How Donald Trump Hijacked the Authenticity of the Web

His credibility is zero, but by attacking political correctness he projects a true voice to his internet followers

Illustration by Lily Padula

In most ways, Donald Trump has taken poor advantage of the Net. He has not used it for organizing and spreading a movement the way the Occupy Wall Street or Arab Spring did. He has not used it to raise essential funding for his campaign, as Bernie Sanders does. He has not used it to build community among his supporters as presidential candidates since Howard Dean in 2004 have. He has not even used it as the primary vehicle for getting his message out, relying instead on the countless hours of coverage broadcast media have provided for free — although he’s obviously no slouch at social media. But despite these missed opportunities, Donald Trump has utterly excelled in one single aspect of the Net. Leveraging — and perverting — one of its key values: Authentic speech.

Speech on the Net sounds very different than the voice of old media. When I was growing up, the media’s authoritative voice had the same accent. It was professionally enunciated, often presented as neutral and stripped of personal belief, always calm, and overwhelmingly male. Then the Internet liberated our voices, training us to expect people to speak for and as themselves, with all their idiosyncrasies and imperfections.

Trump’s voice is indeed authentic in that sense. After all, he is the first major candidate for the presidency of the United States who clearly writes his own tweets. Hillary Clinton (whom I support) tweets out carefully prepared campaign points that seem obviously to have been written by her staff — especially when the tweets are dispatched while Clinton is making a point in a live debate. Donald, on the other hand, just says whatever is crossing his mind at that moment, much of which is nasty, degrading, and untrue. The lack of a filter, the weird punctuation, the very clumsiness of its expression makes Trump’s Internet speech seem much more authentic than Clinton’s.

This is not to say that Trump is authentic. The term “authentic” applies to him about as well as ”credit-worthy” applies to a codfish. To be authentic one must be true to oneself, but that implies there’s a self that has some consistency, something real about it. Trump’s self is the self-regarding reflection of a perfect narcissist, empty of anything except the attention others pay to him. If Trump is authentic, it’s only because he’s so excruciatingly false, desperate to fill himself with the cheers of others.

But Trump sounds authentic to many of his supporters because has twisted authentic speech into a denial of the very values authenticity supports. He has done this by explicitly speaking in “non-politically correct” ways.

The concept of political correctness began in the 1980s as a way to ridicule the young Left’s sweeping moral re-evaluation of its own traditional assumptions about the role of women and other marginalized people. A suspicion of ideas that we have inherited from earlier generations is still a mark of the Left, and is one of its great virtues. As part of this self-evaluation, the Left became sensitive to the ways in which language encodes and perpetuates pernicious assumptions. Avoiding the old, corrupt vocabularies became a moral obligation.

The Right ridiculed this from the start for three reasons: First, PC speech capitulates to people who are being given unfair advantages; the white, Christian, men who are among Trump’s most ardent supporters are convinced that they are the ones who are now oppressed. Second, the “PC police” enforce a mindless, ritualistic, and empty adherence to the PC vocabulary, a criticism that is occasionally on target. Third, PC is cowardly, afraid to state the blunt truth for fear of offending anyone. That’s why Republicans think Obama won’t refer to jihadists as “radical Islamic terrorists,” when in fact it’s because he doesn’t want to legitimize the idea that they represent Islam.

We should therefore not be surprised that Trump’s popularity has risen as his claims have become more outrageous and hateful: his supporters take that as a sign of his bravery. They confirm that Trump speaks truth to power. Of course, those of us who think being “PC” really means granting basic respect and dignity to all think that his hateful bullying is feeding a American version of fascism.

The exhilarating hope of the Web was that authentic speech would enable us to appreciate our differences more than ever. But the only speech Trump and his supporters acknowledge as authentic is the trumpeting of power and ridicule. Rather than dignity, respect and sympathy being the sign of authenticity, in the world of Trump xenophobia, sexism, Islamophobia, racism, and anti-intellectualism are the hard truths that only Trump supporters are courageous enough to acknowledge.

Thus Trump’s short-fingered hands have turned one of the Internet’s greatest virtues into a weapon of a new American fascism.

A version of this op-ed appeared in Nova, the tech supplement Il Sole 24 Ore, May 30, 2016.