Muzzled (6 page)

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 taboo. 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.”

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.