very productive.
- So, Robby.
- I actually have a slightly different
perspective than that.
I am constantly struck by how un-ideological
the opposition to speech is on campus,
that it is purely psychological.
This is an enormous difference
and a very recent one among college students
that their hostility to speech is based in discomfort
to harmful emotions, and this you can measure.
I have students report feeling anxiety and depression
and trauma at off-the-charts higher rates
than even ten years ago,
even among kids who aren't even yet in college,
who are in high school.
Jean Twenge has some fascinating research on this
and how smartphone usage might correspond with it.
But when I talk to students,
they describe their hostility to offensive ideas
in that it's not really a deeply philosophical opposition.
It's this idea hurts me or maybe
it hurts people in my community.
It hurts them emotionally,
and emotional harm is the same as violence
because it triggers my trauma,
a trauma I've been taught to think I have
by this enormous campus bureaucracy
that really weaponizes this trauma,
or permits you to weaponize it because
then you can shut someone down if you have it.
So, there's an incentive to make yourself
be a victim when you really aren't
or you're no more than anyone else
that it is increased,
I believe from looking at the data,
is new and increasing and powerful
and is the main driver of censorship.
- I think at this point I'm gonna
take it back out to some questions.
We will return, I'm sure, to many of those points.
So, who else wants to speak?
Let's see some hands.
Mic people, where are we at?
Let's take this lady in the front row there,
and then do you wanna take the mic to this gentleman here?
- Thank you.
I'd like to take it back out of the campus
and into the country at large again.
I totally agree with everything people are saying
about the issues around being too P.C.
in the campus context, but I'm wondering
how we make a return to civility
because what has happened, and I've seen this
both, you know, having just come from
living in the U.K.
I saw it as a result of Brexit, and I've seen it here
where now, thanks to these surprise votes,
people feel like they have a license
to say things that they wouldn't say before.
So, whether it's attacking someone at a bus stop
and saying, "So, when are you going back
"to where you came from," and things that can
escalate into quite frightening levels.
So, I just wonder how do we get
that level of civility and a sense of the civic,
if you like, and respect for our fellow human back
without going into these extremes
that the political correctness takes us?
- Thank you very much.
Uh, gentleman there, yep.
- Hi.
What role do you think, perhaps,
the first generation immigrants might play
in bringing some sense back to the
political correctness conversation,
given that many of them come from countries
that may not have a tradition of political correctness,
and certainly many of them come from countries
that suppress free speech, and, therefore
might be more likely to protect it,
want to protect it when they come here.
I myself have to tell many people
wearing a bindi as a fashion item is fine.
Recently, the M.F.A, actual Japanese woman,
when there was a protest against having kimono tryouts
and actual Japanese women came there
to say really it's okay, (laughs)
(audience laughs) and white people
and Asian Americans were protesting against them.
So, yeah, that's my question.
- Definitely. Can I see some more hands quickly?
Yeah, do you wanna pass the mic
to this gentleman down here.
I do wanna go up there, but you first, sir.
Just in the middle there. - Thank you.
We're sitting in the university that
from its beginnings used to send people
to Rhode Island if they didn't agree
with the principles being maintained by the university.
So, this goes back probably beyond the 70s,
(audience laughs) and my own pet theory,
and I wonder if it's stupid
or if you'd agree with it is that
political correctness in some sense
is the redefinition of blasphemy for a secular age.
- [Tom] Thank you very much.
- I think a significant number of persons
who voted for Donald Trump
were very, very aware of his warts,
but I think they felt that there were
some fundamental problems with what Hillary Clinton
and Barack Obama wanted to change America towards.
One of those is that if you look in a newspaper
you will see priority given to women
and minorities for jobs, for example.
This is just an example.
Well, what does that mean?
That means everybody gets a push up
except if you're white male,
and if you go around, you can see women power,
Latino power, black power, LGBT power,
but if you say white power,
then you're labeled a white supremacist,
and I would hope the panel would address
these comments that I just made.
- Thank you very much.
I'm gonna bring it back to the panel now,
but I'm gonna ask you guys to be brief
'cause we'll try and pick up the last ones here
before we close, but, Wendy.
- On the last point, there was a political scientist
writing in The Washington Post,
analyzing the election, who said that
the perception that white people
are treated unfairly relative to minorities
was a particularly strong predictor
of support for Donald Trump.
That, I think, goes to your point, briefly.
- And, Brendan, on this point,
which we've heard here, but also at the top there
is to what extent does political correctness
and the backlash against it become a cover
for what is just old-fashioned bigotry potentially,
or how do we de-mystify those two things, I guess.
- [Man] Not seeing if we're going to be
limited resources, and it's just a powerful symbol.
- Yeah, so, just on to that point.
- Well, political correctness is bigotry.
That's what it is.
The dictionary definition of bigotry is
intolerance of someone who has different views to you.
It doesn't actually mean racism and misogyny.
That can be encapsulated in bigotry,
but bigotry is intolerance of people
who do not share your views,
usually your religious views, but all views.
So, political correctness is bigotry.
A lot of the reaction against Trump is bigotry
because of the way it talks about Trump voters
and so on, and the intolerance it has for their views.
Whenever I hear people calling someone a bigot,
I always instantly think, hm, maybe that person's
the bigot 'cause that's often what's--
Under the guise of anti-bigotry,
a lot of bigotry is currently being expressed right now.
I think in relation to--
First, I wanna defend Brexit.
Brexit is not the same as Trump.
Brexit was the largest vote in British history
against an institution, the European Union,
which is incredibly undemocratic and illiberal and racist.
It has a two-tier immigration policy,
which grants freedom of movement for
largely white Europeans, while paying African dictators
to keep their people away from our pristine shores.
So, this is not a nice institution,
and it's certainly not one that anyone
on the Left or on the Liberal side should support.
Brexit is a good thing.
If Brexit licensed anything, it was the contempt
of the technocrats for the idea of democracy
and for ordinary voters.
The bile that is being poured upon people
who voted for Brexit in recent months is extraordinary,
and that's another form of bigotry
that we don't talk about enough.
One very quick point,
I agree that P.C. is like blasphemy for a secular age,
but it's kind of worse because
blasphemy protected God or Jesus or the Bible.
What P.C. does, it turns all of us
into little jumped-up Jesuses.
So, we all deserve our own blasphemy law.
We all have that protection that used to
just be afforded to one book or one church and so on.
So, it makes it entirely unwieldy and subjective,
and anyone can say, well, that offends me,
and, therefore, I don't think it should be allowed anymore.
So, I really agree with Robby that
the censorship we have now is therapeutic censorship.
We had religious censorship.
We had political censorship.
Now we have therapeutic censorship,
which is censorship demanded to protect
my self-esteem and my feelings and my mental health.
- We also have therapeutic justice,
which is very dangerous.
The notion that the justice system
ought to be considering and privileging
the feelings of these self-identified victims.
Where does this notion "believe the women,"
"automatically believe an accuser" come from
if not from the world of therapy.
It may well be appropriate for a therapist
to believe somebody's story or a friend,
but it's really not appropriate for the justice system.
Can I very quickly just respond to the guy up there
who talked about political correctness on the Right.
I think that's just important to keep in mind
that while we've been talking about
progressive P.C. that there's just as much
censoriousness on the Right.
Cato found, for example, that majority of Republicans
would strip the citizenship of people who burn the flag.
Now that was something that was proposed by Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is an instinctive practitioner
of P.C. and identity politics.
That was a big part of his campaign,
and, of course, he's also extremely thin-skinned.
- Definitely, and just on that point,
I'd be interested as well to pick up
on this kind of identity politics issue,
which was also raised there,
which is if the currency in politics
becomes all about this group, that group, that group.
Are you not gonna generate on some level
some kind of backlash? - I wanna address
the back to civility.
I think our watchdog institutions of our society,
our education system, our media institutions,
need to check themselves before they wreck themselves
and bring us all down with them.
The media institutions need to be much more responsible.
They should call out Trump's bad policies
and explain why they're bad.
They can't overreact.
They should not treat him like Hitler
because even in cases where it's justified,
it turns people off.
These institutions have to do a better job
of having regular Americans believe that
there is truth and there is value in what they're saying.
Our school system should foster
enlightenment values, multiculturalism, tolerance,
and not just our college systems,
but our K through 12 system.
There is some evidence that the
Southern Poverty Law Center has compiled.
I don't necessarily trust everything
that they've suggested that people like
Ayaan Hirsi Ali are hateful figures,
but they have found that there does seem to be
maybe a minor bullying in schools relating to
incivility and Trump to kids bullying
Latino students and black students.
I'm skeptical that it's necessarily
this huge jump based on the election
because kids always are mean to each other,
and this might just be the flavor,
the way they're mean to each other right now.
- The rates of bullying have come down.
- Right, rates of bullying come down over time.
But schools can identify that.
It's perfectly fine to do something about that,
but we have to remember that the purpose
of education is to make people better human beings,
not to shame them or scold them
or suspend them or expel them
or put them in jail for not getting
everything right the first time.
- To teach them how to think and how to argue.
I think technology is one of
the biggest obstacles to civility.
Call me a Luddite, but I think in order to bring--
I think civility requires human contact,
person-to-person contact.
People are much more civil when
they have to face each other as they speak.
- Completely, and Steve, is there anything
you wanna respond to before we go back out?
- No. - No? He's good.
- You're good. - On that note,
let's go back out.
Where are my mic people?
Let's go this gentleman here, and then,
other person, there's two guys in the middle there.
Start with the guy with the beard.
- Yeah, I just wanted to talk to
regarding the civility issue.
I think actually P.C. probably gets in the way of it.
I'll go back to when I was a child growing up in Britain.
The area in which I grew up was kind of mixed.
It was quite mixed.
It was a working-class area, but there was outward racism.
I mean, people would call you all sorts of things.
The thing is, though, we kinda had it out with one another.
Someone would say something to me.
I would say something to them.
We would sometimeS even scuffle,
but we had it out, and we kind of had
the space to have it out.
I think to some degree what P.C. does is
it gets in the way of that,
gets in the way of you being there to--
Pardon? - That's not good though.
- [Tom] We'll take you in a minute,
but just finish your point.
- I don't know because I think we ended up
in a better place by having it out.
- [Tom] Okay, excellent. Thank you.
Yes.
- [Man In Hat] Is this on?
- Yes, we're good.
- So, with the idea of political correctness,
I just wanted to point out
I think there's a philosophical idea
that's sort of at war here between certain groups,
between the Left and the Right,
is the idea of collectivism, which, I think,
political correctness and a lot of these ideas,
you know, feminism and Black Lives Matter,
is this idea that we must treat individuals
in a collective manner, and I think that
that conflicts a lot with the first-hand
American ideals of giving power to the individual,
pursuing the American dream,
and if you buckle down and if you fight hard
and you fight through all of the different
types of, I guess, oppressions or whatever you wanna
call it in your life that you will succeed.
As we're kind of moving forward,
these terms like cultural Marxism,
sort of this parallel between post-Modernism
and all these different thoughts
are starting to enter our society,
and I think that really it's, like we said,
it's an ideological battle between these two fields,
and just something I think would be interesting to address.
- That's great.
Can I see some more hands?
Right, there's quite a lot.
First of all, do you wanna pass the mic
to the gentleman behind you,
and then can you, sorry, just come down here.
So, just go jump in.
Yeah, shoot.
- I just wonder how you think Democratic candidates
in the future might thread the needle
between maybe attracting voters who are
opposed to political correctness,
but also satisfying the voters who demand
political correctness, 'cause it seems to me,
I think in The Virginia, it seems to me
the Left is walking away from the Democratic candidate
for not being politically correct enough.
I think the whole thing might collapse.
- Thank you very much.
Take this gentleman down there.
- Professor Pinker, you've said that it's important
to talk about facts.
As I'm sure you know, Charles Murray
recently spoke on our campus,
and one of your fellow faculty members said,
"Charles Murray is like the Confederate flag.
"You can invite him if you want,
"but doing so says a lot about our values."
So, I'm wondering how that squares
with your perception that it's important
to have dialogue on college campuses.
- Thank you very much.
I'm gonna grab two more very quickly.
This gentleman who's been waiting to speak,
semi-patiently, but there you go.
(audience laughs)
- I just kind of shared my view,
and an altercation, I looked at that as progress
but that's just my perspective.
I was just thinking of political correctness.
Is it a symptom perhaps of a larger idea or a larger--
I mean, there seems to be an emergence
of other economies in the context of globalization
and tactile divide here.
Could this just be a proxy battle
and political correctness is actually the symptom,
and the true cold is just not enough resources,
not enough income, not enough growth
and better quality of life.
Is it just that it's easier to have these discussions
'cause the others are so complicated?
You talked about kind of a rational act
or doing a cost benefit analysis,
the voters or the undecided that could be won over.
So, you're talking about them doing an equation.
I don't know how egregious political correctness has come,
but I gotta believe there's something substantial
about political correctness on a college campus
that is beyond just having a sign that says
mother or father and it has to be something fundamental
that makes it a proxy battle,
why it was so powerful to have other people
who are usually logical decide to vote for Trump
despite all his flaws in reason and rationale.
- Okay, excellent.
Thank you very much.
At that point, I think we have to bring it back.
We've got about five minutes left.
So, panel, I'm gonna ask you to
just offer a final thought,
a minute or two, either to answering these questions
or just to ignore them and say what it is
that you think is important.
So, let's do reverse order.
So, Steve, do you wanna kick us off?
- In response to the question that
was directed at me, I'm not sure which colleague
you are referring to but, obviously,
I strongly disagree with him or her.
A great irony is that Charles Murray's
most recent book, "Coming Apart,"
was very much about all of the issues
we've been discussing this evening.
Namely, there is a cultural divide in America,
two sides that barely understand each other
that have different political affiliations,
and that it behooves us to understand them.
The ultimate irony is that Charles Murray
is the one who's shouted down,
given that he's the one who had tried
to explain these very cultural phenomenon
that we're discussing today.
- Thank you very much, Steven.
Brendan. - Yeah, on how to convince
Democrats or Left-Wingers to oppose P.C.,
I don't know about the Democrats.
I think they're probably a lost cause,
and I really agree with the point Wendy made
at the very start that there are
many reasons for Trump's victory.
One is the crisis of the Democrats.
I think there was a New York Times piece
a few months ago saying the problems
faced by the Democrats are worse than you think,
and it broke down the extent to which
they've lost working-class support.
My view is that the Left or Liberals,
however you want to refer to them,
should be at the forefront of
challenging political correctness,
and it's a shame that they vacated the field
and left it to the Right,
and the Right is not, in my view,
a particularly convincing defender of liberty.
But it's because the Left has turned freedom
into a dirty word that the Right
can pretend to be that.
The Left should be at the forefront.
Liberals should be at the forefront
because P.C. represents, in my view,
P.C. is very reactionary.
It sounds very Right-Wing to me.
I always go back to the values of the enlightenment,
which are the values of universalism,
the values of self-government,
the values of freedom of thought and freedom of speech,
which are the values that P.C. attacks.
One of the great ideas of the enlightenment
was the idea of universalism,
the idea of everyone had a shared capacity for autonomy
and a shared capacity to advance in life.
A famous French reactionary,
who was very anti-enlightenment called Joseph de Maistre
responded to that by saying
there is no such thing as man.
He said there is Italian men, French men,
black men, white men, rich men, poor men.
There's no such thing as man.
That was his reactionary cry.
That is the cry of the P.C.
That is the cry of identity politics.
There is no such thing as man.
It's a reactionary movement,
and everyone who considers themselves Liberal
or Progressive or Left-Wing or however you want
to describe it should be fighting against it every day.
- Thank you, Brendan, and Robby.
- I'll just make two points on the identitarianism
that the man in the hat mentioned and Black Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter is the best example
of a group whose goals I support
almost wholeheartedly to the extent that
they're to reform the criminal justice system,
to end mass incarceration, to end the war on drugs,
goals that I support that this group has,
I think you could make a very compelling case
set back very badly, that we were closer to
having criminal justice reform several years ago.
Now we have a law and order President
and a Republican party pivoting massively away from
the kind of Libertarian ideas of criminal justice reform.
I think Black Lives Matter has to
shoulder some blame for that.
It shows the dangers of making it about
racial identity in a non-unifying way.
Their goal had to be to convince people
who are right leaning or white
that they should support criminal justice reform.
If I was going to do this,
I would say it's wasteful the amount of money
we spend locking people up.
It doesn't work anyway.
We don't have the money.
I would also say that it's racially problematic
how we do it, and there's racism in the system.
My lead argument wouldn't be
you are complicit in structural racism
if you support this because that turns people off.
Unfortunately, I think Black Lives matter
is sort of emblematic of the problem we're talking about,
even though I wish they had succeeded in this.
What can we do to change political correctness or stop it?
Trump has shown that surprising things can happen
and that if there's anything that better explains
how he was elected it is simply the cult of celebrity
in this country, the love of T.V. stars, of reality T.V.
I think a lot of journalists didn't understand this
because they watch highbrow television, prestige dramas.
They don't watch Kim Kardashian and The Real Housewives,
which are closer to Trump's temperament
and his celebrity personality.
So, we could have a T.V. personality
that is well-known to all of America the way Trump was
or movie star who challenges political correctness
but in a respectful, non-horrifying way.
I sound like I'm fantasizing about this,
but it could happen.
It is possible, and so I'll leave it there.
- Thanks, Robby.
Kardashian 2020. - Yeah.
- God save us. - Wendy, your final thoughts.
- To the question of how Democratic candidates
can balance the need to appeal to
tribal politics on the Left
and at the same time appeal to
people who are disgusted with political correctness,
if I knew the answer to that, I wouldn't be sitting here.
I'd be making a gazillion dollars
as a political consultant, (audience laughs)
and, of course, the answer's going to be different
in every race, and it's always the challenge
of a political candidate to try to
persuade the greatest number of people
while offending the least number.
It's a real challenge, and I think
part of the challenge is that,
and this is, I think, related to
the problem of political correctness,
is that there's an awful lot of purity out there
on the Right and the Left, you know,
an awful lot of political purity,
which I think is very dangerous.
I think it leads to political nihilism.
If you can't get exactly what you want,
you'll just accept nothing.
You just won't vote.
We haven't talked about the numbers
of people who don't vote.
That is a huge problem, and, by the way,
we have an election in Boston tomorrow,
and I think probably something like 10% of people,
of eligible voters, are expected to vote.
It is a serious problem.
I also wanted to just comment on the spread of this idea,
the remarkable spread of the idea that speech is violence.
I think in one of the surveys I've looked at recently,
and maybe it was Cato, I think they found
majority support for that notion,
and that, to me-- - It was Cato.
- Yeah, that to me is just remarkable,
and it speaks to this failure to
distinguish between metaphor and reality.
I understand saying I feel assaulted by your speech.
If you're saying it metaphorically,
you expect it to be understood metaphorically,
but people don't use it metaphorically anymore.
There's no distinguishing between metaphor and reality,
and I think in some ways the sense that,
this failure to distinguish metaphor and reality
is the Left-Wing version of alternative facts.
- Thank you very much, Wendy.
Will you join me in thanking our panel?
(audience applauds)
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