The right's political correctness

This is how right-wingers get rid of their own kind: "not a real conservative." Fortunately, the target of the present case is Ann Coulter, now treated as the media-whoring excrescence that we've long known she is.

But this brings up another issue: the political correctness of the right. Remember that the right has a political strategy they've used quite successfully against the left, so much so that liberalism became the dreaded "L word" cowing liberals into taking centrist or right-wing positions and thus changing the American political landscape into a de facto one-party system. Karl Rove is the ultimate expert at this strategy. It consists in demonizing political, cultural, and individual opponents through tropes of war and violence. If opponents can be pushed into "enemy" territory, portrayed as worthy of violent punishment (recall the earlier "better dead than red"), then their ideas are certainly not worthy of a listen. Thus, the Democrats came to sound like Republicans - it's the only way to be heard. The right, in the meantime, is then able to borrow the better ideas of the left and shape them for their own purposes as long as they're no longer identified as "red" or "leftist" or, after Reagan, "liberal."

Political correctness was originally a tool of the right and always has been. The Red Scare, Joseph McCarthy, etc. That was the invention of political correctness: create a climate of fear over the proliferation of ideas so that citizens are threatened back into the small fold of safely conservative political propositions. The threat was real - first, a threat of violence, and second the actual ban on citizens' participation in their own livelihoods. People's lives were affected. They lost jobs, lost friends and colleagues, lost opportunities, and sometimes lost their lives. They were purged, made invisible. For the right, the consequences of political correctness had no bearing on the warped principle.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the right effectively dumped the "political correctness" moniker onto trends in academia they didn't like: feminist thought, anti-colonial thought, various forms of socialist political thought, and the idea that forms of oppression and domination were atavistically embedded in the very language we use, when not overt. The right pushed with the accusation, and many on the left overreacted and went further with their own brand of political correctness, creating untenable situations of contorting ordinary language and policing thought.

Political correctness is, nevertheless, an invention of the right. They simply became good at transferring its faults to the left. This is the method of politics that Karl Rove inherited. It is rhetorical judo politics. Pick out a few insignificant scholars and unsaavy academics - Ward Churchill, for example - and exalt them into the epitome of academic teaching in order to attack liberal academic thought in general. The point is not Ward Churchill, et al. The point is to create a climate of political fear in which some who ordinarily wouldn't teach ridiculous ideas such as intelligent design, for example, feel pressured to do so.

I feel it. I can hardly mention Marx in a context in which his thought applies without providing some caveat about the further history and appropriation of Marxist ideas. I also teach other thinkers from other intellectual traditions, but I don't feel pressure to provide a disclaimer along with their scholarly contributions. I'm aware of this and I don't like it, but I do feel it.

This is all to say that political correctness has never been a phenomenon of the left. It was born in the right, manipulated in the right, transferred by the right onto the shoulders of its political opponents and then that leverage used to further demonize political opponents.

Now we have an incipient excommunication of Ann Coulter. This is only because the political climate has shifted in the face of a Republican dominated government - all three branches - that is incompetent and whose power over the citizenry is waning. She no longer serves the purpose that was all too gleefully accepted when Republican power was waxing.

If you want relativism - another accusation by the right at the left - this is it.