April 3, 2006
A F[i]eldman[ual] to the Zeit[z]geist of Political Correctness Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:30 AM EST First of all, I do not need Mr. Zeitz or anyone else to give me a refresher course in American history. The last paragraph of his most recent post is uncivil. I will cheerfully concede that conservatives often drop the term “political correctness” vaguely and indiscriminately into political discourse. About as often, in fact, as liberals vaguely and indiscriminately drop the term “racist.” Those who engage upon the battlefield of politics tend to use what weapons are at hand, as do fighters on any battlefield, actual or metaphoric. Politics is not conducted by means of Socratic dialogues. But neither I nor Mr. Zeitz, so far as I know, are politicians. Our jobs are to seek the truth, not rhetorical advantage. And the truth here is that the notion that conservatives, either in general or the ones Mr. Zeitz quotes, exhibit a tendency “to lament (or ridicule) a world where women, African-Americans, immigrants, and gays and lesbians have full citizenship rights” is, to be charitable, a liberal fantasy. I could hardly agree more with Ellen Feldman about the Scottsboro case. The Deep South was often a dark and ugly place before the Civil Rights movement triumphed in the 1960s and utterly transformed it over the next decade or so. And casual racism pervaded ordinary discourse and appeared in respectable newspapers and magazines without a second thought. As Ms Feldman points out, The New York Times—then as now, hardly a promoter of racism—implicitly made fun of the speech of black Southerners (not a term in use in 1937, of course). In the 1930s The New Yorker had several covers that would make anyone today wince. Rodgers and Hart wrote at least one song that today the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization will not permit to be performed. But I think that in two sentences of her thoughtful post, Ms. Feldman inadvertently reveals much of what is wrong with modern-day liberalism and why this once great political movement has become so irrelevant to American politics, so intellectually pathetic, and often so nasty and humorless. First, liberalism has become the Miss Havisham of American politics. For Dickens’s famous abandoned bride, time stopped on her aborted wedding day and she always wore her now tattered wedding dress while the uneaten feast mouldered on the table, nibbled only by mice. For liberals it is always 1937 (at least domestically; in foreign policy, it seems, it is always 1968). Ms. Feldman, for instance, refers to the Scottsboro case as “a shameful chapter in our recent past.” Shameful to be sure—unutterably horrifying to modern sensibilities. But recent? The Scottsboro case began in 1931, 75 years ago. That is very nearly one-third of the way back to our nation’s founding. My mother was 9 years old when the case started and I, her younger son, am now nearly 62. The world of the Scottsboro “boys” is as dead and gone as the world of slavery. The case took place when the Amos ’n’ Andy show was among the most popular programs on radio. We live in a world where The Cosby Show was the most popular program on television 20 years ago. Blacks occupy the highest offices in the land, are represented on the Forbes 400 list, are the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, belong to the snootiest clubs, eat at the chicest restaurants without anyone giving them a second glance, command awesome salaries on television and in Hollywood, walk with ease through the corridors of power. When will liberals notice that the glass of racial equality is no longer four-fifths empty but instead four-fifths full and getting fuller all the time? Why can they not acknowledge their own triumph? Second, Ms. Feldman writes, “the term [‘political correctness’] has become a cudgel with which to beat soft-hearted liberals who think an inclusive society is preferable to one that brands and jeers at all but certain established and powerful groups.” But nowadays it is not only soft-hearted liberals who think that “an inclusive society is preferable to one that brands and jeers.” In 2006, as opposed to 1937, those who prefer an inclusive society include liberals, moderates, moderate conservatives, conservatives, libertarians, people who couldn’t care less about politics, and even hard-hearted conservatives. The people who prefer a society that brands and jeers make up, at most, a tiny fraction of the American population today. They are the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, religious zealots, and assorted other fanatics in the sense of Mark Twain’s famous definition of someone “who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” Let’s say, for the purposes of argument, that these people possessed by such soul-destroying hatreds total three million in the country today. That sounds like a lot, but it is one percent of the population. The other 99 percent of the American people—fewer than a third of whom describe themselves as liberals in polls—believe in a society in which all people of good will are welcome to participate as equals. The idea that only liberals want an inclusive society is a perfect example of the insufferable—and self-defeating—moral smugness of latter-day liberalism. To liberals today, it seems, either one is a liberal or one is some grotesque combination of Ebenezer Scrooge and Bull Connor, for any disagreement with liberal means is, to liberals, tantamount to disagreement with liberal ends. With their self-conceived monopoly on virtue, liberals do not argue for their beliefs anymore. Instead they anathematize anyone with the chutzpah to disagree with them because they think anyone who disagrees is, ipso facto, a moral eunuch. Any disagreement with liberal orthodoxy is greeted not with objective facts and logic, but with sneers, as Mr. Zeitz sneered at me. This is not how those taking the tide of human affairs at the flood behave. It is how those who can’t understand why no one listens to them anymore behave. In this sense, liberalism is not only the Miss Havisham of American politics, it is the Norma Desmond as well. How very sad.
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