Tuesday, June 13, 2006

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.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I posted the following on Hullabaloo, but it was mainly a response to what I read here. (I liked my first visit to your site, by the way!)

Don't count Ann out yet - she's too useful.

The whole distancing thing on the Right is part of the game. The fringier people like Ann - and Horowitz, and Savage, etc. - are there to toss up the trial balloons. Is the public ready to buy demonization of 9/11 widows and grieving Iraq soldier moms? Not quite yet - more work to be done? OK - we'll shelve it for later, push out the liberal eliminationist rollout for another 6 months.

Make no mistake. Ann's ideas didn't sell - that's why they're backing off her. If no one made a fuss, they'd be climbing into her ideological bed right now. They'll distance themselves from her until the next CPAC conference - the media has a short attention span - and then right back into bed.

These fringers are too valuable at testing and moving the edges of acceptable debate to ever cut loose.

NickM

Anonymous said...

why the diatribe about political correctedness?? And who invented it?? And regardless, it seems to exist in every camp as far as I can tell. She made an outrageous comment, and she is being called out for it by people who usually agree with her. Good for the right!

MT said...

Before McCarthy there was Salem, as Arthur Miller nicely showed with the Crucible. I suspect ideological enforcement has been with us since before we came down from the trees. "Political correctness" is a lame and misleading term, if enforcement or "correction" is your subject. But I'm sure everybody remembers that the term meant different things to left and right. In my experience as a citizen of leftyland, the root term is not the noun "political correctness" but the adjective "politically correct," and foremostly it connotes the goal of setting a socially salubrious example to others, and about being vigilant for the political effects of your language and behavior. Some triumphs of political correctness, as I understand the word, include "Whole Foods," the decision by Starbucks to buy only from coffee cooperatives, and the decision by McDonald's to require egg suppliers to cease the common chicken factory practice of forced molting." Social justice" I guess was recruited to sluff off the perjorative connotation conservatives gave the term. But it's less ideal in that it leaves the farm animals and vegetables behind. "Right livelihood" is pretty good, but it seems to deny the good of small choices that the less than saintly make. Well, I guess since the choices at Starbucks and McDonalds came under "pressure" from activists, those could be examples of enforcement behavior as well. But I think Whole Foods emerged largely thanks to personal choice...and the stock market bubble. The problem with being politically correct is that it's righteous by definition, and in many people righteousness inspires evangelism and intervention in others' affairs. "Teaching" we like to call it. I personally try to be subtle. I guess I consider that more politically correct.

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't count Coulter out either. What the Bush administration and their hate-full hangers-on have shown is that they are willing to do and say anything, for one day.

The right, of course, has its own political correctness, which it enforces and enforces and enforces. It's a bit weaker just now, but note that the gay marriage debate in the Senate took place just in time to reinforce that issue in the Arkansas (I think it was) primary.

They're willing to do mindless repetition, and it works. We keep thinking that logic and reason will win. We're seeing a bit of hope in that department, but some repetition wouldn't hurt.

CKR

helmut said...

Thanks for the exposition, MT. It's true that there's always been an element of "political correctness" in any cultural politics. Basically: social conditioning. The question is how it's done.

I don't think there's any way at all that one can say that anyone with public exposure on the left uses the same kind of rhetoric as Ann Coulter. That's simply false. Trying to be "fair and balanced" on this is itself a crock. Again, Ward Churchill is a nobody. Nobody knew who he was until the right turned him into a bogeyman. On the other hand, Coulter talks about mass murder of liberals, Muslims, and other people who are not her and makes millions of dollars doing it.

There's a difference between activist pressure and the policing of thought and language. Both seek social changes, but the former seeks changes in practices that many may view as repugnant. The latter is brain-washing to get people to do things they might not freely choose to do.