Donald Trump’s election victories in the Super Tuesday Republican primaries, along with GOP senators re-stating their refusal to even consider President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court dramatically illuminate what that ugly phrase — “political correctness run amok” — really means.
For more than two decades, those words have been hurled at acts or policies or even just suggestions deemed too sympathetic to this or that outsider group. My own stripped-down definition of the phrase is this: We’re being too kind to the (fill in the blank). Let’s keep on making them feel as if they don’t belong.
Last week’s events show the Republican Party is the true practitioner of political correctness, and that the wreck the GOP has become since Trump began his run for the presidency is the result of the GOP’s own corrosive dynamic of political correctness run amok. The rigid, reactionary and amoral code of conduct it established within its ranks is a powerful example of the damage an unthinking, unquestioning obedience to a particular ideology can do.
In fact, that rigidity produced its spectacular failures to defeat such major Obama initiatives as Obamacare and the Iran Nuclear Deal. Nor, of course, did the GOP make good on now-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s notorious 2010 boast that the GOP would make Obama a one-term president. And it backed the disastrous — for it and the nation as a whole — Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority handed up in 2010.
Those three developments led directly to the presidential primary rampage of Trump, who now threatens the GOP with “riots” at its convention if he’s blocked from the nomination.
One can be justly furious at Trump’s boundless amorality, and still realize it’s not much different from what’s been the GOP’s standard operating procedure during the Obama Presidency.
That posture has now produced the GOP’s ridiculous claim that Obama should neglect his presidential responsibility to nominate a new Supreme Court Justice.
Of course, Obama ignored that desperate demand, pointedly announcing his nominee, Merrick Garland, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia, at a Rose Garden ceremony the day after Trump’s Super Tuesday victories made his position atop the wreckage of the GOP that much stronger.
The juxtaposition of those two events underscore that American society is well on its way this year to a moment of extraordinary political drama. In that regard, it’s worth citing three comments that taken together frame how it got here and what’s at stake.
The first comes from, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the 2012 book by two veteran scholars of American politics, Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein. They wrote: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the [nation’s] inherited social and economic regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
The second is from words written last week by Rich Lowry, editor of the staunchly conservative National Review magazine:
“Trump’s iteration of the Republican Party won’t have a bleeding heart;” he stated, “it will be out for blood. … personal abuse — and threats — will be its calling card. It will care less about policy than attitude and shibboleths. Electorally, it will repel minorities and hope to run up the score with whites. It won’t have an open hand on immigration but will talk of mass deportation. It won’t care about human rights, and in fact will be happy to violate them — or threaten to — as the national interest and a desire for vengeance dictate.”
Finally, these are words President Obama spoke in declaring Judge Garland is his nominee for the Supreme Court:
“At a time when our politics are so polarized … this is precisely the time when we should play it straight, and treat the process of appointing a Supreme Court justice with the seriousness and care it deserves. … [If not] The reputation of the Supreme Court will inevitably suffer. Faith in our justice system will inevitably suffer. Our democracy will ultimately suffer as well. I have fulfilled my constitutional duty. Now it’s time for the Senate to do theirs. Presidents do not stop working in the final year of their term. Neither should a senator.”
Lee A. Daniels is writing a book on the Obama Years and the 2016 presidential election.
