Permission to do bad: the Republican ethos

By Matt Duell, ITF Founding Member

At the most fundamental level, our morality is communicated through the stories we tell. From our fairy tales and religious texts to our comic books and television shows, good and evil is communicated through both action and statement.

American culture at large tends to tell stories that assign value to a certain shared set of traits, such as generosity, kindness, and perseverance. However, Republicans have spent the last three decades giving their followers permission to ignore these values.

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It started with ‘political correctness’ in the early 1990s. For a thorough history of the origins of the phrase and its spreading use in the Republican party, I highly recommend Moira Weigel’s 2016 article in The Guardian. Even reading the phrase can evoke images of overly-sensitive, too-easily-offended liberal college students angrily attacking well-meaning people for imagined slights. I promise you, that’s by design.

The phrase is used to draw lines between in-group and out-group, between “normal” people and “those'' people. But it does more than that: it outlines what is good and moral and what is deviant and immoral.

Before I continue, I want to clearly state the issue at hand. Marginalized people, who experience discrimination in their daily lives, are asking those more powerful than themselves to learn about their lives and change their behavior to be less discriminatory. At the root of it, this means that white people, and men in particular, are being asked not to be assholes.

To Republicans, when somebody is “politically correct”, they are saying or doing something specifically to avoid the ire of “those” people – the liberal “snowflakes” who take everything too seriously. That is, a “politically correct” person is lying to avoid punishment.

The underlying message is a simple one – wouldn’t life be better if we didn’t have to lie to appease people who are sensitive? Translation: wouldn’t it be better to be honest in our bigotry?

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Though it started with political correctness, there are many variations of the same theme throughout Republican messages:

Virtue signaling
Someone who is “virtue signaling” is saying something they don’t really believe in order to receive praise and acclaim from “those” people. Rather than lying to appear less immoral, they are lying to appear more moral. The underlying message is that you, the non-virtue-signaler are not actually less good a person than the signaler. In fact, you are more moral because you’re not lying about your true beliefs.

“Cancel culture”
There is no one definition of “cancelling.” It always starts with criticism of a person or thing because it is perceived as offensive. The actual consequences are difficult to nail down – often, nothing happens to the person or object being “cancelled” beyond being criticized. Rarely, a product is discontinued or a person loses their job. Sometimes, people stop buying a product.

Importantly, it doesn’t matter who makes the decision. The copyright holders decide on their own to discontinue books for racial stereotypes – cancel culture. The owner of a company fires an employee for offending their customers – cancel culture.

The underlying message: offensive material and people not only have a right to be offensive, the rest of society has a moral obligation to tolerate and promote offensive material. If you break this unstated contract, you participate in “cancel culture.”

“White-knighting”
The simplest definition of this term is that a man defends a woman for the purpose of getting the woman to like him -- so that she’ll have sex with him. Again, this reflects the belief that the man is lying and therefore the criticisms he raises about the way that specific people or society treats a woman can be dismissed.

“Self-censorship”
Special mention to Bari Weiss’s recent column here. “Self-censorship” refers to just keeping quiet instead of saying things that people would find offensive. Rather than lying about your position, you are choosing not to say anything.

Some might call that “family dinner,” but for Republicans even the thought of keeping offensive things to yourself is intolerable. Again, there is a belief that the offensive should not only be expressed at every opportunity, but that society has an obligation not to criticize it – after all, you wouldn’t want to be one of those “cancel culture” extremists.

The thread of commonality between these terms and others is that to Republicans, there is no room for people who truly believe that marginalized people are worthy of respect. The message is clear – everyone who says they believe these things is lying.

If they’re lying, then you don’t need to listen, you don’t need to examine your behavior, you don’t need to think about how your actions affect others, you don’t need to hold back the worst of yourself. They’re not really being moral, so you don’t need to, either. It’s messaging designed to create an entire political party of sociopaths.

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Those who use these phrases believe that what you say is not a reflection on who you are, on whether you’re a good person or not. Some of them want to be judged solely by their actions. Others want to be judged only by their own standards.

Unfortunately for them, being good is caring about the effect that you have on others. Being good is about what you say, what you do, and what you believe. These phrases hide that, and shift the conversation from the content of the speech to the act of speaking. They communicate that hiding, in any way, for any reason, what you think, is the true moral harm. It allows them to ignore the harm they cause, and create from thin air harm against them.

Challenging misogyny and racial prejudice is a moral good whether it appears in yourself or others. So be good. Pay attention to the effect your words have. Convince others to do the same. Keep the focus of the conversation on the harm being caused, and don’t let these phrases be used to shame you out of it or shift the terms of debate.

Stay In The Fight.

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