Hanson is right about political correctness. It stops us calling her stupid
Idea
Pauline Hanson is right. The awakened mind virus has taken control and you can no longer say anything in Australia. You can’t call climate science a hoax, you can’t call Islam a disease, you can’t call workers lazy, you can’t call Indigenous welfare an industry, and you can’t call female heads of government witches.
Actually you can because he did it.
But political correctness isn’t all bad. It protects Hanson from being called a fool. Some insults go beyond their limits.
Back when Pauline Hanson represented several thousand first-choice people in Queensland, it was common to call her the Oxley idiot. Ah, for the monoculture of long ago. Today, if you call him an idiot, you are also insulting the one-third of Australians who say they would vote for him, regardless of the evidence. You will probably increase their numbers.
It is not the unspeakable S-word in our public discourse that Hanson avoids using when describing the multicultural overseas ghettos he thinks he sees in clips on social media. “S-holes,” he said, in a sudden fit of silence. But “shit” is not censored. It is “stupid”.
Politically, the appearance of minds is poisonous. Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull have made themselves unelectable by failing to control their apparent intelligence. John Hewson, the human abacus, lost the unlosable election of 1993. He thought looking smart was an advantage. But Australians will tolerate being scorned by the rich and corrupt, but not by the smart. Our most successful recent prime ministers, John Howard and Anthony Albanese, have masterfully managed to conceal any signs of intelligence.
But Hanson advanced the cause of anti-intellectualism with his unique style of pre-emptive outrage. Kevin Kline’s weapons expert was Otto West. A Fish Named Wanda. Paranoid about his intelligence, Otto’s catchphrase was: “Don’t call me stupid!” If you get caught like John Cleese did, you’ll be hung out the window by your wrists until you apologize. So we don’t and we won’t. Actually we can’t. When every other word is allowed, a taboo will remain.
The roots of Australian anti-intellectualism are 238 years old, and Hanson is merely exploiting a tradition. In the good old days when we were all white and happy and together, Donald Horne wrote: Lucky Country By 1965 it became clear that anti-intellectualism was “extreme” even among educated Australians. It was a fetish. The attack on proxies of intelligence (universities, ABC, arts, science community) is hardly new.
Aggressive anti-intellectualism is a quality whose time has come. Not only is it popular, it’s also extraordinarily disarming. (I overheard a conversation in which the city elite were suddenly forced to take Hanson seriously: “Is he stupid or cunning?” As if one excluded the other.)
It has so turned liberals’ heads that Angus Taylor, always in search of a stance, has now turned to Hansonian shrillness. Goodbye Rhodes scholarships, McKinsey’s and The King’s School, hello rolled up sleeves and shouting slogans. The problem is that Hanson is 30 years ahead of him and can’t sound so angry that his voice shakes. If you can’t act like you’re sincere, you’re cooked.
Commenting on the polls, Hanson is admired for telling it like it is. But it is also the beneficiary of politically correct censorship. Responses to the National Press Club speech revolve around fact-checking and, of course, questions around the topic. Rational examination of his positions is only a sign of intellectual snobbery, the great Australian cannot be forgiven. Hanson inverts the charge by portraying the fact checks and questions in a sarcastic manner. The ruthless victim becomes the victim. It’s a kind of political ju-jitsu that ties opponents into knots of their own making. Is he smart? Irrelevant; Its purpose is to make it more popular.
Hanson doesn’t have a deep bench behind him, but calling his parliamentary colleagues stupid is also taboo. in the Senate estimates committee hearing Last month, Malcolm Roberts pressed Creative Australia representative Tim Blackwell over the “disproportionate” funding given to Indigenous artists. The problem is that Roberts’ numbers were off by several orders of magnitude. Desperate, he blamed his team for asking this question and asked Blackwell to help him. Respectfully Blackwell couldn’t do that. It was not his job to help Roberts file a lawsuit against his own organization.
Roberts muttered that no matter the numbers, funding for Indigenous artists was still excessive. Don’t call him stupid; That makes you a snob. His ignorance is a virtue in itself; Only a smart man could tell the facts to a Senate hearing.
What is unknown is how far it can go. On the other side of the Pacific, Hanson’s populist model, the original Otto West, turned anti-intellectualism into a war. Möbius strip It’s about self-esteem. Donald Trump launches populist attacks as usual expertise has been used to similar effect by Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes. But one of Trump’s favorite insults is calling his opponents “idiots” and “Low IQ”and he expresses his own offensive stupidity by constantly stating how smart he is.
It’s hard to see Hanson taking this step. But who can say? When things are unprecedented, the scientific method of thinking is unnecessary, despised, and wrong before it even begins. If you want to use your brain or the process of logical deduction to explain or understand the rise of One Nation, you’ve already missed the point.
What goes almost unnoticed is how useful the selectively enforced sanctuary of political correctness was to Hanson. In the midst of his attack on “safe spaces” (their assets, their terminology), there is a safe space specifically reserved for him. When all other words have been said, when Australians can say what they really think again, there will be one last exception, one last snowflake.
Malcolm Knox is an author and columnist. Sydney Morning Herald.
Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.
