TOM McCAFFREY:POLITICAL CORRECTNESS- WELCOME TO THE REVOLUTION
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Political correctness is a set of moral imperatives that prescribe how the members of certain “disadvantaged” groups in American society should be treated. It is based on a world view that divides humanity into oppressors and oppressed. This is an updated version of the old Marxist division of humanity into capitalists and workers. In the new version, the oppressors include, depending on the context, white people, males, Christians, Jews, Israel, the United States, the U.S. military, the police, the wealthy, large corporations, industrialists, polluters, gun owners, the Tea Party, the Catholic Church, and the Boy Scouts. The oppressed include blacks, women, sexual minorities, Hispanics, American Indians, Moslems, the handicapped, the poor, illegal immigrants, and even wildlife and “the land.”
Political correctness grew out of the Civil Rights movement. In the 1960s, the law still discriminated against blacks in some states. Whites set out to redress the wrong, but they went far beyond merely ending government-enforced discrimination. They poured trillions of their hard-earned wealth into the new welfare state. They allowed their children to be bussed to inferior schools in distant neighborhoods. They allowed blacks to take jobs for which they themselves were better qualified, and to take the places of their own better qualified sons and daughters in public universities. And they surrendered their constitutional rights to decide for themselves whom to sell their homes to and whom to serve in their businesses.
So spectacular was the outpouring of wealth and preferential treatment the charge of racism called forth that an observer could not help but notice here was a people prepared to part with a great deal of what was rightfully theirs in order to be able to regard themselves, and to be regarded by others, as morally admirable. In this way did the Civil Rights movement exploit the best moral sensibilities of the American people. It was only a matter of time before other prejudices, in addition to racism, would be discovered in the American psyche. And thus was born political correctness.
Political correctness is most widely identified with linguistic changes like the replacing of “Negro” with “black ” and then “African American,” a benign phenomenon on its face. But the effort to banish such words as Christmas, Easter, and Columbus Day from public discourse is less benign. The rationale usually offered is the need to be sensitive to the feelings of those who do not celebrate these holidays or who might be offended by the mention of them. The same rationale has been voiced to prohibit the displaying of the American flag in public schools. The premise behind this rationale is that in public, Americans should keep their distinctive values to themselves. Only the values of the politically correct and their clients are now fit for public display in the United States.
Equally nefarious is the PC effort to criminalize hate speech. To use the word “queer” today in assaulting a homosexual is to expose oneself to additional penalties for committing a “hate crime.” If someone hits me over the head with a stick, he violates my rights and should be punished for that violation. My rights are not more violated if he hits me out of hatred, whatever its motivation. Indeed, hate is no crime in a free society. Nor are bigotry, prejudice, or racism. The crime is the acting upon the hate by employing physical violence against a person or his property. And in that case, the crime is specifically the physical violence and decidedly not the hate or bigotry or racism. The invention of the concept of the “hate crime” is intended to associate hate with criminality, and thereby to pave the way for the criminalizing of “hate speech,” which will turn our politically correct, socially enforced censorship into genuine, government enforced censorship.
This is not to suggest that there is no such thing as hate speech, only that it should not be against the law, just as the advocating socialism or communism-or political correctness-is not against the law. Genuine slurs, such as “nigger” or “kike,” ought to be eschewed by decent people as a matter of good manners. To root out of this kind of language altogether, however, along with the ideas and emotions that motivate it, we should teach our children to judge each person as an individual, rather than as a member of a group. But this is precisely the opposite of what political correctness does as it aggregates individuals into aggrieved groups.
Political correctness operates through moral intimidation. Consider the charge that all white Americans are unavoidably racist and that their racism is a subconscious condition of mind; one need not consciously think or act in a racist manner in order to qualify as a racist. (Note the similarity to the idea of original sin.) This conception places the burden on the individual to prove that he is at least trying to overcome his racism. In this way, political correctness intimidates whites into supporting the PC agenda, and it shuts off debate on the subject. Whole categories of inquiry-black crime, black underachievement in schools-are placed out of bounds, and woe to him who ventures into the forbidden zone.
Among the bedrock principles of a free society are the rule of law, limited government, legislative supremacy, and the securing of individual rights. These all depend for their existence on a society’s culture. Very few cultures in history have given rise to the political principles and institutions necessary to maintain a free society, and few cultures in the world today are capable of doing so.
If one wanted to undermine the political system of a free society, one way to go about it would be to degrade the culture on which it depends. Enter Multiculturalism, which is moral relativism writ large. It holds that the members of any one culture, no matter how advanced, stand to gain from exposure to the members of any other culture, no matter how backward.
But since only a very few cultures are capable of supporting free political institutions, the citizens of a free society have little to gain and everything to lose from admitting into their polity persons from cultures that are incapable of supporting free institutions, unless they can pass on to those newcomers the cultural values necessary to maintain such institutions. The process of passing on these values is what we call “assimilation.”
But assimilation is antithetical to the multicultural view, which teaches newcomers to retain their native cultures and languages. Here political correctness enters the picture. It instructs Americans on how to alter their behavior to accommodate permanently unassimilated newcomers and their alien cultures. It counsels, in effect, that Americans commit cultural, and thus political, suicide. Over the long run, the continual addition of non-assimilating newcomers will dilute the cultural and political influence of those who subscribe to our freedom-sustaining American culture.
Equality before the law is another essential principle of a free society. Laws that require blacks to sit in the back of a public bus violate the principle of equality before the law, so they should be abolished. Beyond the chance to live in peace and freedom, though, there is nothing a free society can offer the members of a minority group subjected to discrimination from private persons except the opportunity to try to persuade those persons voluntarily to stop treating the members of the group unjustly.
Political correctness, however, can promise, and deliver, a great deal more. It can extend to other minority groups many of the pseudo-rights that the Civil Rights movement won for blacks. It can force Christian bakers who oppose homosexual marriage to bake cakes for same-sex weddings. It can force Catholic employers who oppose contraception to pay for contraceptive devices via the health plans they offer their employees. It can force girls to tolerate the presence of sexually confused boys in their bath and locker rooms. And it can force business owners to install, at their own expense, facilities to accommodate the wheel-chair bound.
Political correctness uses the language of rights, but what it means by “rights” is antithetical to genuine rights. Political correctness offers the members of select groups “positive rights.” In a free society, the only rights one possesses are negative rights, the rights, for example, not to be assaulted or robbed or prevented by force from speaking one’s mind or practicing one’s religion. Such rights impose no obligation on others except the negative obligation not forcibly to prevent one’s exercising them. (Recall that Barack Obama once complained that the U.S. Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.)
The problem with positive rights is that they always impose an obligation on someone else. If a homosexual has a right to have a wedding cake baked for him by any baker of his choosing, then whichever baker he chooses has a legal obligation to provide such a cake, which is another way of saying that the baker has lost a part of his freedom. Political correctness advocates positive rights in the name of equality. The homosexual gains a “right,” the baker loses an equivalent right, and both, the story goes, are a bit more equal in the end.
Consider the current campaign, in which the President of the United States is participating, to whip up moral indignation against “income inequality.” In a free society, some persons will always be wealthier than others. This is the natural order of things. Some persons have more talent, more ambition, or more willingness to work hard than others. It requires government intervention-by force-to alter this natural order. Government must forcibly expropriate wealth from some and “redistribute” it to others, or else it must forcibly prevent the more talented or ambitious from exercising their virtues to the fullest. The kind of equality advocated by political correctness is called “equality of result.” A society based on positive rights and equality of result is antithetical to one based on negative rights and equality before the law.
In a society of the latter type, a free society, the government will enjoy the consent of the governed as a matter of course because it limits itself to enforcing universally agreed-upon rules of behavior, such as those proscribing robbery, assault, and murder. When it begins to enact positive rights, however, it necessarily acts without the consent of many whose rights are thereby diminished.
Just as the consent of the governed is important to the maintaining of a free society, so is the rule of law. Outside the context of a free society, however, the rule of law becomes irrelevant. In a society based on positive rights and equality of result, the rule of law is replaced by rule by brute force, and the consent of the governed is replaced by the complicity of the mob.
It is no accident, and certainly not a consequence of his “arrogance,” that Barack Obama, himself a product of political correctness and a practitioner of it par excellence, has shown a marked predilection for governing by brute force. Consider his numerous, unilateral alterations of the Obamacare statute, actions which only Congress is allowed to take under our Constitution. Mr. Obama executed these without even the pretense of a Constitutional justification. His response to Congress’s refusal to pass the so-called Dream Act was unilaterally to suspend enforcement of immigration law as it pertained to some four and a half million illegal aliens, another egregious violation the rule of law and legislative supremacy. (All free societies observe the principle of legislative supremacy as a way of dispersing political power among many hands. Its antithesis is rule by a king, an emperor, or a dictator.) The means by which Mr. Obama won passage of Obamacare, sending a 2000-page statute to the Senate just days before they were due to vote on it, though it preserved the form of legislative supremacy, made a mockery of the principle of informed consent. His contempt for the rule of law, equality before the law, legislative supremacy, (negative) individual rights, and governance by consent is not the result of arrogance, but of ideology, the ideology of political correctness and its underlying Marxism.
This brings us to the topic of prevarication in a politically correct society. Since political correctness is cultural Marxism dressed up to look like a kinder, gentler Americanism, deceit is integral to it. Candidate Barack Obama cast as the Great Uniter was pure fabrication. As president, he offers up more whoppers in a week than any other president has in a career: “You can keep you doctor if you want to;” “Islam has always been part of America.” In 2009, the murder of thirteen persons at Fort Hood by a Moslem who shouted “Allahu Akbar” was called a case not of terrorism but of “workplace violence,” and the attack on the Benghazi compound that resulted in the murders of a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans was called not a pre-planned terrorist attack but a spontaneous response to a YouTube video. Mr. Obama is well aware that honest, thinking Americans know he is lying, but he has no reason to care. His blithe indifference toward the truth, and his contempt for those who value it suggest a belief that, in subverting what he sees as an unjust Constitution, he is entitled to use any means at his disposal. They also reflect, no doubt, his awareness that his power depends on the good opinions not of honest, thinking Americans but of those who are too ignorant to know that he is lying, too corrupt to care, or too politically correct to mention it.
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