The 'Cruel Kids' Are Still Rebelling Against Political Correctness
Reflections on a theory behind Trump's 2016 and 2024 victories.
Following Donald Trump's unexpected victory in the 2016 election, I concluded that an underrated aspect of his appeal was his vocal opposition to political correctness. In an article exploring this topic in the immediate aftermath of the election results, I observed that "political-correctness-run-amok and liberal overreach would lead to a counter-revolution if unchecked. That counter-revolution just happened."
"There is a cost to depriving people of the freedom (in both the legal and social senses) to speak their mind," I wrote. "The presidency just went to the guy whose main qualification, according to his supporters, is that he isn't afraid to speak his."
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That parenthetical—"in both the legal and social senses"—is vital to understanding what we mean when we complain about political correctness run amok. The First Amendment vigorously protects controversial, confrontational, and, indeed, hateful speech, so it is somewhat uncommon for people to suffer genuine legal ramifications for said speech, although it does happen—particularly on university campuses. Organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Pacific Legal Foundation, and (less frequently these days) the American Civil Liberties Union exist to defend Americans whose First Amendment rights are challenged by the government.
It is quite common, however, for people to pay a social or professional price for unwelcome speech. I used to document these cases for Reason with some frequency: They regularly involved nonfamous people losing their employment or social standing after someone—often a social rival or scoop-hungry journalist—went looking for ugly tweets or texts they sent during their adolescence. These tweets were usually described as having "resurfaced," as if they called attention to themselves without any assistance, when really it was malicious, self-interested people who surfaced them for cynical reasons, usually during a celebratory moment for the target. Take, for instance, Heisman Trophy winner Kyler Murray having to endure news story after news story about the fact that he had sent some vaguely antigay tweets while in high school.
Noncelebrities get it much worse. Consider the case of Mimi Groves, a teenager whose life was virtually destroyed after a vindictive classmate posted a short, three-second video of her saying the n-word while driving. The slur was not directed at anyone in particular; the quote was literally, "I can drive, [n-word]." Groves had just earned her learner's permit. This is the sort of thing that should have produced a stern warning to avoid using offensive language, and perhaps an apology if anyone was offended (though again, no specific person was impugned by the remark). Instead, The New York Times (!) reported on it, portraying Groves as a racist and her accuser as a hero. Groves was subsequently kicked off the University of Tennessee's cheerleading squad and ultimately had to withdraw from the university entirely.
The election of Trump in 2016 obviously did nothing to reverse or even slow this phenomenon: On the contrary, both the Groves incident and the Murray incident took place during his time in office. That thing we used to call political correctness run amok, then cancel culture, and, finally, "woke"—which has the benefit of being shorter and easier to say—is still with us.
Table Manners
This subject was on my mind as I read New York magazine's recent cover story about the MAGA-supporting young people who attended the festivities surrounding Trump's second inauguration. The story is titled: "The Cruel Kids' Table," a play on words referencing the cool kids' table, a high school trope.
What makes these young, attractive, elegantly dressed MAGA people so cruel? New York magazine features writer Brock Colyar spends significant attention on their preference for, ahem, colorful language:
"Six months into Biden being president, I was like, I can't fucking do this anymore," says a 19-year-old New Yorker who once quite literally had blue hair and attends Marymount Manhattan, which he describes as "75 percent women and 23 percent trannies." He had supported Biden, but "I hate watching the things I say. I took a much farther horseshoe around this time." Later, a former Bernie supporter (who looked like the most Bernie-supporting person one could imagine with long, curly hair and a plaid shirt) told me the same: He wanted the freedom to say "faggot" and "retarded."
"Conservatives used to be uptight, but the left has become the funless, sexless party. Not that the right is the party of sex, necessarily. We have fun," says a 31-year-old influencer, Arynne Wexler. "What does a conservative even look like anymore?"
A couple of thoughts.
First, I don't think it's a good thing to celebrate or revel in casual cruelty, including mean-spirited language. Of course, there are contexts in which coarseness can be appropriate, entertaining, and of social value: See, for example, South Park's very deserved skewering of Disney executive Kathleen Kennedy's approach to storytelling in the Star Wars universe. (Or South Park on any topic, frankly.)
That said, I have to imagine that part of what these kids are rebelling against is the rigid enforcement of language-related cancel culture. Indeed, it seems to have driven them to the opposite extreme—not only should people cease to suffer consequences for coarseness, they should embrace coarseness.
In the 1990s and early aughts, young people rebelled against their parents' generation by becoming more progressive. Older folks liked George W. Bush and family values and freedom fries, so their kids got on board with gay marriage and Green Day and Jon Stewart. The Substack writer Cartoons Hate Her captured this dynamic perfectly in a recent post:
While some middle-aged white moms have always voted both red, and others blue, there is usually a prototypical "white suburban lady" who teenagers try to shock, and she embodies the least cool politics. In the 2010s, she was Karen. In the 2000s, she didn't have a name, but we all knew her type. She was a "fundie," or religious fundamentalist. She was racist and homophobic. She said dumb things like, "It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!" She was fiercely, and stupidly, patriotic. She was anti-intellectual, uptight, and scoldy.
She's now a liberal.
It's true: Moms make things uncool. (Sorry, Mom.) And one way to rebel against scolding, rule-following, liberal-oriented moms is to become very right-wing, contrarian, and impolite. To the extent that this is what's really going on, it's almost inevitable: Every dominant culture invites a countercultural backlash. Even so, it's never too late for champions of liberal values to consider whether excessive enforcement of new progressive norms around speech and expression is actually helping their cause—or rather, pushing an entire generation into the arms of the right.
Since I am no longer a young person myself, I'm less prone to sweeping pronouncements; I would not flatly assert, this time around, that "Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash." But I still think that backlash is a real phenomenon and continues to draw people of all ages, but young people in particular, into MAGA's orbit.
This Week on Free Media
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