The PC Wars are back, or so says Jonathan Chait in his recent New York Magazine article, “Not a Very PC Thing to Say: How the Language Police Are Perverting Liberalism.” Judging by the extensive, mostly angry criticism that Chait’s piece has generated—he told the Daily Beast that “this has been the broadest reaction I’ve gotten to anything I’ve ever written"—he may be onto something.
Are we reliving 1991, the year the American public woke up to the apparent threat posed by political correctness, when President George H.W. Bush warned in a University of Michigan commencement address that free speech was “under assault” by politically correct professors who had declared “certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits”?
Chait defines political correctness as “a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate,” and he says it’s once again reared its ugly head on college campuses and, worse, has spread to infect political debate on social media. Moreover, Chait argues that political correctness is grounded in the left’s longstanding contempt for liberal norms, such as respect for the rights of people who hold different opinions. Those who welcome political correctness as a means of sweeping away the debris of racism and sexism have, in fact, embraced a dangerously illiberal form of politics, what Chait calls an “undemocratic creed.”
To the degree that political correctness was a genuine phenomenon in the 1980s and 1990s, it took shape as a result of historical exigencies: Latent racial and sexual tensions had surfaced as a result of the post-60s integration of diverse peoples and perspectives into American universities. Conflict was unavoidable, and the fact that some universities instituted speech codes prohibiting discriminatory language was unsurprising. Simply put, many administrators believed that regulating racially and sexually charged words would reduce racially and sexually charged violence.
Although Chait believes that political correctness was moribund for two decades before its recent re-emergence, the formal and informal regulations that emerged during the first PC debates have remained largely intact, with little fanfare aside from occasional alarmism about “trigger warnings” and other such manifestations of political correctness.
With this decades-old PC regime come gains and losses. It is easier to be a woman or minority-group member on a college campus. But some ideas, especially conservative ideas or expressions that challenge prevailing views on race and gender—ideas and expressions that were commonplace on campuses before the PC regime—have less purchase and are occasionally silenced.
Insofar as such rules now also regulate political discourse beyond the university, Chait has a point. Twitter mobs that hunt down and shame moral offenders with puritanical zeal, all in the name of a narrowly defined social justice, hardly seem designed to achieve a better world, much less a more intellectually compelling one. Chait’s article has brought necessary critical attention to this phenomenon. But his history of political terminology, especially the way he distinguishes “liberal” and “left,” is simplistic at best.
Chait’s political lexicon is confused because it lacks history. It is frozen in the 19th century. His liberals, children of the Enlightenment, believe that progress is achieved when ideas are given space for full expression, allowing rational individuals to come to informed conclusions. Chait’s leftists, in contrast, have “borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism"—that “reason” and other supposedly objective criteria are a cover for power—"and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones.” Chait’s liberals think that right and wrong are not specific to race, gender, or other identities. His leftists, on the other hand, are beholden to identity politics and are thus responsible for political correctness, past and present.
Chait’s lexicon ignores recent transformations in American liberalism. Take the case of affirmative action. Most American liberals had come to support it by the 1960s, in large part because they had abandoned the colorblind philosophy of an earlier generation. They had given up on procedural liberalism, the premise that neutral appeals to legislatures and courts remained the best means for safeguarding civil rights, and had instead adopted color-conscious racial attitudes based upon the black-power-inspired theory of institutional racism.
President Lyndon Johnson ditched the colorblind approach when he said in a 1965 speech at Howard University that the federal government should help black Americans achieve not only “equality as a right and a theory,” but also “equality as a fact and as a result.” Erstwhile liberals who persisted in colorblind approaches moved into the conservative camp; the political scientist John Bunzel reaffirmed the merits of colorblindness in the pages of Commentary by posing the powerful rhetorical question: “Is color the test of competence?”
Similar developments reshaped liberal conceptions of sex and gender. Christina Hoff Sommers nicely represents Chait’s brand of Enlightenment liberalism based on universal objective principles. In her 1994 book, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women, Sommers distinguished between her classic liberal brand of feminism, which limited its agenda to the simple demand that women enjoy “the same rights before the law that men enjoyed,” and post-60s feminism, which more ambitiously waged a culture war against patriarchy. Whereas Sommers, then a professor of philosophy at Clark University, was a sex-blind feminist in her belief that people should be afforded equal treatment before the law solely on the basis of their actions, most feminists, including most liberal feminists, contended that it was impossible for women to be evaluated by the same standards as men because gender relations shaped even supposedly neutral institutions like the courts and schools.
This conceptual divide, between those who believed society was best organized around neutral principles that people could aspire to as individuals, and those who thought that society was weighted down by historical patterns that could be overcome only by finding solidarity in groups, became less a divide between liberal and left, and more a divide between left and right.
As a result, American liberalism was transformed. Left-liberal distinctions came to matter less and less in relation to political correctness. Identity-conscious arguments were consistent with either side of the increasingly unstable boundary between left and liberal.
Although most of those who opposed political correctness were conservatives, some liberals and even some leftists joined the fight. Todd Gitlin, for instance, who said that “a bitter intolerance emanates from much of the academic left,” opposed political correctness in the belief that demands for equality should be grounded in universal impulses, and that identity politics represent the “twilight of equality.” In making that point, he is Chait’s kind of Enlightenment liberal, even though Gitlin first made his political mark as a leader of the frequently illiberal Students for a Democratic Society.
Gitlin was not alone among liberals who opposed things like campus speech codes. But such liberals were in the minority, especially among academics. Furthermore, those who lodged the most-sophisticated critiques of political correctness and identity politics happened to be Marxists, further disrupting Chait’s taxonomy. Fredric Jameson theorized that identity politics limited the possibilities for emancipatory change by rendering human solidarity impossible. For Jameson, fracture was never liberating; it was always the product of political reaction. The PC wars were thus symptomatic of the postindustrial transformation of capitalism.
Chait’s muddled history contributes to his mixed-up notions about the contemporary PC wars. He thinks that the singular victims of the battles that rage on Twitter are liberals like his friend Hanna Rosin, whose book The End of Men, which is about “long-term female empowerment,” was deemed “complacent and insufficiently concerned with the continuing reality of sexism” by hashtag activists who went after her with the sarcastic #RIPpatriarchy meme. In this, Chait is blind to the fact that some of the most vehement critics of identity politics are leftists like Adolph Reed Jr., and that many of those targeted by social-justice Twitter mobs have been leftists. Google “Jacobinghazi” to learn about one such infamous affair.
The history of political correctness is more complex than Chait seems to realize. More to the point, the recent histories of American liberalism and the left cannot be so neatly bracketed apart. Chait’s vision of liberalism has long been on the wane. It’s no wonder he strikes such a defensive pose.
Andrew Hartman is an associate professor of history at Illinois State University and the author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.
