Hate on Chait

Friends, foes, and practitioners of PC check in.

Who?

So, to state the obvious: Jon Chait is a jerk who somehow manages to be both condescending and wounded in his piece on political correctness. 

He gets the basic nature of language policing wrong, and his solutions are wrong, and he’s a centrist Democrat scold who is just as eager to shut people out of the debate as the people he criticizes. 

That’s true.

That smear (though Chait may be a jerk and a centrist Democrat, for all I know) was from somebody who agrees with Chait there is a real problem here, though apparently only because it drives away novices wanting to learn about and move into the more radical left.

Not exactly Chait's concern.

The truth about "political correctness" is that it doesn't actually exist

Amanda Taub says Chait is totally wrong and lies about the expression.

The concept of political correctness was explained to me decades ago at my first meeting of the DSA in Pittsburgh by people who approved and were all in on the propaganda war the expression belongs to.

The idea shocked and offended me and struck me just as it does Chait as profoundly contrary to liberal values.

AT is far too deep inside the radical left not to realize Chait is right on the money.

Arthur Chu just doesn't like "white moderates," labels Chait that, and buries him in self-righteous snark

Chait talks back

None of this is going to make the least bit of difference to anyone.

I despised this stuff in the 1970s and I despise it now.

I note in passing how interesting it is that he displays a mandatory PC satisfaction (both the display and the satisfaction are mandatory) that people want to conceal their very real racism and sexism.

I note as well with interest the ideological ambiguity of his orthodoxy concerning McCarthyism in which he, as it were, deplores the witch hunt while insisting witches were very real and very dangerous.

[Aside.

Williamson is right that calling a black person "a primate" is not racist per se, though I would guess it was intended to be.

We are, in fact, all of us primates.

Calling a black adult a monkey in a tone of derision is more likely a racial insult than a merely personal one, however, in our society, though calling black (or any) children little monkeys is often an expression of affection or merely playful.

Too, denigrating someone's views as those of a "sad white man," as AT does those of Chait, is both racial and sexual mockery - perfectly PC, though PC requires the existence of anti-white racism anti-male sexism be denied altogether, though it urgently encourages and trades on hatred of whites and hatred of men.

Language policing is neither a science nor an art but an aggressive and essential feature of the PC movement.

/Aside.]

I do not comment on Chait's own PC orthodoxy re the name of the Washington Redskins.

Sameul Goldman at AC

Personally, I would hate to think liberals universally or even generally are really silly enough to value free expression because it ensures truth will prevail.

It doesn't, nor does it ensure society will move progressively toward the (or some) liberal or other leftish ideal of social justice.

On the other hand, censorship or extra-governmental coercion used to control expression only appears to mold minds, if it even achieves that appearance; it only succeeds in molding speech.

Russians were not just relieved but thrilled with the collapse of the Soviet Communist dictatorship that exercised repressive censorship and had total control of culture, media, and education right up to the end.

China saw the ruling reds abandon not just Maoism but any semblance of Communism with the exhausted relief of survivors of a Tsunami.

[Aside.

Delusions about the importance of what is said are ubiquitous in the blabosphere.

Recall Ms. Kirkpatrick's famous nonsense that right wing dictatorships were less objectionable than left because, among other reasons, right wing ones always collapsed in the end, whereas Communism is forever.

This imaginary difference was supposed to be owing in part to the real difference that Communism exercised much more thorough control over all spheres of expression.

/Aside.]

Millions of Germans came out from under the rubble of Nazidom pleading they had never supported any of the madness, and most likely most were telling the truth.

What censorship does for sure is undermine the free politics of modern republics and monarchies.

And free politics is what we do instead of leaving politics to the arbitration of naked violence.

Something to bear in mind.

PS.

Bear in mind that for a lot of those checking in on this matter it's a question in the professional ethics of polemics - which they agree is really a thing, as the kids say.

(Why are all these people under 50? Why are so many under 40?)

Michelle Goldberg at The Nation

She writes about an article that made fun of the idea of paternity leave,

At the same time, it was a reactionary piece, deserving of at least mild ridicule. 

People who disagreed with it were right to say so. 

If the overall response was overwhelming, that’s not the fault of any one person registering his or her opinion.

The last two sentences are truisms of a free society.

The first is telling.

I think I may have pointed out, once or twice, the essential role of morality in social control and its intimate connection with coercion in any of its many guises.

Recall Chait's characterization of PC.

Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate.

And as I wrote in an earlier post,

Perfectly true, but it will not do as a definition because it leaves out the coercion, menace, threat, and frequently near and sometimes actual violence essential to the thing.

The entire aim of PC is coercive and brutal, and its targets are not limited to the extreme right, or even just the right.

As some of Chait's examples show, their view is that if you are not with them you are against them, and they treat you accordingly.

Vide posts labeled "amoralism."

This Wikipedia article on "politically correct" is not altogether historically correct.

Too much in common with Amanda Taub.

A point to remember in all this is that Nazi thugs were just thugs dressed up to be Nazis because that gave them license.

Likewise the Communist street-fighters of late Weimar, say.

Red Guards, PC thought police, Jihaders, etc.

What's wrong with them is that they are thugs.

What's wrong with the ideas and movements is that they provide license and even careers open to talent to thugs.