Responding with charity

“Political correctness,” the stifling culture of left-wing taboos around race, gender, and sexuality remembered from campus battles of the 1980s and 90s, “has returned.” So claims New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait in an essay that has sent the small tinderbox of progressive media into skyward sparks. According to Chait, this revival is heralded by hashtag activism, privilege-checking and calling out, strict policing of online and in-class language, “trigger warnings,” and bumptious student responses to commencement speakers. The consequences, he says, are dangerous.

“Liberals still hold to the classic Enlightenment political tradition that cherishes individuals rights, freedom of expression, and the protection of a kind of free political marketplace,” Chait asserts. The politically correct “left,” however, critiques concepts like free speech and individual rights in terms of the power structures they inhabit. “While politically less threatening than conservatism,” Chait grants, “the p.c. left is actually more philosophically threatening. It is an undemocratic creed.”

Them’s fightin’ words, as they used to say, and many of Chait’s readers were happy to oblige. Some pointed out that the “p.c. left” doesn’t have a monopoly on language policing or the suppression of disfavored speech. (As I write, anti-abortion activists are pushing St. Norbert College in Wisconsin to disinvite Gloria Steinem from an on-campus appearance.) For that matter, individual rights and free speech are hardly the glorious legacy of “the classic Enlightenment political tradition.” And all politics, not just the politics of feminism and racial consciousness, are in some sense “identity politics”; as Matt Yglesias points out, “those with the right identities have the privilege of simply calling it politics while labeling other people's agendas ‘identity.’”