AMAZING: A BERKELEY PSYCHOLOGIST JUST ABOUT GETS IT:

The penny has finally dropped that Leftist dishonesty about so many issues just loses them votes

"I want to talk about us, about how we promulgated and enforced a politically correct line on a series of key social-cultural issues that played into right-wing charges that we were out of touch and helped to consolidate our virtual isolation from America's lower-middle and working class.

Enforced! I can almost hear the astonishment as some readers ask derisively, "Who are the enforcers? Have progressives jailed anyone for being politically incorrect?" No, of course not. But if there were no pressure to remain silent, how do we explain the many times we sat at meetings wanting to dissent but didn't for fear of being politically incorrect? Or the times we wished for a fuller, more nuanced discussion of the subject at hand but stilled our thoughts because we knew they would be unacceptable, that our commitment to the cause would be questioned? It's possible to dismiss the idea of coercion in voluntary associations only if we don't take seriously the human need to feel a part of a community, especially in difficult and contentious times. When we feel under siege, as we have increasingly in recent years, there's an impulse to pull together, to tighten our bonds, to take comfort and affirmation in the presence of others like ourselves. This is our community-colleagues, friends, comrades with whom we share a world that frames our lives. To speak out against the "party line" is to set ourselves up as outsiders and risk being excluded. Or, if not wholly excluded, sent to the periphery, someone who suddenly becomes the "other," not out perhaps, but not quite in.

Unfortunately, our silence creates emotional and intellectual conflicts that can be costly both personally and politically, as I found out a decade ago when I published Families on the Fault Line, a book about working-class families. Some readers of an early draft of that work criticized my use of the word black (the designation almost all the people I spoke with used to identify themselves) instead of African American, which was then the politically correct term. Others questioned the fact that I referred to illegals (the word used by every Latino I spoke with) instead of the newly minted undocumented workers. And still others told me I should "push the delete button" on my computer before going public with my doubts about the efficacy of bilingual programs, even though these were also the concerns voiced by many of the Latino and Asian families I interviewed.

I struggled with these criticisms, fought silently with my critics and myself, and finally decided to write about the intellectual and emotional dilemmas they posed. In the final version of the book, therefore, I recounted the criticism and mused aloud about the constraints of needing to be politically correct. What obligation, I asked, do I have to honor my respondents' definitions of self and their opinions on the red flag issues of the day? What responsibility do I have to the political subtleties of the time? To my own political convictions? How do I write what my research told me was a true picture of the lives I wanted to portray and not give aid and comfort to right-wing bigots?

I leave it to others to decide how successfully I answered those questions. What I know is that going public about the problems raised by the need to be politically correct didn't endear me to my critics and left wounds that didn't heal easily.

A caveat here: I understand the impulse to keep our differences to ourselves and to vet the work we put into the public arena for fear that our words will be distorted to serve the agenda of the right. But I also know that, no matter how carefully we say our piece, we cannot protect ourselves or control the way our ideas are used-or abused. I learned that lesson firsthand in 1996 when I published The Transcendent Child, a book that examines how and why, despite living in families where poverty, neglect, and abuse are commonplace, some children manage to become functional adults while others, often in the same family, do not. The theory I developed to answer the question sets forth a complex of psychological qualities and social conditions that make it possible for some people to transcend a problem-filled past and develop flourishing adult lives. Not a word to cast blame on those who don't, not a syllable to suggest that their plight is due to their own failing, or because they're stupid, lazy, or unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Yet within weeks of publication, I became the darling of right-wing radio talk shows, whose hosts insisted that this was my message, even shouting me down when I argued that it wasn't.

These real concerns notwithstanding, the consolidation of power by the political right in recent years has convinced me that by insisting on political correctness, we not only played a part in impoverishing the national discourse but, in doing so, we also marginalized ourselves politically and lost what should have been our natural constituency. Our belief that we had to hold the line lest it crumble completely, our fear that by granting any legitimacy at all to the pervasive cultural anxiety of the time we would give fuel to the enemy led us to take positions on many issues that damaged our credibility with a considerable portion of the American public.

Let's go back, for example, to the 1960s and 1970s, when the sexual, gender, and cultural revolutions were roiling American society. In each of these struggles, there was both hope and danger. The birth control pill and the sexual revolution that followed promised important breakthroughs in women's ability to express their sexuality more freely and openly. But as with all revolutions, there were excesses and unintended consequences, among them the shift downward to younger and younger ages, until some among us were defending the right of fourteen-year-olds to be sexually active-while most remained silent.

I'm not suggesting that we should have joined the right in arguing against sex education in the schools in favor of an "abstinence only" position. Even if I believed in it, common sense tells me it wouldn't have worked in the highly sexualized society in which our teenagers live. But surely we could have spoken up publicly and agreed with thoughtful and frightened parents that most fourteen-year-olds are too immature, too prone to give way to peer pressure, to make an informed decision about sex. Never mind the argument that fourteen-year-olds in Samoa or some other island paradise manage their sexuality quite well. American kids generally do not, as witness the number of unwanted pregnancies, as well as the many stories I've heard from teenage girls about the role of peer pressure in their "decision" to become sexually active (Erotic Wars: What Happened to the Sexual Revolution?).

Move up a couple of decades to the 1980s when "crime in the streets" was the biggest issue in American politics. While the right argued for more police, for tougher sentences, for trying juveniles as adults, we insisted that racism and overheated media coverage were at the core of the furor, that the perception of crime didn't match the reality, and with as much fanfare as we could muster, presented statistics to prove the point. It struck me even then that we were mistaken to try to reorder perceptions with facts, partly because we failed to take account of the psychological reality that experience overwhelms statistics no matter how compelling the numbers may be, but also because the perception of crime wasn't totally illusory.

Not that there wasn't truth in our side of the argument; it just wasn't the whole truth. I believe unequivocally that racist assumptions are built into the American psyche but, in this case, they were fueled by the fact that a disproportionate number of street crimes were committed by young African Americans. The media were often irresponsible and always sensationalist in reporting crime, but they didn't make it up. Crime was on the rise; the streets in urban communities had become more dangerous; and, while most people were never themselves mugged, it was enough to know someone who had been-whether a personal acquaintance or a victim encountered on the eleven o'clock news-to create the kind of fear that was so prominent during those years.

Back then there was a saying that "A conservative is a liberal who got mugged on his way to the subway." When I first heard it, I was outraged by those flip words; now it seems to me that they weren't entirely wrong. So today I wonder if a conservative isn't a working-class guy who heard the "liberal elite" (as the right has effectively labeled us) tell him he had nothing to fear when experience told him otherwise-not just on crime but on a whole slew of issues that have turned the country into a cultural and political battlefield.

Take the family values debate. While the events of these last decades left most Americans worried about their families and longing for a return to what felt like a less tumultuous past, feminist writers told them it was all nostalgia, that the families they remembered never existed. We weren't totally wrong, but anyone who lived through those earlier times, as I did, knows also that we weren't wholly right.

Yes, the image some now hold of the family of the fifties is part fantasy, but the fifties really were a time of relative quiet in family life. Yes, if the families the right now celebrates had been so perfect, they wouldn't have given birth to the revolutionaries of the sixties, who wanted to smash the family as they knew it. Nor would the divorce rate have soared as soon as women became more economically self-sufficient. Yes, in those allegedly halcyon days many women awakened every day with what Betty Friedan so aptly labeled the "problem that has no name." But those same women also found a certain amount of gratification and safety in their families. And even those who were actively discontented (and I was among them) didn't recognize their families as the oppressively hierarchical and patriarchal institution some feminist scholars were describing. Yes, there was much to celebrate as feminists led the way in opening the doors of the occupational world and women gratefully flooded through. But there were also legitimate questions about what happens to children when both parents work full time, which we preferred not to talk about. Yes, most Americans agreed that divorce was a reasonable option when it became too hard for wives and husbands to live together, no matter what the reasons, but that didn't mean they were ready to destroy the institution of marriage itself. I have no brief for those writers who bemoan divorce and warn us that our children will be damaged forever, but our refusal to acknowledge and discuss the pitfalls in divorce for everyone in the family, fathers included, was another of those politically correct blind spots that distanced us from people we wanted to reach.

Even on abortion, that most contentious issue of all in the culture wars,* we missed opportunities to build alliances. Not with the hard-core right-to-lifers, to be sure, but with the majority of women and men who might agree on a woman's right to choose, but not a child's. Our reasons for standing against legislation that required a parent to be notified before granting an abortion to a teenager (some parents would force a decision on an unwilling child, others would be abusive) weren't all wrong. But they weren't all right, either. It is, after all, in the nature of the parent-child relationship that parents impose decisions about things large and small on their sometimes unwilling children. True, the abortion decision is larger than most, and a girl forced to continue a pregnancy faces consequences that will affect not only the rest of her life but the life of the child she will bear. Nevertheless, our refusal to acknowledge the real dilemmas inherent in how and when to draw the line between parental authority and responsibility and an adolescent child's rights left us more isolated than we should have been on abortion, especially at a time when most Americans favored our side of the abortion debate.

Whether on welfare, race, or identity politics, we kept silent when we might have built bridges. We resisted talking about the role of Aid to Families with Dependent Children in the rising rate of illegitimacy in the African American community and called those who did racist. I don't say this as an advocate for the Clinton welfare reform program, which has its own serious deficiencies: not enough effective job-training; no adequate child care to allow a mother to work in peace even if she finds a job; and perhaps worst of all, no guarantee that she will keep the health care her family was entitled to under the Medicaid program once she has a job. My argument is simply that our opposition to the reform of AFDC, even after it became clear that its unintended consequences had created a whole new set of social problems, left us with little influence either with policy makers or the general public in the debate about how to change it.

On race, too, we failed to speak out at crucial moments and to face up to self-evident truths. For decades the left has argued that the antisocial behavior of significant numbers of African American youth (dropping out of school, getting pregnant, gang behavior, drugs) is a direct result of the painful realities under which they live and the hopelessness and helplessness their plight generates. Once again, we're not wrong, but we're not wholly right either.

No doubt the prospects of African American youth have been seriously affected by the massive neglect of our public schools, very high levels of unemployment, crushing poverty, police practices that criminalize behavior that's treated like a boyish prank in white suburbs, and a long history of prejudice and discrimination. But as William Julius Wilson, a Harvard scholar who can't by any stretch be called an apologist for the right, argues, there are also behavioral causes of black poverty-decisions and choices that are not the inevitable result of social constraints but of an amalgam of culture and personal behavior that is destructive to both the individual and the community. To believe otherwise is to strip an entire population of any agency and to treat them as if they were as helpless to influence the direction of their lives as leaves tossed about in a hurricane. Well meaning, perhaps, but ultimately condescending".

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