A PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

An old hand on the Australian intellectual and political scene tries to put political correctness into historical perspective. Excerpts:

Earlier this year a prominent American commentator, Paul Weyrich, published a desperate open letter - of some 1800 words - lamenting the hegemony in America of what he called Political Correctness. He sees American culture as literally approaching barbarism. He attributes this to what he calls Political Correctness His alternative name for it is Cultural Marxism - that is, Marxism without the economics but retaining the determination to destroy bourgeois morality and to enforce Correct values. For him and like-minded critics it is a pervasive, comprehensive and dangerous social movement...

What began as a liberal assault on injustice has come to denote, not for the first time, a new form of injustice... my hypothesis is that Political Correctness is a leftist distortion of liberalism.....

It is time to define Political Correctness a little more closely. Its first and preeminent characteristic is that it calls for the politicisation - one might say te transformation - of life. It wants political direction of all departments from, say, children’s fiction to judicial judgments. No profession is exempt. All must meet a political test - of correct thinking and progress. Lawyers, accountants, doctors, scientists, novelists, journalists and businessmen must all pass it.

Liberals of earlier generations accepted unorthodoxy as normal. Indeed the right to differ was a datum of classical liberalism. The Politically Correctors do not give that right a high priority. It distresses their programmed minds. Those who do not conform should be ignore, silenced or vilified. There is a kind of soft totalitarianism about Political Correctness......

The Politically Correct are self-righteous in a quasi-religious spirit.. A sort of vanguard of enlightenment, they do not accept the judgment of voters (unenlightened) or consumers (selfish) and are prepared to impose reforms against the public will, You can’t make an omelette’, as someone used to say,’ without breaking eggs.’

You create the wealth, they said to business, we will change the national identity....

But if the New Left and the counter-culture retreated, they still did not admit defeat. They simply became Politically Correct. This has become, not a greater but a more elusive threat to the free society than the earlier leftist movements. Communism and the USSR represented a clear and obvious danger. So did the New Left with its repressive violence. Political Correctness however insinuates itself and permeates society piously, incrementally, without always attracting attention.