Conservatives’ problem with political correctness

Since last week, I’ve been bothered by conservative commentators’ constant use of the kneejerk phrase “political correctness” to describe liberals’ massively dishonest response to the Fort Hood massacre, but had not gotten around to writing about it. However, Sage McLaughlin posted a superb comment at What’s Wrong with the World yesterday that says pretty much what I would have said and more:

The reason people don’t understand why PC becomes so entrenched is because “political correctness” is itself a phrase that obscures the institutional rationale for things. PC is nothing more or less than advanced, institutionalized liberalism. I have come to dislike the phrase “political correctness run amok” very strongly. It suggests that just a little bit of PC would be sensible, or that PC is just an extreme version of something basically rational, which it’s not. You can’t identify and combat “political correctness run amok,” because it’s a meaningless way to describe the phenomenon.

The phenomenon is liberalism, and the reason Western society is in the death grip of political correctness is because PC is an expression of the death grip that liberalism has on all our institutions—the media, the military, the universities, the mainline churches, etc. All of them are PC because all of them have, in ways unique to the character or charism of each, adopted the essentials of liberalism. In particular, the belief that erasing distinctions—and particularly categories as they apply to human beings—is the highest possible calling in life, somehow residing at the core of the institution’s mission, is the liberal ideal to which all We3stern institutions now subscribe.

What Larry Auster sometimes calls the non-discrimination principle, that is, the notion that discrimination is the single greatest possible evil and that all goods are tertiary to the good of advancing the liberal ideal of non-discrimination, really is the ruling principle of our society. Recognizing this fact makes every single instance of PC madness fully comprehensible. It also explains why everyone knows by instinct the seemingly byzantine demands of PC, even when they aren’t written down anywhere. Being based on such a simple principle, people are able instantly and without reflection to apply it to any given situation at all. Finally, recognizing this fact also explains why people are so hopelessly confused by it all—they accept the basic premises of liberalism, and they largely know precisely when and how to cringe before its demands (“Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”), but they nonetheless are baffled when they see institutions behaving in accordance with the raw, anti-rational radicalism of the non-discrimination principle. They fail to identify liberalism as such as the source of the problem, being basically liberals themselves, so they blame it on some hazy thing called “political correctness.” Moreover, they realize that this is an expression of something that they basically accept, and cannot repudiate utterly, so they say that it is somehow “run amok.”

If people would simply call it what it is, that is institutionalized liberalism, we could at least have a debate on the real causes of such insanity and decide whether we really do think the sacrifice worth it.

[end of McLaughlin comment.]

This is so good it’s worth repeating:

Finally, recognizing this fact also explains why people are so hopelessly confused by it all—they accept the basic premises of liberalism, and they largely know precisely when and how to cringe before its demands … but they nonetheless are baffled when they see institutions behaving in accordance with the raw, anti-rational radicalism of the non-discrimination principle.

In other words, the very thing that people ordinarily and unreflectively support and obey, they suddenly attack as the bogeyman “political correctness” when it appears in its pure form.

Ralph Peters is an example of this schizophrenia. He has had daily columns in the New York Post since the massacre (normally he writes two columns a week) in which he has ceaselessly gone after the “political correctness” of the Army for its failure to stop Nidal Hasan and of the liberal media for their extravagant campaign to describe Hasan’s act of mass murder as anything other than what it is. And what it is, according to Peters, is “Islamist extremism.” In other words, he bitterly castigates liberals’ PC refusal to call the attack what it is, while he himself uses (and uses over and over and over) the gratuitously PC phrase “Islamist extremism,” rather than simply speaking of “Islamic extremism.”

Remember, the whole purpose of the term “Islamist” was to avoid criticizing Islam as such. “Islamist” conveys the idea of extreme Islam as distinct from Islam. If you spoke of “Islamic extremism” or of “Islamism,” you had shown that you were not speaking of all Muslims but of the supposed tiny minority of Muslims who are extremists; you had shown that you were properly sensitive. But now Peters has become so PC and so hypersenstive himself that the unobjectionable and sufficiently qualified phrase, “Islamic extremism,” has become insufficiently qualified for him. So he speaks instead of “Islamist extremism,” which is like saying, “Extremist extremism.”

How can a writer who furiously tells other people that they should stop using their PC euphemisms, and use his PC euphemism instead, expect anyone to take him serously?

- end of initial entry -

Bruce B. writes:

I would qualify two points in Mr. McLaughlin’s excellent comment:

He writes: “PC is an expression of the death grip that liberalism has on all our institutions—the media, the military, the universities, the mainline churches, etc.”

It’s not just the mainline churches. They’re the worst, but the low-evangelical Baptists/Charismatics, the Catholic Church and the conservative jurisdictions of the old, confessional Protestants (PCA, conservative Lutheran Synods, continuing Anglicans, conservative Reformed, etc) are PC-liberal too. Less so, but it’s got its hooks into them too.

Also, I think saying that liberals think discrimination is the single greatest possible evil is overstatement. I’m sure many of them think murder, child molestation, etc. are just as evil. I think a better way to say it would be to say that non-discrimination is a ruling principle simply because it’s an inviolable principle.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 11, 2009 12:44 PM | Send