@camlok,
Quote:Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy
It's a very good history of the thing and everyone ought to read it. I have yet to bump into a conservative on boards like this one who use the term (and almost all of them do use it in a deeply unreflective and cliched manner) who knows this history. I read Bloom's book when it came out in the late 80s, I read Kimball in his pieces at NYRB and I read D'Souza's piece when it was published in the Atlantic shortly after Bloom's book was published. And because I've read Mayer's Dark Money (and earlier had been studying the role of the Scaifes and Coors and Bradleys and Olins, etc, I knew the story behind the ideologically-driven funding that pushed all this stuff forward. (Earlier in this thread, I've written about all this).
But in any case, Wiegel gets this exactly right:
Quote:More than any particular obfuscation or omission, the most misleading aspect of these books was the way they claimed that only their adversaries were “political”.
...In truth, these crusaders against political correctness were every bit as political as their opponents. As Jane Mayer documents in her book, Dark Money: the Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Bloom and D’Souza were funded by networks of conservative donors – particularly the Koch, Olin and Scaife families – who had spent the 1980s building programmes that they hoped would create a new “counter-intelligentsia”. (The New Criterion, where Kimball worked, was also funded by the Olin and Scaife Foundations.) In his 1978 book A Time for Truth, William Simon, the president of the Olin Foundation, had called on conservatives to fund intellectuals who shared their views: “They must be given grants, grants, and more grants in exchange for books, books, and more books.”
These skirmishes over syllabuses were part of a broader political programme – and they became instrumental to forging a new alliance for conservative politics in America, between white working-class voters and small business owners, and politicians with corporate agendas that held very little benefit for those people
The night before last, I watched again the documentary on the making of Monty Python's The Life of Brian. That film, even before release, caused a huge shitstorm in Britain and the US. Many conservative Christians were offended. This was, rather obviously, an example of a right wing (mainly) constituency insisting that others behave or speak in a "politically correct" manner. This was an example of "identity politics". But right wing types do not, as Weigel says, perceive it that way because they've been trained to think of the thing as a left wing phenomenon exclusively.
Another example is this thread. Because I and others contributing are not Americans, it is not "politically correct" for us to speak negatively about Trump or modern US conservatism. And aside from nationality, just the continuing criticism and satirization of Trump or conservatives violates most right wing contributors' sense of the "politically correct". We offend and we ought not to, they seem to believe and insist.
Nice catch, camlok. I hope folks read this. It's important history.
