Caleb Brown: This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 12, 2016. I am Caleb Brown. As there is political correctness on the Left, there is patriotic correctness on the Right. That from Cato Institute Policy Institute Alex Nowrasteh. He argues that demanding people use specific language to refer to groups or public policy issues can preclude an otherwise rational debate. And for people on the Right, he argues the bigger problem is that they don’t know they are doing it.
Alex Nowrasteh: There is a trend on the Right. I call it patriotic correctness, and every group has its own rules about the type of speech allowed and punishing people for how they sort of step outside these bounds. Liberals have it with political correctness. It’s a stifling, suffocating set of rules that are absurd and silly, mostly confined to the university and the media but in Hollywood and other places. What’s different about patriotic correctness is that most people who use it aren’t aware that they have their own code of speech, that they have their own code of acceptable behavior. And so what I wanted to do was just point that out to people and say that as bad as political correctness is, there is another form of patriotic correctness that infects an entirely different group of people, mostly a different group of people, and it is as stifling.
Caleb Brown: Where does this cause, in your view, where does this cause the biggest problems? Or how are people stifled the most when it comes to issues of patriotic correctness?
Alex Nowrasteh: The biggest victims of it are conservatives. The biggest victims are the people who work in these circles, who live in these circles, and who are honestly trying to seek the truth. So I mean one of the examples I use is about opposition to the Iraq War in 2003 and afterwards. If you recall, you know, there are a number of pieces written by people like David Frum labeling everybody who was against the war as a traitor — not as a traitor, but as sort of an un-American position. The Dixie Chicks spoke out against the war. There were like public demonstrations to destroy their records sort of in these grotesque scenes. The Congress relabeled, in their cafeteria, French fries to freedom fries and a bunch of other really you know, silly, absurd things but the problem is that by having this sort of uniform, nationalistic way of thinking and viewing on the Right, it causes them to make the same mistake again and again, because you can’t have any honest self-reflection or debate about what went wrong in the past. It’s the same thing that we see with liberals and a lot of people are blaming sort of political correctness for liberals and the Democratic Party losing this election. And part of the reason is they just have not been able to deal honestly with issues of you know, issues of immigration, or violence, or terrorism, or anything else, and people got sick of it. So they can’t change because they don’t know what the problem is because the language they’ve chosen prevents them from discussing the problem, but I argue that on the Right you have a similar problem.
Caleb Brown: When President Obama I guess opts not to use specific words when it relates to terrorist acts, there’s this big clamor about why can’t he say the words radical Islamic terrorism. And I can think of a couple of reasons why he wouldn’t want to use those specific words and one of them is not wanting to inflate the threat that that kind of terrorism poses.
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, there’s this idea that if you somehow magically incant those words radical Islamic terrorism that’s worth a whole lot in fighting terrorism. I obviously, I don’t think so, but there are a lot of very good reasons not to give a entire religion credit for the actions of a small number of them who are trying to start a worldwide, huge religious war on their behalf. So President Obama has not articulated why it is that he doesn’t say radical Islamic terrorism. Some of the generals around him have said that but that’s also a problem with the political correctness on the left. The majority of these terrorists are radical Islamic terrorists and they seem unwilling to accept that, and on the Right they are all willing to accept it but all they want is sort of showiness, talking about that aspect of it. They don’t want to talk about well what are the best ways to go about dealing with this problem. Is it as big a problem that we need to have a massive Department of Homeland Security and fight numerous foreign wars? No, it’s not that big of a problem. So both sides have a lot of reality catching up to do in order to talk about this issue honestly.
Caleb Brown: It just seems like just another form of virtue signaling.
Alex Nowrasteh: That’s exactly what it is. And it’s virtue signaling to people in your group that you are part of this group but then it makes it almost impossible for you to talk to this group in a way that is critical or analyzes any kind of mistakes that you made in the past.
Caleb Brown: Yeah, Arnold Kling talks about this in his slim book The Three Languages of Politics and how every group, every tribe, wants to you know, earn points with their tribe, score points off of the other tribes, but there isn’t a great deal of self reflection that is required.
Alex Nowrasteh: And using the wrong language to your group results in triggering of the people in that group and usually trigger warnings are suggested when you step outside the bounds of the language that your group finds appropriate. These groups retreat, both on the Left and the Right, retreat to their own safe spaces. So there’s the childish safe spaces on college campuses, and then there are these safe spaces in talk radio or the message boards of Rightwing publications online and other groups that are just as insulating that produce bubbles just as thick and I would argue are more damaging. I am a libertarian but the areas where I deviate from libertarianism are is toward the Right, almost uniformly. I used to come from the Right before I became a libertarian, so seeing these types of things, I’m not a Liberal from the outside throwing stones at people who I think are dumb, I am somebody who comes from this tradition, who respects it, who thinks that Conservatives, Right-wingers have a lot to offer to public policy debates, and I agree with a lot of them on a lot of issues. So this is one of the reasons why I’ve had to talk about this and had to write about it, was because I’ve dealt with these issues so much, working on the issue of immigration, talking to Conservatives, talking to Republicans about this, I get a lot of this patriotically correct response and I finally got to the point where I had to write something about it.
Caleb Brown: In your specific area, the things that are immediately invoked are illegal immigrants or illegals, as you point out, is a popular phrase to refer to immigrants who aren’t here legally.
Alex Nowrasteh: Illegals is not a word, by the way, too. That’s the funny thing. Like, they made up their own little language.
Caleb Brown: And borders. You know, the integrity of borders and being a nation of laws are all things that you refer to as things that you know, and typically I’ve seen on Twitter you get this stuff thrown at you all the time.
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, I mean the patriotically correct language here is you know, these folks must use the non-word of illegals, or illegal immigrant, or illegal alien, to describe foreigners who broke our immigration laws, the people like me who disagree with this, the dissenters are invariably in favor of open borders, or the word shamnesty, which was invented by Michelle Malkin, for the 30 million illegal immigrant invaders…
Caleb Brown: You’re doing air quotes.
Alex Nowrasteh: Yeah, I was doing some air quotes there in case anybody pulled this out. And then the punishment for this, in their minds, is of course deportation because quote, we’re a nation of laws, unquote, and they didn’t get in line, even though there is no line. And point out there is no line, it doesn’t matter at all and doesn’t change anything. When you say that, I mean one of the common responses is when I speak I say Donald Trump, when he was running, was opposed to immigration. He was an anti-immigrant candidate. People would frequently come up to me afterward and say no, he’s anti illegal immigration, not anti-immigration. I then point out that he wants to slash legal immigration and they don’t care. So that anti-illegal immigration versus anti-immigration is a distinction for a lot of the patriotically correct but they think that everybody they agree with is just against illegal immigration, not immigration in general.
Caleb Brown: You take this more broadly. I remember Julian Sanchez a few years ago. I think he may have coined the term epistemic closure with reference to primarily Conservatives or people who would describe themselves that way having so little trust in media outlets using normal language and then essentially shutting off those as sources of information.
Alex Nowrasteh: And that’s exactly what we see with a lot of the sort of the rumor mill that gets out there. Especially, I mean the Left-wingers have their own sort of rumor mills and their own silly stuff but I think this election really showed that there was a lot more of it on the Right than anybody wanted to give it credit for. And this epistemic closure that Julian found or wrote about is a huge symptom of this retreat in the people’s bubbles and safe spaces, on both sides of the spectrum, but it’s just not — and I want to emphasize this — I’m not defending political correctness. I think political correctness is social tyranny with manners and patriotic correctness is social tyranny without the manners. And I don’t think — and neither of them are good and I don’t know if one is better than the other. But nobody talks about their Rightwing variety. Nobody mentions it. And most importantly none of them are aware that they are doing it while Left-wingers are aware that they are doing it. So if five people can read this and figure out that hey, we do have our own speech codes on the Right, maybe it won’t change anything, but at least people being aware of it will be a step in the right direction.
Caleb Brown: Alex Nowrasteh is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute. Subscribe to this podcast at iTunes, Google Play, and with Cato’s iOS app. And follow us on Twitter, @CatoPodcast.
