The acceptance of hypocrisy and outright fabrication in journalism is a threat to the nation. It marks the end of free expression and the flow of information and ideas that are the basis for the informed debate that is essential to democracy. Much of the media plays along as baseball players, their heads as big as pumpkins, pretend not to use steroids, as bankers get rich even as they wreck the economy by giving mortgages to people who can’t afford the monthly payments, as pornographic movies outsell Hollywood movies, without a word about the impact on culture, children, and families. Everyone becomes complicit in the silence.
“Politically correct” is a major theme of our times that extends far beyond journalism. Over the past few decades, the rules of bartender etiquette have been applied to the national conversation in bizarre and dangerous ways. The pernicious rule governing all conversation and debate is that even if the person you are talking to is not directly offended by your opinions, someone else within earshot might be. And if the two people are alone, their comments might be repeated or relayed at some later time in some other place and might offend someone somewhere else. In this PC environment, the preferred course of action is to not voice opinions on any controversial topic unless you know you are in the company of people with similar opinions. Always play the bartender. Americans are constantly walking on eggshells under these rules. Like the bartender, they reasonably conclude that it is better to go along to get along. Honest and constructive discussion is not worth the price they might pay if their opinions are deemed politically incorrect.
So how did we get to this point? What happened to the American ideal of being free to speak truth to the powerful? How did we become so damn politically correct that we stopped having honest conversations and debate?
“Political correctness” is one of the most controversial terms in the lexicon of today’s public discourse. As politics have become more bitterly polarized in recent years, even the meaning of the term “politically correct” seems to change depending on who is speaking and who is listening. In recent years, the Right and the Left seem to have their own stable of historians, sociologists, and even linguists that they trot out to deliver expertise that supports their views on who is guilty of being politically incorrect.
Both the left wing and the right wing are heavily invested in the fight over what it means to be “politically correct.” That is because the winner of that fight earns the right to decide the vocabulary of acceptable terms and labels. It allows one side or the other to own the debate, control the airwaves, and stir a base of funders and grassroots fans. This fight is the backdrop to nearly every debate in America today. As for the middle ground, it is shunned as a kind of no-man’s-land.
Every issue is loaded with a set of “with us or against us” terms. Even within groups of like-minded people, we are told what we can say and can’t say. I sometimes feel out of place saying “happy holidays” to my colleagues at Fox because in conservative circles that term can be taken as evidence that you are part of the effort to undermine Christmas. NPR banned the use of the term “pro-life” because the liberal managers felt it put a happy face on the antiabortion message. They were willing to sacrifice the term “pro-choice,” used by supporters of abortion rights, rather than accept “pro-life” (afterward, they would point out that people who support abortion rights aren’t antilife). This same crazy dynamic applies to political fights. When I point out that Israel is an occupying force with settlements outside its borders, I am called an anti-Semite; and as you know, when I confess to a fear of Islamic extremism, I am called an anti-Muslim bigot.
By definition, political correctness means—and here I am quoting the Oxford English Dictionary—“the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.” Historians have found instances where the words “politically correct” appeared in print as early as the 1700s. The early meaning was much more literal and referred solely to the accuracy of a statement. Offense, real or perceived, did not figure into the definition. For example, “New York has more votes than Rhode Island in the Electoral College” was once known as a “politically correct” statement.
PC began to take on its new, more familiar meaning in the 1960s and 1970s. At first it was a term of self-criticism used by people on the Left, including civil rights activists and leaders of campus groups organizing against the Vietnam War, but especially in the cultural battles being fought over women’s rights by leading feminists. The idea back then was that it was ironic for feminists committed to breaking down old social barriers to put up new walls by insisting that women all had to grow hair on their legs, burn their bras, and give up lipstick. That extreme attitude was condemned by women sympathetic to the movement with the dismissive use of the term “politically correct.” And the idea was a winner because it brought more people to the movement by allowing women to set their own pace for their liberation from male domination.
What also became apparent during the sixties was the importance of the emerging TV news coverage of left-wing social movements and the strategic importance of controlling the language used by reporters. The general idea, which has some basis in psychology and linguistic theory, is that there is a real connection among language, thought, and action. It was a first glimpse of future culture wars as leaders in liberal movements began insisting on new language in the name of fairness but with the real goal of changing politics and society by establishing a vocabulary of acceptable terms and language for people who cared about equality and justice. Soon it was not acceptable for the television network correspondents covering the civil rights movement to talk about “Negroes” or “Colored people.” The proper reference was to “blacks” and later “African Americans.” The movement for equal rights for Indians became a “Native Americans” movement. People began to refer to the chairman of a group as the “chairperson” or simply “the chair” in recognition that the chair could be a woman.
Comedians including Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin lampooned America’s hypocrisy in banning from radio and TV the same vulgar epithets and profanity that were being used every day at home and on the street. Carlin became famous for his routine “The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” He skewered the American acceptance of euphemistic language that obscured reality, from sexual practices to racism, that Americans did not want to talk about.
The people jiggering with the engine of popular language used by news correspondents, politicians, and comedians in the sixties succeeded in making everyday people more aware of racism, sexism, and stereotypes of all sorts. This could be described as the post–World War II era of the opening of the American mind. The big idea was increased awareness leading to empathy, a new conception of how America could improve its practice of democratic ideals and finally effect real change in the form of civil rights laws and equal opportunities for women in the workplace. Discomfort in the nation with racial segregation and the government’s questionable conduct of the Vietnam War provided a fertile environment for these ideas that challenged the established political order to take root. There was a superficial feel to some of these linguistic changes, but anyone who dismissed them as a passing fad had it wrong. The changes in popular language soon became changes in our textbook accounts of history; literature was scrutinized for its “Eurocentric canon” promoting the “white male power structure.”
In a burst, universities agreed to create whole new academic departments, such as Black Studies, Latino Studies, and Women’s Studies. “Critical theory” courses also became prominent during that time, essentially teaching that the transformation of Western society can be achieved through unremitting and deconstructive criticism of every institution in Western society. Critical theorists did not view institutions in the traditional sense as just business, government, education, and the like. They viewed these institutions as representations of s
ocial inequality when it came to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and politics. To left-wing intellectuals, this new “critical theory” approach revealed major American institutions as defenders of the status quo—protecting the wealthy, the powerful, and racial majorities. The animating idea behind “critical theory” is that these institutions should be deconstructed in the name of achieving genuine equality.
David Horowitz, a sixties campus leftist turned conservative writer, has written extensively about this period of history. He became a conservative because he was repulsed by the ever-widening constraints of politically correct behavior that made it impossible for him to express a different point of view to his fellow left-wingers without being dismissed as a sellout working for “the man” or an “Uncle Tom.”
Horowitz was just one voice in a brewing backlash that extended far beyond the American campus. Conservatives began to point out that the culture of political correctness was a hammer to bludgeon national politics and news reports into conformity with a liberal point of view. The right wing felt the left wing had co-opted the debate by finding a way to shut up people who defended American traditions and conservative principles. As a result, the political right wing began to fight politically correct campus “speech codes” and “hate codes,” complaining that American colleges and universities basically indoctrinated top students in leftist thinking. Nobel Prize–winning writer Saul Bellow told The New Yorker that political correctness was “free speech without debate.” Novelist Doris Lessing, another Nobel Prize winner, called political correctness “the offspring of Marxist dialectics.”
After liberal Democratic president Jimmy Carter was rejected in favor of the Republican conservative Ronald Reagan, who had fought political correctness on California’s college campuses as governor, the right wing became outspoken in rejecting liberals as an angry minority tearing down American institutions and traditions. With the help of Christian conservative groups like the Moral Majority, the Right convinced people that Christianity, by far the most popular religion in the United States, was under siege by a minority of liberal secularists in the name of political correctness. Even though it had its own rules setting limits on any criticism of Christianity, the right wing positioned itself as anti–political correctness. The conservatives became holy warriors with a mission to protect the faith from the secular PC attack machine. The strategy at work for conservatives was to give political correctness a bad name and, by extension, give liberalism a bad name. To conservatives, political correctness embodied everything that was wrong and evil about liberalism. They hung this idea around their opponents’ necks like an albatross and watched with relish as it dragged liberalism into disrepute and damaged left-wing politics.
The intense racial tensions of the era became part of the jousting. The idea of forced racial equality—specifically quotas—became part of the conversation as evidence that political correctness included giving jobs to unqualified people in the name of equal rights. Playing to residual racism in the postintegration South, conservatives convinced a large segment of white voters, the majority in the region, that they were being threatened by liberal Democrats, who represented Northerners, Jews, immigrants, and racial minorities, especially black people. This was the premise of Jesse Helms’s famous television advertisement in his North Carolina Senate campaign against Harvey Gantt. A pair of white hands crumples up a job rejection letter as a narrator says, “You needed that job. You were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.” Even black radio talk show host Larry Elder picked up on the angst of whites when he questioned why the phrase “white trash” was acceptable when it was forbidden to talk that way about blacks, Hispanics, or Asians. The argument that whites have never been an enslaved and despised minority in the country failed to halt the slide in political correctness, because the counterargument undermined the heart of the argument for political correctness—equality for all. In addition, Jews, Irish, Italians, and other white ethnicities had their stories of discrimination and oppression. The serious message being loudly heard across American culture by the 1990s was that political correctness was not just an instance of fun and games among the intellectual class. To conservative white men and some white women, political correctness, affirmative action, and even talk of reparations for slavery were a very threatening reality that made it harder to get a job and get their children into college. It generally made them feel as if they had slipped under the thumb of an intellectual regime alien to their upbringing, their traditions, and their pride in America as the leading force for right in the world.
During Reagan’s tenure in the White House, the Republican Party had found it could make huge political gains by playing to the so-called culture wars, in which conservatives became victims of liberal attacks on traditions and institutions central to American life. The most salient examples of the culture wars were incidents of excessive political correctness—such as calls not to have schools teach great books because they were written by “dead white men.” But they extended into so-called political wedge issues, such as abortion, gun rights, and gay rights, which gave voters a stark choice of identifying with one side or the other. Conservative politicians found that a lot of white working-class Americans decided to side with them in the comfort of the voting booth because of discomfort with the fast pace of social change required by political correctness.
Members of the Right practiced ideological judo by using the ferocity of left-wing adherence to every politically correct position to mock the Left as self-righteous and given to censorship. They cast liberalism as the opposite of freedom, individual rights, and constitutional protections. University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom wrote a best-selling book, The Closing of the American Mind, which argued that political correctness in American schools was undermining academic freedom, intellectual debate, and overall scholarship. Bloom asked how anyone could speak or write in any course of study without fear of offending the high priests of political correctness. Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis was asked by CNN’s Bernie Shaw if he would want the death penalty for a man who raped and murdered his wife. Dukakis could not bring himself to say yes. It would have been a repudiation of liberal opposition to the death penalty. Conservatives pounced.
The backlash against politically correct thinking became pronounced in the early 1990s. The New York Times published articles about several incidents of PC run wild. “At San Francisco State University, a black professor was reviled by students for teaching in the political science department rather than in black studies,” according to one story. The Times also found instances where a Harvard student was not only rebuked by other students but punished by the school’s administration for hanging a Confederate flag out the window. At Stanford, students demanded an end to core curriculum in Western civilization and demanded a new approach called “Cultures, Ideas and Values” that the Times said focused on “non-European, non-white studies.”
This coincided with long-standing efforts that had largely been initiated in the 1970s to eliminate American Indian names for sports teams. Major schools, including Marquette, Stanford, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, all changed their nicknames over this time period. Marquette, for example, changed from “the Warriors” to “the Golden Eagles.” All of this aggravated alumni and traditionalists. In this new world it was a crime to say that a person was blind. To be politically correct you had to say that person was “visually challenged.” A handicapped person was “physically challenged,” and a retarded person was only to be described as “mentally challenged.”
It was more than just a right-wing complaint that politically correct language seemed out of control in the early nineties. People of all races, men and women, liberals and conservatives, felt that haphazard declarations of “appropriate” language as ruled by the politically correct were ever changing, making them feel guilty for saying things they didn’t know to be ta
boo. Writing in the Washington Post, journalist Jefferson Morley wrote that “for many Americans—especially a certain generation of older white males—the fact that their ideals of fair play and tolerance can be violated by implacable, self-righteous people with power is utterly novel. In a time of declining wages [for blue-collar workers], such an experience is also frightening and radicalizing.”
Politically correct thinking became so out of fashion that President George H. W. Bush openly attacked it in a 1991 commencement address at the University of Michigan. He said politically correct thinking amounted to “bullying” and “censorship.” While the PC movement, he said, came into being “to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudices with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expressions off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits.” The president concluded: “What began as a crusade for civility has soured into a cause of conflict and even censorship.”
Juan Williams Page 4