On one side of the table on HBO's Real Time Friday night, Bill Maher was using the excuse of guest NYU "Moral psychologist" (there's a profession no one asked for) Jonathan Haidt's plugging of his new book The Coddling of the American Mind* (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff), to get extremely worked up about coddled millenials as the main problem with the left. On the other side of the table and opposite end of the political spectrum, short-termed Trump Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci had moments before been calmly insisting that Trump's supporters see the exact same outrage in Trump's behavior and thought balloons as the left does and are excited by it. Maher was so worked up about both Trump and the millenials that he didn't realize he was making Scaramucci's point for him. (Not an unusual position for Maher to be in lately. But he still makes great television.)
Political correctness is an obvious concern of Maher who thumbed his nose at it with the name of his first show on network television 25 years ago, Politically Incorrect. It's been a primary topic for him ever since. Rarely does he admit that the right has elements just as PC as any on the left, although he did manage a petulant "I know they do" when another guest pointed it out to him.
For Maher and Haidt, the 'coddling' of the millenials is of grave concern to the health of the republic. Crediting his co-author with the notion to study a sociological phenomenon and the literature search to back it up, Haidt painted an unflattering portrait of millenials as anxious, triggered, skill-less, underemployed, overmedicated, self-mutilating, undersexed snowflakes. Maher provided a steady supply of amens along with anecdotes and theories of his own as a counterpoint to the professor's learned voice of authority, revealing a bit too much of his own personal animus to the youngest adults and their parents in the process. He's turning into a bit of an old man where the new generation is concerned. You might say he's triggered by them. <smiley face> For Maher, there's a connection between Trigger warnings-- a major topic of interest in Haidt's book apparently-- and political correctness, a topic that Haidt has written about in the past. Haidt gained renown originally with a book on the non-intersecting morals of liberals and of conservatives, making the case for them for those inclined to organize tribally that these are 2 different species of animal. In my experience of Haidt over the years, I've found the topics that occupy his professional attention to be a bit perversely concerned with the pathology of young people's politics and social consciousness. Those who wrote, studied and taught in colleges and universities were once accurately termed "educators" but education does not seem to be the apt description for Haidt's curious predilections of study. "Public intellectual" is the term many of his class prefer for themselves and it's accurate in a "green paint" kind of way, but I prefer the term "data strategist." What do they do with the data when it can't be twisted to their agendas? (I have always had this notion I can't get out of my head that there exists a class of liberal who make good careers and build solid reputations-- usually in journalism and academia-- on besmirching the left as a way of proving their own cred if not outright pleasing their paymasters.)
As for Maher, who has shown himself to be a bit off the hinges when it comes to this topic in recent episodes, when he is not spiraling about Donald Trump (or pushing anti-Islamic fervor while plugging his ears about the context anti-Western violence is fomented in), he is fretting about how political correctness and trigger warnings are pushing people to the right. His go-to place for examples of the problem all come from Twitter. As a non-twitter or facebook user who is by osmosis no stranger to the trainwreck atmosphere on social media, take it from me. It's not the left that's bugging you, dude. It's Twitter. The real world impact of Twitter controversies is a problem but you won't solve it by mistaking it for Excesses of the Left. Where do you think the term "snowflake" snowballed, and by whom?
People forget: Political correctness has been with us a long time. People were complaining about it when I was in school in the seventies. It's an easy target! Everybody hates it! One person's morality is another person's political correctness. The person who is triggered by social justice is just as fragile as the one who is triggered by cultural appropriation. But People! Bill! Jonathan! Very few people can't tolerate being triggered! Most people-- even young people-- perhaps especially young people-- live for it! It's ugly when people like Maher and others are disinvited from collegiate venues they'd been invited to on the basis that their speech is deemed odious by young loudmouths. But how could it not be invigorating for the students who make it happen? What's fragile about that? In this polarized age, if you don't learn to develop tolerance to contrary ideas and be inoculated by them, you will be in pain for a very long time. Most people will learn. Barring speech I don't agree with is not how I would choose to confront it or what I would urge, but it's rarer than the deliberately incorrect would have you believe; it's a tactic evidenced on all ends of the spectrums of politics, class and age (and it's not new); and it is one way to deal to with it. Sometimes it's called for. So why tar young people on the left with it?
Now that I've triggered myself, back to Scaramucci. Before Jonathan Haidt was brought out to balance things, Bill Maher had been exciting himself on the topic of Donald Trump's prevarications and shit-stirring about the approaching Caravan of would-be refugees from the South. As Maher turned red in his anger and became increasingly vigilant about letting anyone else, particularly Scaramucci speak, Scaramucci, the author of a new book called, Trump: The Blue Collar President, was as calmly attempting to make the point that at least one member of the audience got: Trump's base gets off on Bill Maher getting unhinged. The crazier Trump gets, the more they like it because it's guaranteed to provoke an equal and opposite reaction from the left. In an odd way, Scaramucci seemed to be saying, Trump's base anticipates the reaction and thereby almost mirrors it. On some level, these hapless rubes grok the essence of what is wrong with Trump's intellect as gleaned through his utterances, and yet, coming from feelings of deep resentment toward the sensibilities of the class who are reviled by the nature of Trump's worldview, they are damned if they won't share it. The importance of this point can not be stressed enough: there is no fixing this way of thinking. This is the mind virus of nihilism pure and simple. I don't know if Trump is masterfully manipulating the unmoored impulses of his audiences for personal gain-- it may be his one talent if so-- or if he's just one of them, who merely happens to be the most powerful person in the world at the moment. It hardly matters. From Trump to Brexit to Orbán in Hungary to Duterte in the Philippines to Bolsonaro in Brazil, this is the age of the nihilists and if you're not one of them, this is not your age.
This is not my age.
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* For a review by someone who actually read the book, go here.
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