The Myth of 'Politically Correct'

SOME day, when the catch-phrase-turned-cliche "political correctness" has "passed away," there will be an inquest. The authorities will have possible causes, some suspects, even a paper trail to follow.

Trouble is, they won't have a body.

Because the unasked question "Who are the PC?" has no answer. Because the PC don't exist.

Which isn't to say that the issue hasn't generated a list of candidates. After all, the New York Times felt PC-ness was important enough to allot a full page in its Sunday "Week in Review" section to "A Campus Forum on Multiculturalism." The goal of the page was to consider "the tyranny of the politically correct."

So let us ask, before the body is even cold, who are the tyrants?

ARE they the faculty?

Chief among the supposed tyrants are what Roger Kimball in his book Tenured Radicals has called, not suprisingly, the "tenured radicals."

In America today, according to Kimball, "every special interest--women's studies, Black studies, gay studies and the like--and every modish interpretive gambit--deconstruction, poststructuralism, new historicism, and other varieties of... `Left Eclecticism'--has found a welcome roost in the academy, while the traditional curriculum and modes of intellectual inquiry are excoriated as sexist, racist, or just plain reactionary."

The argument goes something like this: organizations like Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Power movement and radical feminists who invaded administration buildings in the Vietnam era, took over campuses again in the '80s--only this time from the inside.

It makes a nifty conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, it's not true. The hard fought and infrequently won tenure battles (the war metaphor is Kimball's and the Times', not mine) by members of "special interest" groups have hardly changed the faces in the academic group photo.

Perhaps the problem is not the number of these "latter day Sophists" (to quote Brandeis's Frederic T. Sommers), but the appeal they have. In this case, the problem lies not with the stars but within vocal campus groups who succumb to the radical chic. Which leads us to our next group of candidates.

ARE they the campus leaders?

If the answer is yes, we should be able to find them as leaders of the various non-conservative political groups on campus. Already, you may see the trouble: the groups aren't all liberal (though some are) they aren't all radical (though a few are) and they aren't all anything else either.

The only thing these groups seem to have in common is that they aren't conservative. (Actually, even this isn't true; where do you put the Objectivists? the Libertarians?)

When David A. Plotz, in his lively opinion piece last spring "`Politically Correct' Thought Control" claimed that the left wing groups "have reached virtually identical liberal conclusions on what is `correct'," he was wrong. Most of the groups he singled out don't even have positions on the PC causes celebre.

What, after all, is the South Africa Solidarity Committee position on abortion? AIDS testing? The establishment of a women's center? Contrary to the conspiracy theories that Plotz's article could spawn, no grand meeting was held to determine the platform of the Campus Left for the '90s.

Maybe there's no activist plot to poison the hearts and minds of the student body, but the net effect of these activisms is one that produces "liberal totalitarianism." Perhaps every time an activist group opens its collective mouth, all others take that as a cue to silence themselves. That, too, seems unlikely.

The most recent example, yesterday's mock eviction of house residents by the "Israeli Military Command" staged by the Committee on Palestine, will undoubtedly cause substantial rifts in an (always) already fractured "liberal fascism." There will be those who decry the Israeli Occupation and those who say that now is no time to apologize for terrorism in any form. A broad consensus among various organizations will probably not emerge.

WELL then, are they the masses?

This, it seems, is the guts of Plotz's argument: "The result of this campus activism and media bombardment [by just a few radicals] is that the only voice that gets heard at Harvard is the voice of the PC." Which means that "Harvard's sheeplike liberal majority is large enough and accepting enough of this PC ideology to stifle campus debate." In the end, the blame falls on the "PC crowd."

In other words, Plotz and others utilize the same rhetoric that they deride. By lumping students into a silent majority, they effectively silence that majority. The only people who are left with any real opinions at all are the "PC ideologues," the "oppressed conservatives" reading National Review in Lamont and campus critics such as David Plotz.

So who are the PC?

The problem is that once you have asked someone "Are you PC?" they can't be anymore. The question is equivalent to "Why don't you think?" In formulating an answer, any answer, the respondent has become someone with a reasoned, perhaps a liberal, view.

Which brings us to the startling revelation that the center of Harvard's political thought is left of America's. That does not mean that those on campus are sheeplike, unworthy or stupid. And it doesn't mean they are totalitarian. Instead, they happen to hold the majority view that is worthy of respect. They are people worthy of being asked not "Why don't you think?" but "What do you think?" In asking this, we have moved beyond PC.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. agrees: "Joining mood rings and Earth Shoes, `political correctness' has now entered into the realm of the merely facetious...After all the shouting is over, is it too much to hope that the real conversation, long deferred, may begin?"

When the inquest finally comes, and all the questions are asked, and all the answers are given, don't be surprised if the PC body turns up lost.