Right Wing Political Correctness

Jesse Walker has an essay at Reason that absolutely nails the emergence of political correctness on the right. It's titled Right-Wing P.C.: How conservatives learned to stop worrying and love political correctness. After long denouncing the sort of shallow identity politics so common on the left, conservatives have discovered that there is power in claiming the status of victim. After an amusing introduction in which he said that the right's hatred of political correctness was "a Sam-and-Diane sort of enmity, an animus that could only end with a lusty, guilty romp in the hay", Walker explains exactly what he means:

When I say "political correctness," I'm referring to an attitude, not an agenda. In some hands the term is a broad synonym for censorship and groupthink, qualities that have always been common across the political spectrum. Other times it devolves into a vague smear-term for anything left of center. I'm using it to describe a particular political posture: one that treats identity politics not just as an ideology but as a trump card, that maintains a rigid orthodoxy while regarding itself as subversive, that uses a series of contrived outrages to feed a bureaucratic machine. Each of those elements has infected parts of the right.

A perfect definition of PC, and he's absolutely right that the term has unfortunately lost this meaning the way it's usually used. Most on the right today just use it to mean anything they deem liberal. But it's the use of group identity and victimization as a "get out of trouble free" card and the use of contrived outrage that is the hallmark of PC thinking. 90% of the time when I see someone use the phrase, I tune them out. But this is someone who understands what it really means, and he delineates the difference perfectly:

When identity-conscious movements began to emerge from the '60s and '70s left--black pride, brown pride, women's liberation--the animating idea was to refuse to be a victim. Over the years, they sometimes came to connote the opposite: the power of being a victim, or at least of being seen as one. The difference between the two approaches is the difference between James Brown singing "Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud" and Tawana Brawley deciding there might be an advantage to covering herself in dogshit and racial slurs.

It's important to point out that it's not a mere claim of victimization that becomes PC; there are lots of genuine victims in this world. Gays really are victimized by discrimination and, far too often, hatred and violence. But even where there is real victimization like that, it can easily transform into the sort of PC response that Walker is talking about, such as in demands for protection from ideas rather than from actions. When legitimate concern about harrassment of gays crosses over into attempts to censor any and all statements against homosexuality, that is exactly the transformation I'm referring to (and we've seen that lately, with kids getting expelled from school simply for wearing a t-shirt that says "Homosexuality is sin" - a position I vehemently disagree with but refuse to censor). When we go from "you don't have any right to deny my equal rights" to "you can't say anything that upsets me because I'm part of a victimized class", we've made the leap from legitimate position to the politics of professional victimhood. And as Walker points out, the right has quickly learned to adopt this pose:

We haven't had any Brawley-style fabrications on the right--none that we know of, anyway--but Republicans have certainly learned the benefits of faux victimization. You can see this in play with several identities the right likes to claim as its own--southern, military, male--but it's most pronounced when the subject is religion. Some of the country's leading conservatives met this past March to denounce what they called a "War on Christians." To hear them tell it, this war on faith includes Tom DeLay's legal troubles: When conference organizer Rick Scarborough introduced the disgraced congressman, he said, "I believe the most damaging thing that Tom DeLay has done in his life is take his faith seriously into public office, which made him a target for all those who despise the cause of Christ." (He also told DeLay to buck up, because "God always does his best work after a crucifixion.")

The religious right has clearly adopted the tactics of professional victimhood, to the point of now essentially casing themselves in the role of perpetual martyrs. A group that controls every branch of government and most cultural institutions has somehow managed to convince themselves, or at least their more credulous followers, that they are a poor abused minority. It's staggering to contemplate.

Walker goes on to discuss the recent incident at Bellevue Community College in Washington, where a professor put a really stupid question on a math test. The question began, "Condoleezza holds a watermelon just over the edge of the roof of the 300-foot Federal Building, and tosses it up with a velocity of 20 feet per second." Now, the question is idiotic and it is a gratuitous insult aimed at Condoleeza Rice. The professor certainly deserves to be condemned for this juvenile nonsense. But the reaction from the right precisely mirrored the sort of PC reaction from the left that they have always condemned.

Right wing bloggers went berserk, emails poured in to the college and what ended up happening? Exactly the sort of thing the right has always condemned - mandatory diversity seminars, the appointment of a "Vice President of Equity and Pluralism" (the very phrase gives me the creeps), a pluralism committee that will report to the college president, and so forth. Exactly the sort of bureaucratic apparatus that will become self-perpetuating, interested only in finding more and more to be outraged about even where no real justification exists. And Walker ends on just the right note:

So this isn't simply a case of people on the right taking advantage of the structures put in place by the left, nor of building a parallel apparatus of their own. It's a case of a conservative campaign that actively helped those original structures grow, even landing a professional diversity hustler a job. Left and right were already co-dependent; now they're in a full-fledged clinch. I wonder how they'll feel in the morning?

Amen, brother.