Political Correctness: Welcome to the Revolution
By Tom McCaffrey
FamilySecurityMatters.org
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.
Tom is a realtor near Sacramento, California.