|
A Review of the Left’s Counterattack by Laura Clawson |
Not so many years ago, very few people had ever heard the phrase "politically correct," let alone any horror stories about politically correct leftist college professors and students trashing the canon and burning labryses on the lawns of white, unapologetically heterosexual and capitalist men who bravely persist at reading Shakespeare. Recently, though, political correctness has become so well-known and such a stigma that Wesleyan students, who in any other context would be seen as members of the PC thought police, routinely proclaim themselves politically incorrect--often in the course of taking positions that have remarkably little to do with politics, correct or not. The problem with all of this is that political correctness is largely a myth, as John K. Wilson argues in his aptly titled book, The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education.
One component of the myth of political correctness is that all people on the Left are entirely lacking in humor or any sense of proportion, particularly about themselves and their politics. Apparently, someone who is PC can be identified by his or her habitually grim expression and his belief that saying "pet" rather than "animal companion" is a crime equal to, say, disemboweling live puppies. Wilson shows the irony of this, as the term "politically correct" originated on the Left as humor, "used sarcastically among leftists to criticize themselves for taking radical doctrines to absurd extremes." In addition, The Myth of Political Correctness never takes itself too seriously and is at times very funny.
This truly wonderful book was published just five years after Wilson graduated from college. Wilson’s argument is relatively simple and ought to be obvious to anyone who has read the book’s title. In chapters titled, "The Myth of Political Correctness," "Conservative Correctness," "The Cult of Western Culture," "The Myth of Speech Codes," "The Myth of Sexual Correctness," and "The Myth of Reverse Discrimination," Wilson looks at many of the widely told stories about political correctness, countering them with what I would like to believe is the truth, and exposing distortions and outright lies in the versions you’ve probably heard told by people like Dinesh D’Souza, William Bennett, and George Will. The book also contains a great many valuable statistics disproving common beliefs, such as that, due to affirmative action, qualified white men can no longer get jobs (see Hermes Index).
Wilson’s refutation of these stories provides the Left with a strong defense against the charge of being PC thought police. The remarkable thing is that Wilson also begins to provide an offense, something that has been sorely lacking in the past few years. In addition to retelling the standard repertoire of stories about leftist political correctness, he gives examples of much more grievous behavior by the Right. These are included throughout the book, though they are especially concentrated in the second chapter, "Conservative Correctness."
I don’t mean to suggest that the entire book is one anecdote after another. There are a lot of them in the book, but interspersed with excellent analysis of the ways that the myth of political correctness has been used specifically against higher education, reasons for the myth’s acceptance, and reasons for the Left’s inability to answer accusations against itself. Wilson is not afraid to critique specific programs, such as affirmative action, or the Left in general, and does so very sensibly.
"The Myth of Speech Codes" is the weakest (and shortest) chapter of the book. It is strong when it looks closely at some of the most publicized college speech code controversies and exposes the hypocrisy of speech code opponents such as member of Congress Henry Hyde, who exempted religious colleges from his opposition to speech codes, thinks that flag burning should be illegal, and supported Edwin Meese’s Commision on Pornography. The weakness lies in Wilson’s attempts to draw conclusions about the correct place and form for college speech codes. Wilson could probably make a good argument about this, but here he attempts to fit it into the segues and conclusion of a short chapter, and it gets slightly muddled and trite. The chapter remains informative and readable, though, as it is largely composed of anecdotes and statistics, and the weakness of his analysis is confined to this chapter.
The Myth of Political Correctness is worth reading cover to cover, but each chapter also stands on its own for those who are interested in a particular issue but don’t have time to read the whole book (which, for the record, is not that long and goes pretty quickly). I especially recommend it as pre-vacation reading if you will be spending time with conservative family members, as it will provide you with enough ammunition for several months of arguments. And it really should be required reading for all of you who want to declare yourselves rebels against political correctness. Chances are, you wouldn’t want to spend time with most of the people who made sure you know about it and dislike it.