Savannah Pointer: The Secret Danger of Political Correctness
I once heard a story about a man who needed money very badly. The holidays were coming up and he was flat broke, partly due to just having started his own residential tree business. Being an industrious capitalistic chap, he decided to use the tools available to him, which included his tree-cutting gear and the knowledge of where he could secure a lot of mistletoe.
So, he called around to every nursery in the phone book (it was the 70s, so yes, all those words did make sense together at the time) and each one said that they didn’t have any demand for mistletoe, but they took his number just in case.
The man was disheartened, but not beaten yet. The young business owner called each nursery back, several times, cycling through the list, asking for mistletoe with a disguised voice, and since caller ID wasn’t something people typically had access to in those days, lo and behold, he created demand for mistletoe.
It was a happy Christmas at the young business owner’s home, and while the man has since repented of his deceptive ways, he demonstrated an age-old concept that politicians are using on us today: If you have a lot of something that people don’t want, create the demand for it.
In the case of liberal politicians, what they have a lot of are ideas to grow the government. What they need are people who demand bigger government.
Our limited government was founded on the principle of citizens governing themselves through morality and social accountability.
We, as a people, looked up to those who were of high moral standing. Men regarded as wise and worthy were the ones who framed our Constitution, and they laced biblical principles and morals throughout it.
However, now that morals have gone drastically out of vogue, what will people use to set themselves apart? How will they show that they’re better than their competitors? How will politicians convince you that you should elect them?
Enter political correctness, the religious doctrine of the American left in 2018. It is a new guiding light, the yardstick against which politicians and individuals are measured to determine their worth. It’s also, at its core, all about getting ahead.
Why else would people keep upping the ante? We constantly have to be more “woke” and all the time new ideas become PC or not, because the person who introduces you to each new concept demonstrates his higher degree of wokeness. He “gets ahead.”
We see it not only in politicians, but also in our entertainment.
One recently aired TV show had a plotline in which the winner of a Halloween costume contest won a day off. The protagonist then proceeded to break down every costume by convincing some other employee that each was offensive: Hula girl was offensive to someone half-Hawaiian, Aldan was offensive to someone from the Middle East, etc.
The same held true for reality TV, when a dance group won a million dollars by breaking their season-long streak of performing the same style that got them to the finals by performing a song about “waiting on the world to change.” “If we had the power / To bring our neighbors home from war / They would have never missed a Christmas / No more ribbons on their door.”
It was risky, but risky in a way calculated to bring tears to the eyes of the liberal judges. And it won them $1 million.
We’ve reached a point where even those who buy into the idea of PC culture are starting to make fun of it.
It was recently brought to my attention that Democrats would probably not have such a hard time blocking illegal immigration if they thought that illegals might vote Republican.
This point was made by Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld, who likened the way Democrats were treating illegal immigration to the immature antics of a child. He pointed out that they can afford to pontificate about the cruel nature of border security, because it’s not their job to secure the borders.
Once you see it for what it is, you can’t stop seeing it. From the smug and haughty holier-than-thou social justice warriors of today, to the chilly calculated glee on the faces of politicians when they see one of their colleagues make a misstep in the minefield of political correctness, it’s all around us, and it’s growing, like a flesh-eating bacteria.
But here’s the good news: It has no roots, and it’s trying to overreach. What may have started as an argument in favor of women’s right to education is now overstepping with transgender indoctrination in schools.
The point of political correctness was, in the beginning, supposed to be making others feel cared for and included, but there is very little about the movement that can’t be achieved by following the Golden Rule: Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.
PC culture says there is a set of rules you need to follow, but those rules are constantly in flux because people are literally making them up as they go along.
When asked by “The Originalist” Director Molly Smith what keeps her “hopeful,” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg referenced something that her late husband, Marty, used to tell her.
“My dear spouse would say that the true symbol of the United States is not the bald eagle — it is the pendulum,” Ginsburg said. “And when it goes very far in one direction you can count on its swinging back.”
There are only a few possibilities about what happens from here. One is that Americans completely throw off the mantle of political correctness, the doctrine that has replaced morals, and try to repair the social experiment that is our republic, or we find another way to get antifa and the like in hand.
Maybe political correctness worked well for a while, but the screaming, masked throngs of entitled children have ruined that. As Americans, we have a long and illustrious history of not negotiating with terrorists, even if you recruit them from Ivy League schools and stick a locally sourced pumpkin spice latte in their hands.
A terrorist is as a terrorist does, and yet we constantly bow to the throngs of social justice warriors, fraught with internal turmoil, attempting to both hold those around them to an impossible moral standard and at the same time deny that morals exist.
Morality is established to lead you somewhere. We understand the morality of the radical jihadists because we have seen where it leads them. Traditional Christian morals, however, have been all but removed from acceptability in the West, though they were adhered to by many in our history, including our Founders. People could be pointed out as exemplars of good morals.
But we’re not allowed to do that anymore.
The new morality of political correctness is leading us somewhere else: toward more rules, regulations and the bigger government necessary to control a people who won’t control themselves.
Adolf Hitler said, “I want to raise a generation of young people devoid of a conscience, imperious, relentless and cruel.”
PC culture has more or less accomplished the same thing, raising up those who are cruel to those who cross their impossible standards made up on the fly, and just like for the nurseries suddenly in need of mistletoe, something will arise to fill in the vacuum of a generation out of control.
A dictator can require a generation to abandon their morals and empathy, or a lack of morals and empathy can require a dictator to control a generation.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
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