American politics is increasingly pervaded by outrage and hysteria, much of it feigned, and most of it staggeringly stupid.
It doesn't take much these days to get crossways with our self-appointed PC police--cite the acronym LGBT instead of LGBTYzuBF (or whatever), forget to include the word "fascist" prior to the name Donald Trump, or use traditional pronouns instead of the demanded transgender variants and you run the risk of finding yourself pursued by an enraged electronic mob.
To even remotely suggest that there might be innate male-female differences, physical and perhaps psychological, or that a contributing factor to police shootings of young black males might be the staggeringly disproportionate rate of violent crime committed by young black males can quickly land you in the PC Lubyanka.
A movie like Black Panther can be the most diverse superhero movie to ever come out of Hollywood but still provoke fury for not having any gay characters.
Thus are the consequences of living in a politically correct "outrage culture," wherein an increasing chunk of the populace spends an increasing chunk of their day looking for things to be offended by, and then makes sure everyone knows that they've been offended, to the point where the agenda of public discourse is largely determined by professional grievance-mongers, neurotics, and hysterics.
Whether people are actually offended by something matters less than that they become conditioned over time to believe that they should be; it is, after all, safer to be part of the mob than its quarry. As Shadi Hamid noted in a recent essay in The Atlantic, most of the members of a typical Twitter mob probably didn't know they were supposed to be outraged by a particular outrage until they saw others being outraged.
In the outrage culture, a competition thus develops to see who can be most offended by the most things (what Hamid calls "virtue-outbidding"), with pride of place going to those who can shriek the loudest and claim to have suffered the greatest trauma in response to the "insensitive" words of others.
In order to keep the hysteria at fever pitch, a 24/7 search has to be carried out for new kinds of offenses and new culprits committing them. Protecting freedom of speech is accordingly replaced with the need to restrict speech in order to protect the feelings of those who thrive on being offended.
A curious new right not to be offended (that is, exposed to speech one disagrees with) is thereby created.
A daily melodrama is thus played out in which Twitter erupts and the fury of the mob is directed against some hapless soul who happened to say something that was somehow thought to violate PC orthodoxy, with the duration of the fury contingent upon how long it takes the miscreant to cravenly (but prudently) apologize for whatever it was that he said (but which everyone is still glad was said, because it provided the opportunity for another bout of public outrage and virtue-outbidding).
Since we are surrounded by sexism, racism, ageism and all kinds of other "isms" yet to be discovered, there will never be a shortage of offenders, and, given the logic of a reign of terror, we can all probably expect our turn in the stocks to come at some point.
For David French, the growing dedication to taking offense and letting everyone know about it, usually through moronic mediums like Twitter, inevitably produces "a kind of endless public screaming, an unmodulated howl" that renders public discourse increasingly meaningless.
In a bizarre perversion of human dignity, the more grievances you express, however far-fetched in the broader historical hierarchy of human wounds, and the more pain you claim to have experienced as a result of other people's words, however transparently silly, the more power you are granted over other people.
The capacity for being offended and whining about it to strangers on the Internet becomes a political asset, conferring veto power courtesy of moral authority. Under such circumstances, public debate effectively shuts down, as people become reluctant to express opinions out of fear of being punished for offending someone somewhere.
The "outrage culture" consequently depends for its continued spread on not just the imposition of a noxious political correctness that constricts the range of discussion of public issues and allows its custodians to bully violators, but also our willingness to be intimidated; more precisely, our granting of moral authority to the bullies. The PC mob only works, in other words, if we actually care, or at least are seen to care, about offending those most eager to be offended.
Heather Wilhelm, in a penetrating critique of outrage culture, recalls wise advice from football legend Lou Holtz: "Don't tell your problems to people. Eighty percent don't care, and the other 20 percent are glad you have them."
If only that were true, or at least more people behaved as if it were.
How refreshing and downright wonderful it would therefore be if, next time the Twitter mob erupts, and the virtue-bidding competition starts on cue, the object of the fury said, per Rhett Butler, "Frankly folks, I don't give a damn."
So go pick on somebody who does.
------------v------------
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 02/26/2018