Who's the Real McCarthy?

LAST SATURDAY, the Harvard community was reminded by a coalition of conservative students that "McCarthyism has revealed its post-Cold War agenda."

In a flyer distributed for Junior Parents' Weekend, members of the Peninsula, The Harvard Conservative Club, the Harvard Republican Club and the Association Against Learning in the Absence of Religion and Morality (AALARM) located this new McCarthyism in the phenomenon they call "Political Correctness"--commonly referred to as PC.

But this conservative flyer--whose reinterpretation of events at Harvard over the past four years is a testimony to the absence of absolute Truth--is pointing fingers in the wrong direction. In fact, the recent anti-PC movement has many more similarities to Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist tirade than does the alleged "PC hegemony."

HARVARD, declares the conservative flyer, "is controlled by a bastion of faculty and students determined to use our university's considerable resources to forward a narrow, self-seeking leftist political agenda."

The conspiracy-theory rhetoric used by the conservative students is striking in its resemblance to 1950s declarations that Hollywood was controlled by Communist propagandists.

But the similarities between this anti-PC trend and the Red-baiting of old are more than rhetorical.

It didn't take much to be labeled a Communist in the '50s. Membership--even long past membership--in any group associated with the Soviet Union was sufficient proof of anti-American leanings.

Similarly, participation in the "PC hegemony" requires almost nothing. A member of the "PC hegemony" need only show the mildest advocacy of a liberal cause, use a gender-neutral term, recycle white paper or enroll in a course like "African-American Women Writers" to oppress the anti-PC forces.

During the Red Scare, simply questioning the American government made you a Communist. Today, any challenge to traditional, white, male, heterosexual hegemony makes you a PC totalitarian. Just as the "Commie" epithet was used three decades ago to suspend rational political discourse, so today is the catch-phrase "PC" bandied about carelessly to dismiss any argument conservatives find distasteful.

Of course, as many historians are quick to point out, there was a certain level of legitimate concern about Soviet spies in post--World War II United States. But what McCarthyism did was to take that legitimate concern and turn it into a full-scale witch hunt.

The same thing is happening today. There are occasional examples of over-zealous reactions to comments unfairly perceived as racist, sexist, "ableist." But anti-PC forces move too smoothly from these isolated incidents to the idea that all accusations of prejudice are unfounded "PC totalitarianism."

THOSE WHO level charges of PC totalitarianism are playing a dangerous mirror game. While conservative students scream about supposed violations of their right to free speech, it is becoming slowly unacceptable to express a liberal point of view.

Reducing every progressive cause to the "PC" epithet is a powerful conservative tool. It makes people uncomfortable about expressing liberal ideas, shuts off reasonable debate with an unanswerable charge and erases serious social problems by suggesting that they are fictitious products of some radical leftist agenda.

A striking example of this denial can be seen in some recent reactions to acquaintance rape--now declared a "PC" issue and thus an hystericized red herring presented by rabid feminists to emasculate men.

In the November 1990 volume of Peninsula, for instance, one of the editors wrote, "Feminists try to tell me that I should watch out for date rape--the same girls that are handed a box of pills and a diaphragm with their notebooks and Coop card when they come to college." Date rape, like available birth control, is a "PC" threat to this writer's oh-so-comfortable picture of the world. He thus suggests that birth control implies continuous consent to all future sexual activity, negating the possibility of date rape.

In another recent instance of denial through labels, an administrator, discussing the "PC hegemony," reportedly complained that some colleges were treating acquaintance rape like it was a serious problem, actually forcing students to attend a meeting to discuss the issue.

Rape. A serious problem. Imagine that.

IN THE HANDS of conservative critics, the epithet "PC" becomes an eraser, making liberal ideas nothing more than knee-jerk euphemisms and real-life problems nothing more than fictions.

This eraser effect leaves space only for the world as conservative students wish it to be. This PC Scare stifles debate in its search for a monolithic community.

McCarthy would be proud.

Not the liberals who dare to address issues of discrimination in our society...

...but the reactionaries who dismiss liberal causes as "PC totalitarianism."