The Democrats Make Bloomberg Their PC Punching Bag But it seems a dubious way of getting votes. How many American voters subscribe to political correctness? Joseph Epstein
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-make-bloomberg-th
Poor Democrats. As if they don’t already have enough trouble, they also happen to be lashed to political correctness. How firmly lashed we learned at last week’s presidential debate, in which candidates competed over who is the most PC.
This came out emphatically in the attacks on Michael Bloomberg. He was vulnerable on the two major political-correctness fronts: race and the treatment of women. Nearly everyone on the debate stage took a moment out to spit upon Mr. Bloomberg for his stop-and-frisk policy while mayor of New York. That the policy seemed to work, radically reducing the number of murders in New York, mattered little beside what the other candidates took to be its inherent and loathsome racism. The logic, apparently, is that it is better to live in a murderous city than a racist one. One of the hallmarks of political correctness is that words matter more than deeds.
Nor are the purveyors of political correctness notable for self-examination. Thus Bernie Sanders, a mere millionaire with the utmost contempt for billionaires, blithely called Mr. Bloomberg a racist. Sen. Sanders apparently forgot that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union at a time when it was still murdering its own citizens and sending them to gulags. He apparently also forgot that he long approved of the cruel and stunting regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Sanders was one of those people Lenin called “useful idiots,” dupes of a murderous regime. Is a useful idiot in a position to call another man racist? Perhaps, since there is nothing politically incorrect about being a useful idiot, whereas a racist is clearly beyond the pale.
Then there was Elizabeth Warren, who went after Mr. Bloomberg for the disparaging things he has supposedly said about women—“fat broads,” “horse-faced lesbians”—and was applauded for doing so. Ms. Warren also challenged Mr. Bloomberg to release his former female workers from their nondisclosure agreements. This all seems rather high-minded—political correctness is nothing if not high-minded—but are Mr. Bloomberg’s verbal sins greater than Ms. Warren’s lies about her genealogy? Or the uncorroborated stories she’s told about having been fired from a job owing to her pregnancy? Or her claims that her children went to public schools when one of them actually went to an exclusive—and expensive—private school?
Which here are the mortal sins and which the merely venial? Political correctness has no difficulty letting Ms. Warren off the hook for her egregious lies and keeping Mr. Bloomberg endlessly dangling on his hook for his verbal excesses.
Political correctness, like all ideologies, has the propensity to swamp any subject it touches. Among the current batch of Democrat candidates, this clearly includes climate change. On this subject no modulation is permitted. No talk of “global warming” is allowed. The world for all of them is going up in flames, and damn soon, and anyone who doesn’t understand this is a knucklehead.
While political correctness may pump up Democratic presidential candidates with the always cheering feeling of self-virtue, how well is it likely to serve them at the ballot box? Whoever turns out to be the nominee—and at the moment it figures to be a white man—will be forced to choose either a woman or an African-American as his running-mate. To fail to do so would outrage a party that has branded itself the standard-bearer of diversity and inclusion.
Outside contemporary universities and the #MeToo movement, for which anything taken for political incorrectness spells certain social death, how many Americans subscribe to, or even mildly believe in, political correctness? Or is political correctness a special taste, like that for foie gras mixed with Jujyfruits? Surely many people are put off by the self-righteousness that is at the heart of political correctness. Aren’t most Americans, unlike most Democratic presidential candidates, more interested in improving infrastructure, in sensibly regulating immigration, in halting terrorism, or in maintaining a robust economy than they are in establishing their own impeccable virtue? I should have thought so, but then I am not a Democrat running for president.
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