Abstract: All democratic education is directed against tyranny, but some kinds of tyranny are easier to identify than others. One kind of tyranny involves a visible dictator who controls public and private lives toward arbitrarily determined ends. Another kind of tyranny, more insidious than the first, controls what people come to want for themselves and for others – this is the result of the tyranny of habit. We want what we are conditioned to want, and we often find it hard to imagine anything else. One of the aims of education for the office of citizen is to provide students with the intellectual tools and to develop the character dispositions required to recognize, monitor, and respond to the tyranny of habit. The remainder of the chapters in the book is an elaboration on this aim and the way it sets the stage for the education of new patriots and their role as custodians of democracy.

This substantial introduction covers Trump’s divisive verbal shock tactics during his rise. It offers a history of presidential oratory and speech style, discusses Trump’s use of social media, and his rhetorical feedback loop with his supporters. It analyzes the way the “culture wars” over so-called “politically correct language” feed into Trump’s popularity and the dismay of his critics. Trump supporters often refuse the notion that word choice creates problems, arguing instead that linguistic care stokes oversensitivity, or that it evades harsh realities that harsh language merely describes. They also feel his simple, profane verbal style and even his spelling and grammatical errors reflect his “authenticity” and positive masculinity. Trump’s critics, meanwhile, believe his insulting words and hate speech incite violence while his style denotes lack of education and care, possibly even dementia, while demoting the verbal standards expected of a president. Disagreements over Trump’s verbal style and propriety have sometimes played out over class lines. Trump’s well documented prevarications have exhausted journalists and seemed to influence his supporters, some of whom take his statements as merely hyperbolic articulations of a deeper underlying truth.

This chapter argues that the success of Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary was due in part to its value as barbed comedic entertainment, generated through gesture. The chapter builds on semiotician Mikhael Bakhtin’s notion of the “grotesque body” to examine the ways that Trump’s unconventional communicative style, particularly his use of gesture to critique the political system and caricature his opponents, brought momentum to his campaign by creating spectacle. By reducing a target perceived as an opponent to an essentialized action of the body, Trump’s bodily parodies deliver the message that he rejects progressive social expectations regarding how minority groups should be represented. Five highly mediatized caricatures are analyzed in detail: the Wrist-Flailing Reporter, the Food-Shoveling Governor, the Choking Ex-Politician, the Border-Crossing Mexican, and the Swooning Democratic Nominee. In each of these gestural enactments, Trump displays his antagonism to political correctness by embodying discourses of disability, class, race, immigration, and gender, thus encouraging a new sociopolitical order that discourages empathy toward the vulnerable.

When I was writing The Moral Arc, I found my life-long libertarianism challenged on so many fronts that I began to reconsider my politics and to look for a new label, one that better described what I came to believe was the right balance between Left and Right, between liberalism and conservatism. I believe I may have found it in classical liberalism, a defense of which follows in this essay, originally published in the online magazine Quillette.

This chapter deals with the unsaid as a discursive strategy in antipolitical correctness discourse, where the unsaid is framed as something that can be said and needs to be said but is prevented from being said through silencing and taboos. Antipolitical correctness discourse is described as a language ideological debate. This metadiscursive debate involves notions of language taboos, denial of voice and representation, accessibility, and limitations of public discourse. It thereby negotiates issues not so much of language use, but of national identity, democratic representation, and purported cultural hegemony with the aim of changing public discourse. The strategy of claiming to be silenced to increase the acceptability of contested propositions rests on the extent to which silence is at odds with public discourse in modern mass democracies. Its functions will be exemplified using the example of the antipolitical correctness discourse perpetuated by Germany’s New Right. The chapter also aims to show how analyzing metadiscourse can on the one hand be a fruitful way for empirical textual analysis of the unsaid and on the other hand also provides scope for studying the language ideology of silence.