I have tried not to sour my temperament by participating in the vitriol that has infected this year’s campaign for President.  What happened to the civility and mutual respect that once characterized public discourse?  For crying out loud, the University of Chicago made news by simply announcing that ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘safe spaces’ should be unnecessary on a college campus that celebrates the free exchange of ideas.  This position was newsworthy because it has become commonplace to attribute hurtful motivation (and actual emotional harm) to the articulation of ideas with which one disagrees.  College campuses have published lists of words, phrases, and questions that are now considered “microaggressions.”

In his 1984 book The Naked Public Square, Richard Neuhaus bemoaned the disappearance of religious conversation from public discourse due to a one-sided application of the First Amendment.  We are seeing an extension of that trend into other arenas of thought as a humanist orthodoxy dominates academia, journalism and government.  If your religion teaches that abortion is wrong, then your religion has to become enlightened.  If your understanding of economics suggests that more people will be harmed than helped by, for example, raising the minimum wage, then you must have a loathing in your heart for low skill workers.  If you believe that immigration laws should be enforced and applied fairly and evenly, you lay yourself open to accusations of bigotry.

I mourned the death of journalism several years ago.  I no longer expect straight news reporting from any news source.  Among the signs of journalism’s demise was the corrupting of the language by using adjectives and adverbs – or value-laden nouns and verbs -- to “color” the story.  One sees this in the coverage of political rallies; a reporter is not content to simply report what the candidate says, but feels obliged to report tone and body language.  Such observations are highly subjective and tilt the coverage toward the perception of the reporter.  Was he/she intense? … passionate? … angry? … persuasive?  Pick your choice depending on what you think of the candidate.

Secretary Clinton opened a can of worms when she used the label ‘deplorable’ to describe half of Donald Trump’s supporters.  It is one thing to say, “I deplore racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and Islamophobia.”  But to call millions of Americans ‘deplorable’ on the basis of a personal judgment that they hold such views is quite another thing.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post wrote a column titled “Yes, half of Trump supporters are racist” in response to criticism of Secretary Clinton. I read it with great interest.  He cited research into racial attitudes in making his case.  But in my view, he missed two key points:  first, the research would point to approximately one-third of Clinton supporters being racially prejudiced; second, the leap to the word ‘racist’ is not supported by the facts cited.

Milbank concluded his column as follows:  “Trump, on stage, rejected any notion of racism, saying people who want secure borders ‘are not racists,’ people who warn of ‘radical Islamic terrorism are not Islamophobes’ and people who support police ‘are not prejudiced.’ But moments later, he repeated the campaign slogan he borrowed from an anti-Semitic organization that opposed involvement in World War II.  ‘America First – remember that,’ he said. “America First.’”

So Milbank would have us believe that a form of patriotism that puts America First is rooted in anti-Semitism and therefore its use is a prima facie rationale for labeling its user a racist.  That is absurd.

Will this campaign cause me to mourn the death of the English language to carry meaning apart from the filters of the sender and the receiver?  I have long ago consoled myself with the realization that the suffix ‘-phobia’ is now used to connote ‘hatred of’ rather than ‘fear of.’  If we can now label someone or some group as racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. based upon a public policy position, then the public square is not only naked, it is nihilistic.

One passing thought in conclusion:  I have observed that those who tend to use the word ‘xenophobic’ are themselves heavily xenophobic.  The word is used by most speakers to mean exclusively “fear of people from other countries.”  But the word itself means “fear of that which is foreign or strange.”  The attitudes of those who use the word seem to include fear of those whose faith guides their daily lives, who do not live on either coast, who enjoy hunting and fishing, who drive pickup trucks, listen to country music, and love NASCAR.  These are the kinds of people who are “other” to many in academia, media and government.

Words mean things.  At least, they used to.