Juan Williams

by Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate

  Robert Bork, who became a conservative icon after he was denied a seat on the Supreme Court—by Democrats on the Left who attacked him as too controversial because he openly expressed a conservative, and definitely not politically correct, judicial philosophy—joined in the attacks on political correctness. In a 1993 debate with Professor Linda S. Greene of the University of Wisconsin Law School, he spoke of the frustration felt by many when he said: “Political correctness, I think, is something that is widespread in this society and it’s part of a mood of radical egalitarianism which has taken hold.… And we’re seeing it in the speech codes, which are judging speech not by what it objectively means, but by how somebody perceives it, over which the speaker has no control.”

  The sense that PC had gone too far became mainstream. Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh lampooned hard-line feminists as “femi-Nazis.” In 1993 comedian Bill Maher’s show Politically Incorrect debuted on Comedy Central, and in 1994 James Finn Garner wrote Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, which turned classic children’s stories into absurd tales of princes who had weak knees and princesses who did not need princes.

  Even President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, seemed to sense the change in the political winds when he famously moved to the center after the 1996 election, with more socially conservative policies on criminal sentencing, welfare, and tax cuts for the rich.

  Members of the Left, sensing that political correctness was losing steam, tried to fight back. They made the case in books and in debates that instances of political correctness—like those in the Times article—had been either greatly exaggerated or completely made up, twisted by conservatives to divide people in order to win elections. Some liberals, like Camille Paglia, a popular feminist professor, went a step further by saying the right wing had distorted political correctness to stop the advance of gender and racial equality in America. Another professor, Doug Smith, asked what was so bad about Stanford students being required to read the book I, Rigoberta Menchú, as well as The Republic and The Prince. He pointed to a double standard in which conservatives showed the same intolerance to a free market of ideas they charged liberals with imposing on the world. “What is so intolerant,” he asked, about having students read one book on a Guatemalan peasant woman who comes to support socialism and feminism, as well as the Greek philosophers? “One could easily and glibly describe Plato and Machiavelli as intellectual hirelings whose works are for the most part apologetics for authoritarianism,” wrote Smith.

  The Left saw arguments over the concept of political correctness rising to the point that the public no longer remembered the problem—inequality, bias, and racism—that politically correct language was intended to cure. In her 1993 debate with Judge Bork, Professor Linda S. Greene put it this way: “If you can force us to discuss censorship instead of discussing … sexual harassment, censorship instead of discussing the question how we are going to transform our institutions into more diverse places, then you have set the terms of the debate and prevented a discussion of the real issues. And it seems to be a great cause of glee on the right, among conservatives, that they have been able to change this debate.”

  By 2001 British essayist Will Hutton, writing in London’s The Observer, followed the same line of what looked like left-wing surrender to conclude, “Political correctness is one of the brilliant tools that the American Right developed in the mid-1980s as part of its demolition of American liberalism.… What the sharpest thinkers on the American Right saw quickly was that by declaring war on the cultural manifestations of liberalism—by levelling the charge of political correctness against its exponents—they could discredit the whole political project.”

  The whole political correctness phenomenon seemed to have expired by the turn of the century, replaced by political shouting over Clinton’s impeachment hearings and then the historic Left-versus-Right fight over hanging chads in Florida and the 2000 presidential election. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 seemed to further bury political correctness when American flags popped up everywhere from the liberal neighborhoods of the East Village in heavily Democratic Manhattan to conservative Republican suburbs in Orange County, California. The threat to the nation made arguments over politically correct speech seem very dated. In addition, the increasing racial diversity of the country took the edge away from heated debates that tied affirmative action to politically correct policies. Attitudes on gay rights also shifted, even among conservatives, to the point that polls showed majorities of Democrats and even Republicans in support of ending the ban on gays openly serving in the military.

  Harvey Fierstein, the gay playwright and actor, wrote a piece in the New York Times in 2007 that sounded like a farewell to political correctness. He asked Americans to keep their eyes open for “expressions of intolerance” and prejudice in everyday life. “Still, I’m gladdened because our no longer being deaf to them may signal their eventual eradication,” he wrote. He ended by cautioning readers that it is wrong to “harbor malice toward others and then cry foul when someone displays intolerance against you.”

  But I’m not sure PC disappeared so much as it switched sides. Now it is largely the Left that decries limits on free speech such as those imposed by the Patriot Act after 9/11. And it was not just the law giving liberals rightful fits but also the conservative push to shut down debate about the terrorist attacks and halt criticism of the U.S. military response in Afghanistan and Iraq. The most famous instance occurred when Bill Maher on his late-night show, by then on ABC network television but appropriately still called Politically Incorrect, said with his usual fearlessness, “We [Americans] have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.” Ironically, when he made these statements, Maher was agreeing with a conservative guest, Dinesh D’Souza, when he said that the 9/11 hijackers were not cowards because they stayed in the airplanes as they hit the buildings. If Maher had not affirmed D’Souza’s comment about the perverse bravery of the terrorists, nothing might have ever come of it. D’Souza, with his conservative street cred, wasn’t going to be lambasted as a traitor, was he? ABC was reportedly pressured to fire Maher after advertisers threatened to pull their sponsorship from his program, and Maher’s show was canceled the following year, in large part due to ratings and advertising troubles presumed to have resulted from the backlash against his comments. Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer criticized Maher and, in a controversial statement of his own, warned people from the lectern in the White House briefing room to be careful about what they say.

  That was seen by the Left and much of the rest of the country as a chilling threat to First Amendment rights. The Far Left began hauling out analogies between the Bush White House and Joe McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator who smeared liberals in the 1950s with largely baseless charges of being communist sympathizers. Instead of being called insensitive or offensive for violating a speech code under the rules of politically correct behavior, conservatives attacked antiwar protesters as people who hated America. Even the language being used in newspapers to describe the U.S. war effort became an issue when Vice President Cheney insisted that waterboarding terrorists—flooding a suspect’s covered head with water to create the sensation of drowning—was not “torture.” Scott Horton, writing in Harper’s magazine, said the decision by the top editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, not to label waterboarding as torture amounted to following “politically correct” dictates coming from conservatives. “This is not merely being politically correct; it is being politically subordinate.… Bill Keller’s political correctness couldn’t be more clear cut.… This is precisely the sort of political manipulation of language that George Orwell warned against in ‘Politics and the English Language.’ ”

  The country music singers the Dixie Chicks were branded as traitors after one of them told a foreign concert audience that they were ashamed to be from the same state as
President Bush. Radio stations refused to play their songs and hosted bonfires where they burned their CDs and merchandise. Entertainers like Tim Robbins, Mike Farrell, and Janeane Garofalo, who questioned the wisdom of going into Iraq, were told they should just shut up. They were accused of damaging the morale of the troops and giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

  And in a provocative recycling of the term “speech code,” reminiscent of the Right’s complaints about left-wing insistence on politically correct language twenty-five years earlier, it was now the liberal New York Times columnist Frank Rich who used the phrase “speech codes bequeathed by 9-11” to defend, of all people, Rudy Giuliani in his criticism of the rebuilding of Ground Zero.

  So while my friends at Fox frequently and courageously expose the use of this tactic of political correctness by the Left, it’s important to remember that the Right plays this game too. It shouldn’t be given a free pass, because the net negative effect on the discourse is the same, no matter who’s doing it. While the Left mostly uses PC on minority identity issues like race and ethnicity, the Right uses it on issues of piety and patriotism.

  Since Reagan, the Right has used wedge issues like abortion, gay rights, and prayer in school to paint its opponents as heretical and hostile to traditional family values. President George W. Bush’s victory over John Kerry in 2004 was in part attributed to anti–gay marriage ballot initiatives in electorally crucial states like Ohio. The Family Research Council, the Parents Television Council, the American Catholic League, and other faith-based conservative groups, whose convictions I deeply respect, engaged in their own form of political correctness during the Bush years and before. They too are quick to claim outrage and offense when their interests are challenged. For example, take the Catholic Church’s slow response to the scandal over priests abusing children. Church leaders tried to distract the public by casting their opponents as people attacking the church, rather than people attacking sexual abuse of children. They pretend to be the victims to play on loyalty to the Catholic Church and rile up their membership, demonstrate their political clout, and get their leaders on television. Like groups on the Left, they make implicit criticisms of the goodwill and integrity of people who disagree with them. For them, it is about religious sensitivity toward Catholics (and Christians more generally), instead of race or gender. They presume to speak and act for the majority of Christians in much the same way the National Organization for Women presumes to speak and act for all women. Such political correctness should be exposed in whatever form it comes.

  The truth about political correctness is that it has never gone away. It remains a steady feature of American political and cultural discourse and debates. It is a tactic that almost everyone uses when it suits their purposes. Much like negative ads in a political campaign, appeals to politically correct thinking are proven weapons in modern history. Activist groups and news outlets have rows of scalps from public figures guilty of having made politically incorrect “comments” to remind us all of this. My scalp is among them, after being claimed by NPR. Political correctness is indiscriminate. That is perhaps the most insidious thing about it.

  As noted, ABC got Bill Maher’s scalp a few years back, but he’s not done fighting for political incorrectness. He now hosts a lively, uncensored show on HBO and continues to rail against our fear of speaking out. The week after I was fired from NPR, Maher noted on his show that the most popular name for babies born in the United Kingdom last year was “Mohammed” and said he was “alarmed” because he did not want the Western world to be taken over by Islam. “Am I a racist to feel alarmed by that, because I am. And it is not because of the race, it’s because of the religion. I don’t have to apologize, do I?”

  Like George Carlin and Richard Pryor before them, comedians like Maher are uniquely positioned to challenge the PC culture when it’s used by the Left and the Right to cut off debates they don’t want others to hear. Many examples of PC are ripe to be skewered with ridicule. While some of the send-ups of PC behavior are funny, it’s important to recognize that it’s really gallows humor. The substance is very serious, and the injury to people’s reputations and livelihoods can be very real. As someone who was at the center of one of these PC media feeding frenzies, I can assure you there was nothing funny about it at the time.

  At its core, political correctness relies on tribalism, an “us versus them” mentality. It is about cultivating identity groups and placing people into convenient boxes where they think and act and speak in predictable ways. In recent years, people and groups from all points on the political spectrum have used this fragmentation to their advantage. They use it to attain and expand their political power, whether it’s by generating media attention or raising money. They use it to insulate and protect their constituents so that whenever a controversy comes along, they can go to the appropriate box and produce victims who will echo their sense of outrage.

  The tremendous growth of media, with cable TV and the Internet offering niche outlets to fit any specific political taste—thereby atomizing the idea of a big-tent, mainstream media where everyone can tell their story and hear the other side—and decades of greater class divisions and political polarization have brought us to this point. There is no clear incentive for anyone involved to change the tone and the nature of the conversation. Politicians who utilize PC tactics regularly win at the ballot box. Lobbyists and special-interest advocacy groups are more influential and better funded than ever before. Their favorite weapon is to charge any opposing camp with being insensitive and even offensive—in other words, politically incorrect. Television ratings and Web traffic numbers are shattering records and soaring with any report about politically insensitive statements, such as the burst of online hits after Ann Coulter labeled the 9/11 widows “witches” and “harpies” or Tucker Carlson pronounced himself a Christian who nonetheless thought football player Michael Vick should have been “executed” for staging dogfights. This problem did not happen overnight, and it will not be fixed overnight.

  The goal of these political tactics is changing America to fit one’s preferred vision—making sure one’s ideas come out on top. The genius of America is that reactionary groups rarely achieve progress. But good arguments, persistence, and appeals to conscience that challenge the majority at critical junctures—see the civil rights movement and particularly Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—actually change the majority and become “mainstream.” This dynamic was first expressed by James Madison in Federalist No. 10. The idea is that only the best ideas and movements will survive and have the wide-scale appeal to rise and withstand exposure to vigorous national debate.

  Yet as the country has grown more diverse, as women have gained a larger voice in picking winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas, and as Hispanics, Asians, and blacks also have their say in politics and culture, we find ourselves looking across a broken, factionalized landscape. In this new reality, many Americans feel they have lost power, and an increasing number are worried they are in the minority. The best and obvious example is older, blue-collar white males who can easily recall when leadership, decision making, and good taste were largely up to them. The big changes in twentieth-century America—aside from the atomic bomb and technology—have been about social movements for equal rights for women and minorities. They have left much of the nation, including women and minorities, with an identity crisis, a new hunger for some scrap of common identity, and heightened competition for influence over the country’s future as we Americans safeguard identities, both for individuals and groups. We are all adopting the vocabulary of the aggrieved, and it comes at the expense of some notion that we all share a common cause. The rising tide has been replaced by zero-sum. The conversation is now a hostile negotiation.

  I believe the charged atmosphere of our conversation with one another has taken a wrong turn. And I think it went seriously wrong over the course of the last thirty years—in the midst of the culture war between the Right and the Left.

/>   If the intent of PC was to encourage a culture in which people in power had to be careful of the sensitivities of others, the reality of it was that it inhibited frank conversations. It became nearly impossible to have direct dialogue between any two groups, or even a class discussion about history, without running the risk of offending somebody. As a result, the most important conversations, in which people try to understand one another and solve problems, became more trouble than they were worth. With caution as the wise course of action, many political leaders, professors, and media people on radio and TV began seeking refuge in a polite middle where hard truths are muzzled. Meanwhile, hard-liners on both sides migrated to the political fringes, where honest, potentially fruitful debates are secondary to reaffirming the party line and pushing one another to become more rigid, orthodox, intolerant, and politically correct in their thinking.

  It may feel like a flashback to the bad old days of politically correct speech codes and wedge issues. But the truth is this is just a new vintage of the same politically correct wine. In this new age of politically correct thinking, Left and Right continue limiting debate, controlling the media, rousing the base of their most partisan supporters, and hitting hard and fast when lines of group propriety and identity are crossed. The prime targets are anyone who thinks differently and, as was evident in NPR’s handling of me, anyone within one’s own group who is guilty of straying to talk to the other side and finding points of agreement with what is viewed as the enemy.