Back when I still waded into the fever swamps of comment threads in places like Mediaite, in conversations about the naked racism of the Steve Kings, Rush Limbaughs and Donald Trumps of the world I was often accused of denying or refusing to acknowledge the truth of the Democratic Party’s pre-1965 history with respect to racial issues. My response was usually along the lines of, “Of course it’s true. It’s not important, but it’s true." Just because it’s true, doesn’t mean it’s important.
Matthew Yglesias wrote a column on Vox this past week about the “hack gap,” which he calls “one of the most fundamental asymmetries shaping American politics.” I’ve written about it before too in somewhat different terms, not as an “asymmetry” but as a “double standard." What the “hack gap” basically means is that when Republican politicians and conservative media start freaking out about something a Democrat (or some Democrat-adjacent public figure) has done, said, or worn, the media bends over backwards to treat it as if it’s tremendously important, even though it isn’t, and we know it isn’t because we know from past behavior that Republicans and conservatives don’t actually care about it.
The obvious example to which Yglesias points is the Clinton e-mail “scandal,” which got more coverage in 2016 than all actual policy issues combined. Yes, Clinton broke with internal State Department e-mail protocol, but departmental e-mail protocol is (a.) not important enough to give rise to a national scandal (never mind anything approaching a crime); and (b.) not something that Republicans or conservatives actually care about. They simply seized on it as a means of validating their long-standing prejudices, and the so-called “news” media predictably played along. Here’s Yglesias:
The essence of the hack gap is that when Clinton was in the crosshairs, conservative media made a huge show of being sincerely outraged by her misconduct, which forced the topic onto the national media agenda.
Reporters, meanwhile, simply tend not to jump on left-wing talking points. And progressive media is more infused with the values of actual journalism, and pretending to think something unimportant is actually critical is not journalism.
(emphasis added). The concept of importance is what interests me here. We all know, and remember, that Republican politicians and Republican-adjacent media figures throughout the Obama presidency “made a huge show of being sincerely outraged by” all sorts of unimportant, benign, routine, non-controversial things, and that’s the things that were real and not a product of the ever-burgeoning Republican fan-fiction universe. This, more than anything else, is what programmed the base for Trump; the non-stop outrage, the unhinged freakouts about anything and everything, constantly watering the tree of grievance and resentment and paranoia and self-hero-worship until it sprouted one big, odoriferous orange flower.
Bill Maher did another rant last night about “political correctness” as he is wont to do, and while he is not entirely wrong in saying that political correctness is not always appropriate or necessary and can be really, really annoying especially when it’s not called-for, that’s still all it is. But at the risk of my going off on that rant for the umpteenth time, I’ll say that “political correctness” does provide a common thread for understanding importance in the political sense.
As I’ve written before, left-wing liberals see oppression and injustice everywhere even where it either doesn’t really exist or is not really that important; right-wing conservatives either don’t care about oppression and injustice (except to the extent they imagine themselves as victims), don’t believe it exists at all (ditto), or think it’s actually justified and desirable (and therefore neither oppressive nor unjust). More to the point, however, is that “political correctness” — viz., being politically correct, or being annoyed by it — is not so important that anyone should be voting for or against either party because of it. Liberals should not be voting Democratic in order to make the world more “politically correct”; conservatives should not be voting Republican because they’re “sick of political correctness."
Simply put, “political correctness” is not something elected officials can really do anything about. Punishing Democrats, viz., Democratic officeholders and candidates, for “political correctness” makes no sense because there’s really nothing they can do to ameliorate or make it go away in order to win votes; nor is there anything Republicans can do to make that happen once they’ve won. Both sides can talk about it, encourage it or discourage it in whatever ways they do, but they can’t stop political correctness any more than they can stop political incorrectness. I keep coming back to Andrew Sullivan’s dopey remark that Democrats and the mainstream media (actually, liberal pundits, bloggers and activists, but whatever) had made the Brett Kavanaugh hearings about “all white men” thereby “making them feel shitty about who they are” and, presumably, soil their nice clean “F*** YOUR FEELINGS” t-shirts with sad, sad tears.
But I’ve strayed from the main point I wanted to make, which is about importance. I’d like to do a thought experiment. Ask any liberal/Democratic voter what they think the three most important issues/problems in America today are that we’d like our elected officials to solve, then ask a conservative/Republican voter for their top three. If I were being generous, I’d say the former would probably list health care, climate change and the cost of higher education, whereas the latter would list taxes, regulations, and Radical Islamic Terrorism™. Were I less generous, I’d imagine the former listing racism, sexism and homophobia, while the latter might list media bias, “illegal” [non-white] immigration, and political correctness. Regardless, ask for each side’s top three, then combine them and list them in order of importance. I’d be interested to see the results.
Voting based on things that aren’t true is bad enough. Voting based on things that aren’t important may actually be worse.