Dachshund:
I think Trump is one of the best Presidents the US has ever had
Your first paragraph from which this quote is lifted says you like Trump because he's "no obfuscation, no sophistry, no labyrinthine rhetoric; he is a straight-shooter." First, being a straight shooter begs the question: what is he straight shooting about? Who cares if he's stright shooting about being, say, a serial killer. Hardly a mitigating condition if the it is appalling behavior in question, is it. Ted Bundy was a straight shooter; he'd told others in the greatest frankness of the joy he received in strangling women. See the point? Second, you conflate being himself with straight shooting. Trump is NOT in fact a straight shooter at all. He is a dissembler beyond anything this world has sen since the propaganda machinery of the nazis. He is first and foremost, beyond any trait you might ascribe, a liar. If you think not, then, and I do not want unkind, you are either compromised in your thinking or lying yourself. Trump's lying is an objective fact. Even he knows this.
Your second paragraph is out of place and does not in any way encourage your argument.
In short,I think that Trump is genuinely alarmed by his observation that Western societies today are increasingly paralysed by a potentially self-destructive cancer of "political correctness",
This is from your third paragraph. Yes, I think you're right, Trump is genuinely alarmed that the the world has gone soft in its accommodating rhetoric regarding radical Islam. I am not sure why I should care about what is alarming to a person like this, though: he is not very smart, doesn't read, is vulgar beyond dignity, never has said an interesting think in his life. I mean, why is he right? That is the question. Not, he thinks this or that. There is a very convincing argument that says whatever he says should be prima facie dismissed, simply because he does not say intelligent things as a matter of course.
So far, nothing here to recommend Trump at all. (But you did push a lot of vacuous reading on me.)
1) To begin with we need to try and the define the meaning of the term "political correctness" as it is used in the West today. I think "political correctness" is currently a term of abuse in the West that connotes an overly tolerant, overly liberal attitude, a hypersensitivity to the prospect of saying, doing or even thinking anything that might be offensive to any of the minority groups that exist within advanced industrial democratic societies yet do not embrace/respect the core values that underpin the dominant, (nominally) Christian ,white/European, culture of Western Enlightenment rationality that defines these societies (for example, the United States, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada among others).
finally, a point. Political correctness, as I suspect you know, started as a pejorative coined by conservatives. It suggests saying anything to appease some complaining minority. Go back a bit further in time, and this includes issues like child labor laws and a national minimum wage. It is still in the minds of many conservatives that this latter is a bad idea.
My thought is this: The US is not a Christian White European culture. It was, but by 2060 or so these will not be the majority any more. You have to yield to this, or go apoplectic and start reading Breitbart News. Now, in this huge, complex, muticultural evolving society, as once voiceless minorities swell into political voting blocks (notwithstanding conservative efforts to gerrymander the vote), there arises issues never thought important before. Blacks under Jim Crow had to fight red in tooth and claw to enfranchisement as citizens, for example. We are still trying to make this work. Difficult when you have a conservative mentality that possesses such primitive manicheanism (it is all right or wrong, good of evil, good decisions, bad decisions) in their thinking on matters of crime, poverty and ignorance and refuses to invest in the measures required to liberate people from poverty. Blacks, Asians, Ashkenazi Jews: all will fail in abject poverty save when circumstances allow. (Trumps comment about Haiti: beneath contempt, truly. Those people are desperately poor, unlike Trump who received millions for nothing. Why you like a man pours out cruel, stupid remarks against the poor is unfathomable. Einstein would have, had been born on the near west side of Baltimore, become a terrific drug dealer, no doubt.)
But the point about political correctness being oversensitive is true. That is the way it goes with change. See how the right fights back so vigorously now against the Obama legacy. It is a painful political struggle to bring these people into the future. Like the sixties, conservatism will not go gently into that good night. But it is going. Trump is just an aberration rising out of the resentment against change.
f one broadly accepts this definition of "political correctness", is Trump correct in claiming that it has become a serious problem in the West in the context of the threat to Western culture/civilization that is posed by the Muslim/Islamic world? The answer, I would argue is a clear and unequivocal "Yes, it has". I say this because I believe that the West today is struggling in thrall of a "crisis of rationality" ( a crisis of Enlightenment reasoning) that has suffused its societies with a toxic cultural ( moral/ethical, epistemological and metaphysical) relativism. This predicament is, in my opinion, a consequence of the progressive cleavage in Western culture of the supernatural/Divine knowledge of (revealed) Christian faith from the knowledge that is afforded by human ("Enlightenment") reasoning alone, but this is a separate issue for debate and I will not belabour it here; suffice to say that I believe there is a general consensus of opinion among mainstream philosophers today that contemporary Western civilization is indeed beset with a widespread culture of moral/ethical/epistemological/metaphysical relativism and moribund skepticism about which there is the unmistakable stench of nihilism and self-destruction.This "doctrine" of cultural relativism and skepticism while it denies any values, is ironically, doctrinairre in its own enforcement. Faced with an onslaught from the Muslim/Islamic world that currently (and correctly) recognizes Western culture as decadent, we no longer know what it is we want to defend. We tell ourselves, that we in the West stand for human rights, freedom, democracy, tolerance, justice - and yet we also tell ourselves that we cannot uphold these rights because to prefer one culture over another is racist or xenophobic. So, a liberal society cannot by definition defend itself, but in the interest of equality must apparantly accept its own obliteration. This is Trump's point.
Now that has a lot of impressive words. Let's take a look.
A crisis in rationality? Reason, you will recall, has no political favorites. It is, as Hume put it, an empty vessel. It awaits the content to give it direction. Are you saying Descartes or Kant produced an body of thought that is offended by political inclusion? Have you ever read Kant on Morality? Do you know his deontological thesis which includes as its major premise a respect for persons as "ends in themselves" and that this is an inalienable right of all, ever Haitians and Africans s it is grounded in our essential being?
Moral relativism? Interesting complaint. What do you think should be the
absolute criteria for making public policy? Is it Christianity? Are you a Christian that thinks the world should be Christian? Have you EVER read the Old Testament? When was the last time you made a burnt offering to Yahweh?
This is Trump's point? First, Trump does not have a point, okay? Look. you can have strong views. But you should not hitch your wagon to an idiot.
What is this: "We tell ourselves, that we in the West stand for human rights, freedom, democracy, tolerance, justice - and yet we also tell ourselves that we cannot uphold these rights because to prefer one culture over another is racist or xenophobic. So, a liberal society cannot by definition defend itself, but in the interest of equality must apparantly accept its own obliteration. This is Trump's point."
You need to understand a muticultural society: there is nothing here that says you cannot prefer one culture over another. It is about tolerance and equal treatment in a world where there are people of difference. You're right, though, Trump thinks like this and doesn't understand; this is because, by his own confession, he does not read.
And then you say a liberal society cannot defend itself because of this inherent contradiction, so liberal say. But liberals don't say this.
I"m out of time. More to a proper critical analysis of your little sand hill of big words.