While we are all familiar with these hypocrisies – driven by the need to virtue signal and affirm progressive dogmas – the right has its own version of political correctness and it can be just as insidious. Nowhere is this political correctness more apparent today than in the Republican Party in the US. Members of the Grand Old Party are known to express derision for Donald Trump in private yet pander to him and his base to protect their political interests.
Former Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein has listed 21 Republican senators who have privately expressed contempt for Trump but who, when in public, sing his praises. These senators include Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney and Chuck Grassley as well as senators from Ohio, Tennessee, Nebraska, Missouri, Maine, Alaska, Texas, South Dakota, Indiana, South Carolina, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Kansas and Alabama.
In the aftermath of the January 6 Capitol riots last year, US House of Representatives Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was recorded saying: “I’ve had it with this guy … what he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and nobody should defend it.” In public, however, McCarthy bends over backwards to appease the former president.
Railing against law enforcement on Twitter after the recent FBI raid on Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, McCarthy demanded the Attorney-General “preserve his documents and clear his calendar”.
Another Republican who has succumbed to Trumpian political correctness is Mitch McConnell. Following January 6, McConnell was so disturbed that he described Trump as a “despicable human being” who “fed a mob with lies”. Since that time, however, McConnell quietly backtracked and voted to acquit Trump of any wrongdoing.
The rationale for this behaviour is not complicated. Republicans are afraid to criticise Trump in public because they know it would harm their political careers. Trump is still popular with voters, especially those who turn out to primaries. Indeed, the most vocal conservative critic of the former president, congresswoman Liz Cheney, recently lost her house seat in the Wyoming Republican primary race in part because of her fierce criticism.
Despite what Republicans may truly think and feel about Trump – about their party and the important issues of the day – today’s GOP members know they have to toe the Trumpist line to stay alive politically.
In Democracy in America, published in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “I do not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America.” The French philosopher astutely observed that Americans, despite being free of the tyranny of an all-powerful state and the divine rule of a king, were not free from the tyranny of the majority. “In America, the majority draws a formidable circle around thought,” he wrote. “Inside those limits, the writer is free: but unhappiness awaits him if he dares to leave them.”
Over the years I’ve been running my own publication, I’ve published countless essays written by Americans who have been excommunicated from progressive communities, from the arts to academe, to local grassroots community organisations. In fact, we have published so many of these stories that in 2020 we released an anthology titled Panics and Persecutions. While the details of these stories change, the pattern generally stays the same. An individual stands up to a mob, and the mob, because of its collective power and ability to intimidate, almost always wins.
It is a tragic irony that some of the individuals who have been purged from progressive spaces by vindictive mobs also have been cast out of right-wing circles for the sin of criticising Trump.
A colleague of mine, Bo Winegard, was driven out of academia in 2019. He told me recently that when he criticised Trump on social media after January 6, he lost thousands of social media followers and was flooded with abusive private messages.
Just last week, Sam Harris was targeted with mass abuse after sharing the honest reflection that he did not care about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 election. A figure who has been shunned by the progressive left for years, Harris is no stranger to mob abuse. The difference is that now he is a double heretic: a heretic for challenging the left, a heretic for challenging the right. And an infidel who must travel with security for his criticism of fundamentalist religion.
The frenzied desire to punish individuals for the crime of speaking their minds openly and honestly reflects a toxic political culture that thrives on quashing dissent. The soft tyranny of mob rule may take on different forms according to which mob is administering it. Yet it would be a mistake to attribute this desire to one side of American politics. Both are implicated and both contribute to American mobocracy.
Claire Lehmann is the founding editor of Quillette, a platform for free thought.
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One of the hallmarks of a culture afflicted by political correctness is that there is a gulf between what people say in private and what they do in public. Classic examples of this phenomenon include the male feminist who turns out to be a creep or the celebrity who argues for action on climate change while travelling the world on a private jet.