Ascent of the A-Word

by Geoffrey Nunberg

  Snark and political assholism are clearly fellow travelers: both are pretexts for nastiness and aggression and both permit one to respond to criticism with the “can’t you take a joke?” or “hey, it was satire” defenses.39 But snark is generally directed at a specific person—Denby describes its platonic ideal as two teenage girls putting down a friend who’s sitting at another table in the cafeteria—whereas the objects of political assholism are often just targets of convenience, like Coulter’s camel-riding Muslims. Then too, there’s nothing really new about snark, whereas political assholism is a recent phenomenon. The long history of American political rhetoric can produce plenty of controversialists more venomous than Coulter or Limbaugh, but none who was playing the same game. When Westbrook Pegler referred to Jews as geese (“they hiss when they talk, gulp down everything before them, and foul everything in their wake”), he was giving voice to his gnawing anti-Semitism. When Coulter makes an analogous remark about Muslims, she’s only trying to sound offensive by the lights of the liberals who don’t approve of such talk. We know that she doesn’t lie awake seething about Muslims the way Pegler did about Jews.

  The Personal Is Political, and Vice Versa

  I describe this kind of assholism as political because it’s always framed as a finger in the eye of power or propriety. It’s an endemic tone in big-P political discourse, as we saw, but it has also worked its way into everyday conversation, particularly as a response to the politicization of manners associated with “political correctness.” When the right first coopted that phrase from the left around 1990, it was as a mocking label for the standards of civility that were being incorporated into university speech codes and curricula—what President George H.W. Bush described in 1991 as “attempts to micromanage casual conversation [that] invited people to look for an insult in every word, gesture, action.” But “political correctness” took on a life of its own after those controversies subsided. It spread beyond the campus, nourished by some egregious cases of bureaucratic overreach, by satires like Politically Correct Fairy Tales and by urban legends about schools rebaptizing Easter eggs as “spring spheres” or refusing to let kids wear red and green to school at Christmastime. By the end of the decade “PC” was an all-purpose disparagement for any received liberal dogma, with the implication that it was born out of exaggerated “sensitivity,” an unwillingness to acknowledge inconvenient facts, or slavery to fashion. (By a happy accident, the word correct, which for the old-school Marxists who first coined politically correct meant simply exact or true, can also mean comme il faut, as in “the correct fork to use with fish,” which is how the right reinterpreted it in their version of the phrase.)

  To describe yourself as “politically incorrect” is to stake a claim to being plainspoken, independent minded, and courageous—in effect, to say that you’re authentic, not an asshole. A remark that would once have stamped you as a boor can now be defended as a blow against fashionable orthodoxy. As the Irish critic Finian O’Toole wrote in 1995:We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, “I know this is not politically correct, but . . .” in front of the usual string of insults in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. . . . Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every sort of curmudgeon and crank.

  Back in 1995, for example, Robert Novak was guest-hosting the Larry King show with Senator Jesse Helms as his guest. A caller from Alabama came on the line and said, “Mr. Helms, I know this might not be politically correct to say these days, but I just think that you should get a Nobel Peace Prize for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.” (Helms, weirdly, responded, “Thank you, I think.”) For that caller, the allusion to political correctness was merely a cover for airing his racism undiluted. But often the point is the show of defiance itself, and the person disparaged by the remark is merely a collateral victim, like the student at whom Coulter directed her “Take a camel” line. The offender isn’t always a “bitter bigot,” as O’Toole puts it. Often he’s merely a bigot of opportunity who’s trying to play the lad, a brash young layabout acting up for the benefit of his mates.

  Dekes,Yale Men, Perfect Assholes

  The claim to be politically incorrect was initially a response to the cultural left’s insistence that “the personal is political,” as feminists put it—as if to say “You want political? I’ll show you political.” If the codes of polite interaction are rooted in politics, then it becomes a political act to reject them. That contention was introduced to justify some of the reassertions of masculine privilege that I mentioned earlier. A lot of what has been called backlash is really just the resurfacing of an un-rehabilitated beer guy culture that didn’t have any explicit beef with feminism as such. But it could be given a political cast, particularly when it surfaced in elite contexts where feminism itself was a prominent force. There was the incident at Yale in 2009 that I mentioned earlier, when the Zeta Psi fraternity had its pledges pose in front of the Yale Women’s Center holding a sign that said “We Love Yale Sluts.” Then in the following year, the Yale Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter marched its pledges to the freshman women’s dorms chanting, “No means yes, yes means anal.” The stunt led Yale to suspend the fraternity, an action that critics on the cultural right denounced as a capitulation to a campaign by militant feminists and “PC campus administrators” who were trying to stifle the members’ First Amendment rights. Granted, the critics said, the chants were in poor taste, but the students weren’t actually advocating rape, merely satirizing, in an admittedly crude way, the ambient campus climate of political correctness. And isn’t it the very purpose of free speech to protect the expression of ideas that are provocative, disturbing, and unorthodox?

  Not that anybody really thought the Dekes had contrived the exercise as a satirical performance piece. They were just looking for a way to make their pledges act like obnoxious assholes in public, as Dekes have been doing since the day when George W. Bush was a member, and the anti-feminist slogan served to give them political cover for it. What was innovative wasn’t the sophomoric assholism of the Dekes, but the postgraduate assholism of cultural conservatives who depicted the midnight chanting as an intervention in the marketplace of ideas, aimed not at the women in the freshman dorms but the feminists at the Women’s Center (who, the Yale Daily News reminded its readers, “spent their time painting murals of their own vaginas”). The whole affair could only have happened in an age in which acting like an asshole can be invested with political moment. If the same thing had taken place in W’s day (supposing Yale was accepting women undergraduates back then), it’s unlikely that the First Amendment would have figured in the subsequent discussion. The fraternity and its members would have been briskly micromanaged off the campus on the unappealable grounds of end-stage loutishness. But then fifty years earlier, W and his fellows would never have chanted that in the first place (can you imagine what mom and dad would have said?). They would have been laddishly pilfering panties, not reciting paeans to anal penetration. Kids today!

  It’s true there are any number of legitimate gripes that can begin with “This may not be the politically correct thing to say.” There were and are an awful lot of progressive prescriptions that deserve to be received with rolled eyes—not least the ever-changing list of approved denominations for constituencies defined by race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and physical condition, which was the casus belli when the whole controversy erupted. Sometimes the reason for beginning a sentence with “This may not be the politically correct word to use” is honest perplexity, especially if you haven’t been keeping up. What are we calling them now? And “PC” has been given so wide a brief these days that the “political” part often means nothing more than “conventional.” It isn’t odd to find people saying things like “It’s not politically correct to say that the Packers will-out-and-out whip the Giants on Sunday” or “It may not b
e politically correct to say it, but 64-bit Linux running on commodity hardware powered by AMD won’t smite the midrange dinosaurs.” (Even PCs have their PC.) The phrase is even used, if not that frequently, to refer to departures from orthodox conservative thinking. “A little political correctness never hurt anybody,” a Chicago Herald columnist said in applauding the Miami Marlins after they suspended their manager Ozzie Guillen for saying favorable things about Fidel Castro in April of 2012.

  Still, to paraphrase what John Stuart Mill said about the stupidity of the Tories, while not all people who claim to be politically incorrect are assholes, it’s exactly the sort of thing an asshole is apt to say. The phrase itself implicitly acknowledges that; in its own way, describing a remark as politically incorrect can be a backhand acknowledgment that it really is an asshole thing to say. Indeed, the notion of political incorrectness couldn’t have arisen until after most of the linguistic reforms of the cultural left had been accepted as just. By 1990 or so, gay, African American, disabled, and Hispanic were obligatory in polite use, while racist, sexist, and later homophobia had become universal disapprobations. That’s why Coulter’s “faggot” remark could evoke a sense of naughty pleasure when a few decades earlier, it would simply have sounded coarse.

  It’s true that the vast majority of Americans profess to take a dim view of political correctness, especially when it’s described as such. In a 2011 Rasmussen poll, 79 percent of Americans said that political correctness was a problem.40 But by definition, after all, political correctness involves an unreasonable imposition on expression; not many people would appeal to political incorrectness to defend that guy who called the Larry King show to talk about keeping the niggers down. It’s only in highly partisan quarters that politically incorrect has taken on a life of its own as the name of a comprehensive, totalizing worldview, like medieval Catholicism or the Grand Larousse. For those people, it has become a catch-all for a collection of ideas that were never perceived as having a political significance before the right took exception to them—not just about evolution, climate change, and the Constitution, but about the relative cultural importance of Bobby Vinton and Bob Dylan (in Human Events, Jonathan Leaf notes that Vinton had four number-one hits in the so-called radical sixties while Dylan had none) and whether English literature can be said to have begun with Beowulf (it used to, says the Politically Correct Guide to English and American Literature, “before PC professors decided that heroism is irrelevant to modern life”). We’ve come to the point where someone can announce in complete earnestness, “This may not be the politically correct thing to say, but as Conservapedia notes, the instantaneous transmission of Newtonian gravitational effects contradicts special relativity.”

  People talk about this effect with phrases like “alternate reality” and “living in a bubble”; the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt likens it to William Gibson’s “consensual hallucinations,” which became the premise of The Matrix. All ideologies share that tendency to different degrees: the desire to purge their world pictures of things that are inconsistent with their moral vision. But the cosmology evoked by “political incorrectness” is singularly broad and contrarian. You have the sense that often the point is not so much the hallucination as the consensuality—the sense of collective identity that comes of defining one’s beliefs in explicit opposition to the other guy’s, far beyond anything that one’s political or theological commitments would militate for. Regnery’s Politically Incorrect guides are strewn with pull-quotes and call-outs to remind readers that every statement in the book is a refutation of some liberal canard, something that your professors don’t want to tell you: “Books you’re not supposed to read” (e.g., Burke’s speeches); “Movies you’re not supposed to watch” (e.g., On the Waterfront); “Guess what?” (“Greek philosophy was born in a men’s club”).

  The effect of this is to assholize the whole of human knowledge. If everything you’ve been taught is the product of liberal mendacity, then there’s no proposition—about history, art, law, biology, even climatology and physics—that you’re obliged to believe, and no argument you’re bound to accept. Assholization turns belief itself into a matter of solidarity as much as plausibility. Do they really believe that? It’s like asking me whether I really believe the Giants runner was really picked off at first while I and thirty-five thousand other fans at AT&T Park are yelling at the asshole umpire who made the call.41

  T-Shirt Ideologies

  This Manichean view of reality is a partisan taste, and so is the rhetorical maneuver of assholism that accompanies it. Indeed, political assholism is just a way of giving flesh to the political identity that flourishes among intense partisans, even if others find it entertaining to tune in from time to time. Despite the ubiquitous talk of an America riven by the culture wars into blue and red nations, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that mass polarization is exaggerated; as the political scientist Morris Fiorina puts it, “No battle for the soul of America rages.” Polarization, in that view, is restricted to political elites and to partisan activists. There’s some debate over the details of that thesis, partly because polarization itself looks different according to whether you examine voting preferences, party affiliation, opinions on the issues, or the geographic and social sorting that has left more Americans huddled in politically like-minded clusters and communities. But one thing is clear from the rhetoric alone: people who are highly partisan and engaged are likely to construe their political identities differently from others. If you spend a lot of time and energy listening to political broadcasts, participating in Internet discussions, and attending political events—all venues where the rhetoric of political assholism is heavily deployed—it’s going to have an effect on the way you see yourself.

  If I stress the role of political assholism on the right, it’s because that’s where it’s more systematic and developed, to the point of having become idiomatic. But the underlying principle shapes the identities of partisans on both sides. It’s implicit in those T-shirts that websites offer: “Offend a Liberal” or “Offend a Conservative,” both continuing with the slogan “Use facts and logic”:Need a cool, right-wing shirt for the next Tea Party event, town hall meeting, or just to annoy a liberal? . . . Well, pick up some Second Amendment—friendly, anti-Obama, conservative apparel and stickers, but watch out—the Department of Homeland Security may be watching you!

  The Annoy a Conservative, Think for Yourself t-shirts will really tick off any fascist neocon who crosses your path. Liberals are well known for having diverse opinions and being able to think for themselves, whereas conservatives must ask their leaders or their preachers for guidance. These t-shirts are a funny way to show the Republicans what you think of them.

  Those shirts dramatize how political identity can arise out of your contemplation of the indignation you arouse in the assholes on the other side. That’s the point of slogans like “Proud to Be Everything the Right Wing Hates” and “Proud to Stand for Everything Liberals Hate” or of “Annoy a Liberal: Take Personal Responsibility” and “Annoy a Conservative: Help Someone.” Or you can taunt the other side by boasting of an exaggerated attachment to some value they find odious about yours, with slogans like “Gun Control Means Using Two Hands” or “You Say Commie Like It’s a Bad Thing.” One way or another, each side is framing its identity by opposition to the assholes on the other. You wouldn’t want to assume that the consumers of these things are representative of anybody’s base, but their very crudeness makes the rhetorical mechanisms clear.

  The left-right parallels are obvious, too, in the puerile nicknames used by radio hosts and in the comment threads of blogs and articles, whether for each other (libtards, dumb-ocrats, repugnicans, repukes), for public figures (Dumbya, Slick Willie, Shillary, Michael Moron), or for the media themselves (lamestream media, “Faux News”). Most of these fall in a long tradition of American political vilification, though not even Lincoln collected remotely as many nicknames as Obama has, owing in part to th
e serendipitous phonetic versatility of his name: Obamanure, Obumma, ObaMao, Oblowme, ObeyMe, Obozo, and literally hundreds more. More significantly, there’s a uniform tone to the comments on those threads, the one place where liberals and conservatives come into regular and deliberate contact. People routinely deplore the “siloing” effect of the Internet, where interlinking creates hermetic discourses closed to opposing opinions, but it works the other way, too: the medium also makes it trivially easy, and safe, to go looking for a political fight:Still no explanation from any of you Repug fuckholes on why not ONE Repug member of Congress supports the public option??? Despite the fact more Repubs nationwide support it than are against it by a margin of 47%—42%???