From The Daily Beast, How the P.C. Police Propelled Donald Trump by Tom Nichols

The great mistake made by both liberals and their most extreme wing on the American left is to assume that ordinary people, once corrected forcefully enough, will comply with their new orders. This is, of course, ridiculous: Americans do not magically become complacent and accepting multiculturalists just because they’ve been bullied out of the public debate. They will find a new vessel for their views, and will become more extreme with each attempt to shut them down as the issue moves from particular social positions to the far more encompassing problem of who has the right to tell whom to shut up, and to make it stick. Nixon’s “Silent Majority” increasingly feels itself to be a silenced majority, and Trump is their solution.

Many liberals, I know, will scoff at this because they believe that American public discourse has shifted irretrievably to the right. But that’s because to them, political discourse in the United States is already where they think it should be: firmly centered on liberal ideas. They see conservative objections as aberrations, not as the views of half the population. Liberals won America’s culture war—and they did, even if conservatives undeniably won the contemporaneous economic war—and so liberals don’t really notice what they consider to be nothing more than mopping up operations on abortion, gay rights, immigration, and other hot-button issues.

print