Trigger Warnings: political correctness and the rise of the right

TRIGGER WARNINGS

Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor, and broadcaster. He writes a fortnightly column for the Guardian, and contributes regularly to many other Australian and international publications. Jeff is a member of the 3RRR Breakfasters team and the immediate past editor of the literary journal Overland. He is also the author of a number of books, including No Way But This: in search of Paul Robeson and Money Shot: a journey into porn and censorship.

Scribe Publications

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First published by Scribe 2018

Copyright © Jeff Sparrow 2018

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

9781925713183 (Australian edition)

9781911617075 (UK edition)

9781947534698 (US edition)

9781925693133 (e-book)

CiP records for this title are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

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To Steph, for all the reasons

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Inventing PC

Chapter Two: Three kinds of leftism

Chapter Three: Battlers and elites

Chapter Four: The Australian way

Chapter Five: Howard and Hanson

Chapter Six: With us or with the terrorists

Chapter Seven: Smug politics

Chapter Eight: Why the culture wars didn’t end

Chapter Nine: The nature of identity

Chapter Ten: Privilege and inequality

Chapter Eleven: Trauma and trigger warnings

Chapter Twelve: Them and us

Chapter Thirteen: The alt-right and appropriation

Chapter Fourteen: Fascism and democracy

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Notes

Introduction

Nothing is more anti-American, anti-freedom, anti-truth, and anti-reality than political correctness. It is a noose around America’s neck, growing tighter each day … It is a communal tyranny, not dissimilar to the one America fought a revolution over.

This passage comes from a volume published in 2015 under the title Retaking America: crushing political correctness. ¹ There was nothing particularly unusual about it. Rather, it was a boilerplate example of a popular genre in what was often called ‘culture war’. On Amazon, readers could find a wide assortment of books making an almost identical pitch: The Intimidation Game: how the left is silencing free speech; The Silencing: how the left is killing free speech; Bullies: how the left’s culture of fear and intimidation silences Americans, and many, many others. ²

If Retaking America was in any way different, it was only because of its author, a man called Nick Adams. For, despite his book’s title, Adams was not American at all. He was an Australian who’d launched his political career in the inner-Sydney suburb of Ashfield.

Back in 2004, Adams had become the youngest councillor in Australia, winning election for the Liberal Party while still at school. His policies included support for portraits of the Queen, opposition to multiculturalism, and the extermination of the suburb’s pigeons. ³

‘Ashfield should be inhospitable to pigeons,’ he told a perplexed council meeting as he presented a plan to protect the region from avian flu. ⁴

Adams’ career in local government came to an end when his verbal abuse of a journalist led to a six-month suspension from the Liberal Party. Undaunted, he decamped to the US and reinvented himself as a motivational speaker and conservative commentator. Soon, he would be prosecuting the culture war on Fox News and similar platforms.

By good luck or by good timing, Adams’ second coming coincided with the rise of a certain Donald J. Trump. In fact, in Retaking America, Adams presented a model inauguration address written for a hypothetical but distinctly Trump-like president.

‘Of all enemy combatants, political correctness is the most dangerous,’ announced Adams’ imaginary statesman. ‘It endangers our homeland and our culture. It emboldens our enemies and critics. It denies reality and encourages mediocrity … That’s why my first act as President is to announce from this day forward an end to political correctness.’ ⁵

During the 2015 primaries campaign, Donald Trump was grilled by Fox News personality Megyn Kelly, who quizzed him about his long history of sexism.

‘You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,’ Kelly began. ‘Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who is likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?’

Trump didn’t hesitate.

‘I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct.’ ⁶

Sections of the crowd in the studio erupted into whoops and cheers.

Kelly had highlighted a record of misogyny sufficient to sink the electoral chances of a traditional politician. But Trump neither apologised nor explained. Rather, he implied that the question itself was out of line, symptomatic of a broader national dysfunction — and many in the audience, it seemed, thought so, too.

In Retaking America, Adams explained that he’d left Australia to escape oppression by political correctness.

‘From identity politics and secularism,’ he argued, ‘to the all-powerful welfare state and the war against national identity, every problem in America today is compounded by this suffocating regime of thought control.’ ⁷

After 9/11, the US government passed the USA PATRIOT act, rolling back traditional freedoms in the name of fighting terror. The CIA established a network of ‘black sites’, secret prisons located all over the globe, in which suspects could be detained without charge or trial after being snatched from the street. American agents established elaborate protocols for ‘enhanced interrogations’, sometimes involving the practice known as ‘waterboarding’ — a torture technique used by Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot. Successive presidents embraced a program of assassination, in which the commander-in-chief signed off on ‘kill lists’ handed to drone operators so that the death sentences could be carried out remotely by sophisticated robots. The National Security Agency and other agencies worked to establish a total surveillance of all electronic communications, compelling every major American internet service provider to hand over the content of their users’ records. According to Edward Snowden, in a single month in early 2013, one National Security Agency unit collected data on more than 3 billion telephone calls and emails that had passed through the US. ⁸

Those developments — reminiscent of the darkest sci-fi dystopia — didn’t trouble Adams in the slightest. For him, it was political correctness that constituted an Orwellian tyranny. He wasn’t alone. Throughout the Republican primaries, almost all the major candidates denounced PC. Ben Carson explained that PC was ‘destroying our nation’, Ted Cruz said that it was ‘killing people’, Jeb Bush declared that it needed ‘to be shattered’, and Carly Fiorina insisted that it was ‘choking candid conversation’. ⁹

Like most mainstream pundits, the Democrat strategists assumed that anti-PC obsessives were unelectable. The Clinton campaign actively tried to boost the fortunes of those it called ‘the Pied Piper candidates’ — the ‘culture war’ populists likely, according to the conventional wisdom, to lead their party into the wilderness. Chief among them, of course, was Donald Trump, a man whom the Democrats privately identified as their preferred opponent. ¹⁰

In many ways, Trump behaved exactly as they hoped.

Following Kelly’s tough questioning, Trump hinted to the public that she was probably menstruating. During a later feud with Ted Cruz, he implied that Cruz’s father had helped assassinate JFK. ¹¹ He threatened to imprison Hillary Clinton, mocked the spasticity of a disabled reporter, and boasted on tape about sexual assaults (‘Grab them by the pussy!’). ¹²

Yet Trump’s faux pas did not destroy his campaign. The crasser his conduct, the more his fans enthused. For them, the gaffes weren’t scandals at all but evidence of a welcome hostility to the political correctness ‘killing our country’. Trump’s boorishness became a performative rejection of an entire philosophy: with each sneer, he proved himself a walking, talking rebuke to the PC agenda.

The US election in 2016 came, of course, after a series of other political earthquakes, events that spectacularly upended the liberal consensus. In Britain, the electorate voted to leave the European Union, its ‘No’ campaign spearheaded by UKIP’s Nigel Farage, a man whose ‘Little Englander’ persona manifested itself as an opposition to political correctness distinctly reminiscent of Trump (whom he later befriended). In Australia, Pauline Hanson and her anti-PC One Nation party staged an unexpected resurrection.

Those results were noteworthy for many reasons, not least because, for the first time in years, the language of class made itself heard. Again and again, candidates said they represented ‘the working class’ — a group previously rarely mentioned in mainstream politics. Yet, again and again, these candidates were, it seemed, enlisting workers for the right, rather than the left.

In the second decade of the 21st century, the developed world endured shocking levels of social inequality. A new Gilded Age, some called it, with the contrast between the haves and the have-nots stark and getting starker. Oxfam reported that the world’s eight richest billionaires controlled as much wealth as the poorest half of the planet’s population, a disparity of resources and political power unknown to any previous generation. ¹³ In the United States, it was even worse, with the nation’s three richest men together holding more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent. ¹⁴

Looking at those statistics, a historian of the future might assume that the left was ascendant: that the injustice under which the planet groaned would be fuelling radical ideas and egalitarian alternatives to the status quo.

Such a historian would be wrong.

Donald Trump worked from an office serviced, quite literally, by a golden elevator. For decades, he had constructed a persona based on conspicuous consumption and crass excess — and then won the presidency on an anti-establishment ticket. The most powerful man in the world’s most powerful nation, he somehow presented himself as the scourge of the elites.

Almost everywhere, the right claimed the language of radicalism, a vocabulary weaponised against a left accused of representing a loathed status quo. Not only did progressives fail to make gains in circumstances that should have, on paper, favoured social justice and equality, but the populism that flourished explicitly targeted progressive ideas and slogans. The radical right attacked immigrants, refugees, Indigenous people, and so on — but it also campaigned against the perfidy of ‘cultural Marxists’, liberal elitists, social-justice warriors, and so on.

Not surprisingly, many progressives found politics suddenly well-nigh unintelligible.

In August 2015 — shortly after Trump’s Megyn Kelly interview — the basketball legend and anti-racist campaigner Kareem Abdul-Jabbar discussed what he called the ‘apocalyptic backlash’ against political correctness. Yes, he acknowledged, sometimes campaigners went too far; yes, on occasion, so-called PC measures were annoying or silly. Nevertheless, the aim of erasing ‘centuries of bias in our country’s collective unconscious’ was, he said, worthy and valid — and what the right attacked as PC was, for Abdul-Jabbar, generally ‘a benign combination of good old-fashioned manners and simple sensitivity toward others’. ¹⁵

Around this time, the alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos — a British journalist working for the Trump-supporting Breitbart — was building a high-profile career with an online fan base of almost fanatical loyalty. He was doing so by mocking precisely the traits that Abdul-Jabbar identified as self-evidently important.

‘Your professors are cunts, on the whole,’ Yiannopoulos told students in Oregon. ‘Limp-wristed, pacifistic, sandal-wearing weirdos.’

Feminism was a ‘cancer’, he said elsewhere. Lesbians were ‘horrendous, quivering masses of horror’, birth control was ‘a mistake’, women were ‘happier in the kitchen’, and so on. ¹⁶

Yiannopoulos eventually flamed out. But the anti-PC sentiment that he’d tapped into — the hostility to so many ideas associated with the left — continues to bubble away. The New York Times’ Bari Weiss writes of the so-called ‘Intellectual Dark Web’, a network of remarkably popular personalities (the New Atheist Sam Harris, the psychologist Jordan Peterson, the right-wing ‘feminists’ Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Sommers, the commentator Ben Shapiro and others) united mostly by their visceral hatred for measures that liberals see as self-evidently decent. ¹⁷

It’s not just that the left and right consider each other repellent. It’s also that they find each other almost incomprehensible.

Understanding the political landscape of today is not easy — and intervening in it is even harder. The peculiar positions taken by left and right — and the strange arenas on which they fight over them — only make sense in the context of a long and complicated history.

This book offers a particular explanation of that history. It suggests that the anti-elitist right has successfully reshaped the frame through which even people on the left understand politics. As a result, the usual response by progressives to populist provocateurs and charlatans not only fails to combat them, but often leaves them stronger.

In many ways, the right depends, almost parasitically, on the left, in ways that the left consistently fails to understand.

The chapters that follow unpick the dynamics of contemporary culture wars, the methodology through which the right reinterprets social class. They retrace the recent history of the left, so as to put into context the strange phenomenon of political correctness, and they examine the evolution of anti-elitism before concluding with an argument about the wrong and the right ways to respond to social inequality in the age of Donald Trump.

A ‘trigger warning’ is, of course, an alert given to readers about distressing or upsetting material, allowing them to prepare themselves for what they might encounter. As we’ve come to expect in the so-called culture wars, the media attention devoted to trigger warnings bears little relationship to their actual prevalence. When a tiny number of courses in a tiny number of universities offered students notice about potentially disturbing content (a courtesy not so different from that given to viewers by commercial television networks), conservative culture warriors seized on the development as further evidence of generalised PC tyranny.

In a later chapter, I analyse that particular furore for what it reveals about politics today. The title of this book does not imply that trigger warnings are, in and of themselves, of particular significance, except insofar as they exemplify the contemporary tendency for debates to fixate on the relatively trivial.

But the term feels appropriate in part because any discussion of political correctness and related issues will, inevitably, be controversial. The culture wars, almost by design, touch on subjects (such as race, gender, religion, and sexuality) about which people feel very strongly. It’s difficult to unpick the arguments around PC without causing some offence to someone, particularly when presenting a case that is at odds with the mainstream left as well as the right.

So that’s one reason for a warning. But there’s another.

This book is a polemic, a deliberate attempt to challenge conventional wisdom. But it’s not meant as empty contrarianism or as a provocation. On the contrary, it’s predicated on the notion that, despite the silliness of people like Nick Adams, politics in the 21st century matters a great deal.

We live, after all, in a time of warnings. As this book goes to print, scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have announced the 400th consecutive month of above-average temperatures. ¹⁸ It’s a grim reminder of the urgent challenges confronting the planet.

But just as economic inequality hasn’t spontaneously generated movements for egalitarianism, we need to recognise that environmental catastrophe will not, in and of itself, spur environmental action. The denunciations of political correctness that helped Donald Trump win office are also a standard tool for climate denialists and oil moguls.

That’s a second reason for the title. However challenging we find these debates — however much they trigger us or others — we need to persist with them, simply because they touch on tremendously urgent problems.

CHAPTER ONE

Inventing PC

Political correctness never really existed — at least, not in the way that conservatives claim.

As we saw with Nick Adams, right-wingers portray PC as an Orwellian scheme to end freedom of speech, a deliberate strategy to impose a progressive orthodoxy. In reality, radicals coined the term as a joke. The phrase first emerged within the American New Left as an ironic homage to Stalinist rhetoric, adopted by progressives to mock censorious comrades and to chaff the overly earnest. ¹ In Australia and Britain, the preferred term was ‘ideologically sound’, but the gag worked the same way. ² When an activist declared a particular film or book or person ‘PC’ (or ‘ideologically sound’), she did so with her tongue firmly planted in her cheek. It was never serious. By describing a friend as ‘very PC’, a radical didn’t imagine herself to be identifying incipient tyranny. She was just suggesting that they might lighten up.

What was originally a satire on totalitarianism somehow became, for the right, a signifier of totalitarianism. The quite strange process by which this happened illuminates important trends in modern politics.

The story began in the United States in 1964, when, over the course of a year, thousands of Berkeley students embraced civil disobedience in massive protests for free political expression on campus.

‘[T]here’s a time,’ student leader Mario Savio said, in his iconic speech at the demonstrations, ‘when the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.’ ³

The campaign — a major win for free speech — and the rhetoric that accompanied it inspired a generation of New Leftists. Perversely, though, it also played a major role in the career of that doyen of modern conservatism, Ronald Reagan, and the eventual campaign against PC.

Originally a Hollywood liberal, Reagan had shifted to the right during the Cold War. His political career really took off, however, when he capitalised on the backlash against free speech at Berkeley in a run for governor. Campaigning in 1966, he denounced the ‘small minority of beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates [who] have brought such shame to … a great university’. ⁴ Then, in 1969, activists tried to establish a free-speech area (‘People’s Park’) on vacant university land. Reagan duly placed Berkeley under martial law, and deployed helicopters, the National Guard, and riot police, who killed one man and wounded several others.

The governor showed no remorse. ‘Once the dogs of war have been unleashed, you must expect things will happen,’ he said. ⁵

In Retaking America: crushing political correctness, Adams explained his hostility to PC as support for freedom of speech. ‘[P]olitical correctness,’ he declared, ‘acts as a heavy blacksnake, whipping us into submission. Pushing us into line. Cutting us down. It squelches debate and polices speech.’ ⁶

In reality, the campaign against PC began with the so-called ‘education wars’ launched during Reagan’s second term as president in the late 1980s. The Reaganite right who led that effort were not promoting free speech. In the wake of his confrontation with the Berkeley activists, Reagan believed deeply in censorship — and actively campaigned for more of it. The 1984 Republican National Committee platform, on which he ran for re-election, promised: ‘We will vigorously enforce constitutional laws to control obscene materials which degrade everyone, particularly women, and depict the exploitation of children.’ ⁷

Adams also made the familiar claim that PC was ‘a disease of the elites’, something that he, a man of the people, instinctively despised. ‘You’ll never catch me eating kale, seaweed or tofu,’ he boasted. ‘When a waitress offers me a gluten-free menu, I decline almost immediately … [It] will be ribs, brisket, chicken fried steak, mac ‘n’ cheese, fries and onion rings, washed down with beer and soda, followed by pie, all the way.’

But the education reformers of the 1980s were not