David Michael Miller
We all have our demons. Even the purest Prius-driving Unitarian has her dark side.
But until now we have just assumed that in polite society we suppress our pettiest selves, we bury our meanest, least noble thoughts.
One of the most haunting things about the Donald Trump candidacy is the number of times that his supporters have been quoted as saying something along the lines of, “It’s refreshing to hear somebody say out loud what we’re all thinking.”
Why ignorance and incoherence are refreshing is beyond me. But I suppose I can understand why people who have resentments piled up inside of them might feel liberated when those feelings are expressed by a candidate for high office. I suppose they feel liberated because his reflection of their prejudices gives that ugliness legitimacy.
It’s the reason that Trump and his supporters rail against “political correctness.” They define PC speech as being somehow less than honest because it prevents them from airing deeply held grievances against all kinds of groups, cultural changes and ideas that they don’t like.
As a staunch supporter of the First Amendment I’m not entirely unsympathetic to their basic argument. I think that free speech means the right to say things that are stupid, mean and hurtful. It protects ideas and their expression, whether or not those ideas are any good at all and whether the expression is eloquent or garbled. Because if the First Amendment isn’t there to protect awful speech, it also won’t be there to protect the kind of challenging but unpopular speech that moves us forward.
But the Trumpites are really not talking about laws that would ban them from saying what they think. Instead, they’re rebelling against evolving social norms that make it increasingly unacceptable to, for example, spew “locker room talk” about women. For the record, I attended an all-boys high school in the 1970s and never heard anybody talk the way Trump did in 2005.
But what if a man really believed and felt what Trump said to Billy Bush in that now infamous conversation? And what if Trump’s supporters really have gone around thinking that Mexicans are killing and raping Americans along with a lot of other crazy stuff?
While we should never support laws that would outlaw speech that we consider ignorant or hateful, I see little wrong with social pressure against it. People should feel pressure not to give voice to their own demons because when we allow those demons out they can flourish. Once the lid is off, all kinds of bad things can happen. Witness the increasing vitriol bordering on violence at Trump rallies. When they go low they just get lower and lower.
In his excellent book The German War, released last year, Nicholas Stargardt documents how Adolf Hitler methodically peeled back the veneer of polite middle-class German society to encourage the full expression of their worst prejudices. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the road to the Holocaust started with one man making it acceptable to say out loud the blackest things in the deepest regions of the coldest hearts.
Politicians have more influence on us than we like to admit. They can play bright chords or somber ones in the national character, notes that resonate with the better angels of our nature or the most regrettable parts of who we are.
It comes down in the end not to laws against hate speech or to trigger warnings, safe spaces or even to societal pressure to be politically correct. It comes down to our own individual self-discipline to not give voice to our worst selves. Because when we repress what we know in our hearts to be ignorant and wrong, my experience, at least, is that the suppression of stupidity eventually can snuff it out. I’m probably most proud not of the good things I’ve said or written but of the ignorant things I never uttered.
We need to think and feel before we talk. Donald Trump has demonstrated a capacity to do neither. And as a result, he has done real damage to our society, which will echo on even after, as I so fervently hope, he and the unbridled hatred he represents are crushed in November.
