The political correctness conspiracy theory

“Political correctness”. Colloquially, the term is used to denote the adherence to some political orthodoxy, or the converse, “politically incorrect” is applied to ideas outside of a perceived (or imagined) orthodoxy, often to claim that the free thought of the proponents of these ideas is being oppressed, repressed or suppressed.

Who hasn’t run into something like this on the odd instance? I can recall once stating that popular, easier reading books were a good way to get children of lesser reading ability involved in literature. Apparently, at least according to one young lady (and nobody else in attendance) I couldn’t refer, in any way, to students with less developed skills, as in anyway having less ability. I even got the “you can’t say that!” line.

Apparently, my notion of unequal ability was “politically incorrect”, although you would be hard pressed finding an orthodoxy cracking down on me. It was just the one student. It’s not like there wasn’t an academic from the oft-lambasted-as-PC liberal arts on hand, but he seemed to be loving it (and the usual ribald stuff I brought to class back in the day).

It was a pretty marginal orthodoxy in this case (as it is in many cases of “political correctness”), so the oppression angle can’t always be taken seriously. Furthermore, accusations of “political correctness” are quite often levelled when nobody is trying to silence the “politically incorrect” at all. Not a “you can’t say that” being asserted explicitly or implicitly.

“Politically incorrect”, in the common vernacular, can also just be code for “may offend some people”. The way you could describe each and every episode of The Chaser’s War on Everything. But then, how meaningful is the term “PC” as a pejorative if it’s able to be used as a marketing angle to popularise something? Hardly indicative of some Big Brother figure ready to chide you for free-thought is it?

The common conception of “political correctness” isn’t really such a meaningful term in general. Sure, when someone says “you can’t say that!”, then perhaps in that instance, the term has some use without being vapid, banal or comedic, but that’s often not the case.

There is one more common use of the term “politically correct” that is exceptionally vapid. That piece of anti-PC rhetoric used to voice disapproval of a piece of policy enacted or advocated for by whatever political party is being opposed by the accuser.

Helping minorities being an oft-repeated example. “They are helping the disabled! I don’t want my tax dollars spent on that kind of political correctness!” Which is to say (the standard libertarian argument against such spending aside), they disagree with what the government is doing and there is something inherently wrong with the Government not doing what they want it to.

One doesn’t have to be in power to be labelled politically correct of course. You can be fashionable at the same time as being unpopular with the electorate you see. And while anything to do with minorities are a common theme, you can be labelled politically correct in any policy area. Take arts funding for example.

All you have to do is contradict the political beliefs of the self-styled politically incorrect, and you become politically correct by extension! It’s your disagreement that is wrong, so stop being orthodox and fall into line! (Yes, I know that doesn’t make sense but I am talking about a pretty vapid concept here).

This is probably the most telling use of the term “political correctness”. One simply levels a charge of political correctness against whatever policy is undesirable and the debate is settled. Of course, in this case, “politically correct” is being used in the same fashion as the “racism shut-up” (or any of the other “PC shut-ups”) that the “politically incorrect” lament.

But hey, it’s not a double standard if they do it.

This pretty much sums up the common use of the terms “politically correct” and “politically incorrect”. However, there is a more considered version of the term that most people are unaware of. Average John Bloke in the street may use the words “politically correct”, but when the culture warriors of the right use the term to address John, they don’t necessarily mean exactly the same thing.

Sure, the more considered version has all the trite refrains of “oppression by leftists!” and double-speak advocacy for diversity of opinion, but there is often more to it than just that.

Where the conspiracy theory came from

Back during the 1980s over in America, back when the Reagan administration and assorted political allies were engaging in organised and offensive culture war not seen in a long time, a group of conservative thinkers got together and formulated a theory of political correctness. This theory alleged that political correctness was a deliberate conspiracy calculated by a group of neo-Marxists otherwise known as the “Frankfurt School”.

The Frankfurt School, were a group of neo-Marxists who were run-out-of-town so to speak, during WWII (for being critics of Fascism as Marxists usually are, and for the fact that most of them were Jews). The Frankfurt School, aside from being proponents and developers of a Critical Theory of Marxism, were known as critics of party politics, particularly that of the Communist Party who they claimed employed a narrow, select version of Marxism to affirm the decisions of the party.

While one can make several criticisms of the Frankfurt School, being party-players isn’t one of them.

Now one of the people who were key in generating this theory of political correctness that accused the Frankfurt School of conspiracy to silence dissenting views, was Bill Lind of (the poorly named) Accuracy in Academia fame.

Some background on the PC-conspiracy theorists

Lind has been giving tours of US campuses for years,  giving talks on the topic of how the left is indoctrinating students, and oppressing dissenting academics, all as a part of “Cultural Marxism”, which is another term for “Political Correctness”. How does he describe the effect of this “Cultural Marxism” upon American Academia?

“For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.”

(Bill Lind, 2000)

Or indeed, the wrong words denounced as politically incorrect. In the words of Accuracy in Academia (AIA)..

“Accuracy in Academia, a non-profit research group based in Washington, D. C., wants schools to return to their traditional mission-the quest for truth. To promote this goal, AIA documents and publicizes political bias in education in Campus Report, its monthly newsletter.”

(Accuracy in Academia, 2008 )

In the 1980s, and to this day through Campus Report, AIA had a monitoring campaign that had the following Modus Operandi.

• AIA will investigate reports from students of seriously inaccurate information being imparted by classroom instructors—either through lectures or required reading material.
• AIA will try to discuss the matter with the teacher to determine whether or not the complaint is valid and to see if the teacher would be willing to make a correction. – Emphasis added.
• In cases where the professor declines this opportunity, AIA will employ other means to call the error to the attention of students and others who may be interested, including AIA supporters throughout the country.

(From an excerpt from Accuracy, Fairness and Balance in Higher Education, reprinted at People for The American Way, 2008 )

So to determined if the complaint is valid, a politically polarised right-wing group simply calls up/writes to the academic? No formal approach? No due process? No peer consultation? And if the academic doesn’t subject themselves to this kangaroo court of validity determination, Accuracy in Academia will scream that the sky is falling?

Americans, at least those in academia,  have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think, indeed!

AIA’s parent body, Accuracy in Media (AIM), isn’t much better. In the 1980s, they campaigned to and managed to get Raymond Bonner of the New York Times fired for claiming that troops allied to the US had massacred villagers in El Salvador. Years later, the UN in excavating the alleged site, confirmed Bonner’s account.

Bonner didn’t lose his job for a lack of accuracy, he lost it because he had a different opinion to AIM, the founder of which (Reed Irvine, a fellow conspiracy theorist to Lind) was a supporter of extreme measures against guerrillas by the right-wing totalitarian regime in El Salvador. Clearly Bonner got on the wrong side of Irvine.

Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia aren’t supporters of free speech and free thought, they are opponents of it. As a fund raiser, a book by AIM board member James Tyson called Target America was used. In the book, Tyson called for government ombudsmen to be present in major media outlets to police accuracy during contentious, and complex issues.

[Please note that the following paragraphs in italics, within the context of this post, are currently a matter of contention. For comments specific to these paragraphs, please see the discussion here.]

As I write this, AIA has as its featured book in its bookstore, Blacklisted by History by M. Stanton Evans. A book telling us how Joe McCarthy really was justified in the measures he used to out Communists, because the author, in five years of research using recently declassified documents, hasn’t found a single example where the accused were innocent of being communists.

This is negationism at its usual silly level. Two errors stand out immediately; firstly Evans’ proof is a positive conclusion from a negative premise – a logical fallacy. Secondly, just being a Communist isn’t enough to justify McCarthy’s antics, because just being a Communist per se doesn’t make one an enemy of the state unless of course you live in a totalitarian regime where free thought isn’t permitted.

It’s like saying that one is guilty of being a Capitalist. It’s not a crime! It’s freedom of association. You have to go further to find guilt than identify one’s political persuasion, i.e. the criminal means by which they attempt to attain their political goals – Iran-Contra anyone?

I’m not against the re-evaluation of history and being somewhat Popperian, you can gather what I think of historicism, but let’s not predicate revisions upon shonky reasoning (for obvious political motive). Whatever we may conclude about McCarthy’s character or that of his targets, one thing is still clear; McCarthy’s methods still violated first amendment rights and his motivation was right-wing political.

Of course, this negationism fits in just fine with AIA/AIM. Intervention to stop dissenting views is a common theme of their political ilk. McCarthy was justified (thus validating Lind’s “For the first time in our history…” line), government media ombudsmen are justified and the like of Bonner need to be run out of a job.

So you will have to forgive me if I am a tad incredulous when those who claim to oppose political correctness in support of free speech, are actually demonstrably opponents of free speech.

The conspiracy theory such as it is

“What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, “What is the theory?” The theory is to criticize… What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory.”

(Bill Lind, 2000 )

Before I get stuck back into Lind, I’m reminded of another quote by (you guessed it) Karl Popper.

“Marx’s own condemnation of our society makes sense. For Marx’s theory contains the promise of a better future. But the theory becomes vacuous and irresponsible if this promise is withdrawn, as it is by Adorno and Horkheimer.” – Karl Popper, 1994.

Now, I think this is a valid concern more so than a terminal flaw but Popper was always prone to a bit of hyperbole (and his criticism of Adorno and Horkheimer in this case seem ironic considering his criticisms of Marx based on his acting as a prophet). This all can be seen in light of Kant and Hume (if you ask me), with the inspiration of Kant providing a good part of the motive for criticism, but with Popper’s concerns about the lack of positive content being echoed earlier by Hume when he advocated only a practical skepticism.

You could probably inform this with a bit of Nietzsche as well, on the matter of Nihilism. Indeed, there is probably quite a lot we could go on at length about this, sensibly of course.

What we get though, from Lind, is the notion that being criticised by Feminists (et. al.) is bad per se. This shouldn’t surprise us considering AIM/AIE’s afore mentioned penchant for the censorious.

Indeed, you often get this aversion to criticism in the casual, every-day invocation of allegations of political correctness. Often all you have to do is criticise someone’s ideas (usually of the political right) and you are branded some kind of PC-bully trying to stifle debate (presumably echo chambers are the only venue where these people experience “debate”).

Of course, Lind still has to tie the Frankfurt School to modern day alleged political oppression against conservatives. After placing a bizarre emphasis on the Frankfurt School being “to a man, Jewish”, Lind briefly tells us the tale of how the Frankfurt School came to the US and how one of them, Herbert Marcuse stuck around in the US while the Frankfurt School returned to Europe after the war. Unfortunately, he goes overboard with the hyperbole…

“And whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there – when the student rebels come into Adorno’s classroom, he calls the police and has them arrested – Herbert Marcuse, who remained here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United States.” – Emphasis added.

(Bill Lind, 2000 )

It is true that two of the works of Marcuse in particular (Lind only mentions Eros and Civilization – presumably he finds the title self-evidently smutty or something – One-Dimensional Man was also of influence) were taken as influence by radical students and the New Left in general. However, to imply that Marcuse was somehow the architect of student radicalism (a claim erroneously made by some in the left as well) is wrong-headed. There were several figures other than Marcuse involved in inspiring the New Left, Marcuse himself disavowed leadership or fatherhood of the New Left and the notion of him scheming manipulation of the New Left is just a silly, unfalsifiable allegation.

This paranoid allusion to a plot, for which no concrete supporting evidence is available nor no falsification possible, demonstrates the pervasive character of the theory and those that adhere to it. In The Open Society and It’s Enemies (yes, Karl Popper again), Popper argues that paranoid conspiracy theories are imagined up that are predicated based on prejudice (be it class, race etc) and provided the very foundation of totalitarianism.

Lind’s treatment of Marcuse’s theory is at its best shallow and rhetorical. You may criticise me for going to the same text of Lind’s, but really he’s like a broken record. Find another essay/lecture by him elsewhere if you please, but don’t expect to differ in essential detail.

“Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines “liberating tolerance” as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left.”

(Bill Lind, 2000 )

This is just a straw man argument and a pretty obviously group-serving one at that. Marcuse’s “liberating tolerance” was essentially an intolerance of intolerance argument similar to that in another of Popper’s quotes I’m fond of repeating (but which I won’t to save you from the monotony).

What Marcuse was intolerant of was of repression, particularly of minorities against absolutist majoritarian rule (i.e. the tyranny of the majority) or those who had suffered from popular, long term repression (such as women – hardly a minority). Right and left had diddly squat to do with it. That many in the right chose to faciliate repression isn’t material unless you want to entertain fallacies – it’s the repression that isn’t tolerated, not the political right.

Sadly for Lind, and anyone reading or listening to his tripe with an un-critical mind, this dissembling is as close as he gets to demonstrating a link between the theories of the Frankfurt School and alleged political oppression of the right wing. A self-serving, gross misrepresentation of a single point amongst very many, by a single academic amongst several, that just happened to be in the right place at the right time to be accused of a plot and to have that unfalsifiable accusation retrospectively levelled against his colleagues from back in the 1930s.

You would think with all that the Frankfurt School wrote, he could come up with something a bit more substantive! But no. It’s at this point that the conclusion comes in, loaded of course with a bunch of unexamined premises not hitherto discussed in Lind’s diatribe.

“In conclusion, America today is in the throws of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology enforced by the power of the state. In “hate crimes” we now have people serving jail sentences for political thoughts… The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness on campus is part of it… And we don’t recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off. My message today is that it’s not funny, it’s here, it’s growing and it will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have ever defined as our freedom and our culture.”

(Bill Lind, 2000 )

In essence, all Lind is rallying against that is outside of his fevered imagination, is the simple notion, espoused by Marcuse, essentially that the state shouldn’t facilitate the freedom to deprive dis-empowered people of their freedom. It’s not exactly a uniquely Marxist notion at all, nor is it even at odds with much of the enlightenment thought that informed the founding documents of Lind’s very own nation.

There has been plenty of consideration given to these matters for hundreds of years, with many schools of thought and published work worthy of further analysis. Instead, Lind bypasses all of this and reduces things to a paranoid and demonstrably faulty and dishonest theory about how a bunch of neo-Marxist Jews plotted to destroy America with political correctness.

This conspiracy theory is as Popper has observed of conspiracy theories in general, the basis of a totalitarian movement. One that seeks to gain ideological purity within academia and in the media. The disclosed methodology employed by AIA is clearly one of a witch hunt and the case of Bonner testifies to the nature of AIA’s parent group, AIM.

If you don’t tow the line of these totalitarian thugs, you are being politically correct. Which is of course means you need correction!

Conclusion

You can see now how in the context of this conspiracy theory, “political correctness” resembles the last of the colloquial definitions I mentioned wherein “political correctness” simply means non-adherence to an orthodoxy of self-styled pariah status. By not being strictly in line with those who speciously claim to be the victims of oppression, you become part of the orthodoxy that supposedly oppresses them.

No matter if you merely criticise their reasoning when their reasoning is defective. All that is required is that you disagree, they slap you with “political correct” and it’s debate over!

The common language version of “political correctness” isn’t a particularly meaningful term, but the (ill) considered, formulated conspiracy theory is utterly without virtue. Unvirtuous when Lind dissembles about it and unvirtuous when the pseudo-intellectual right in the media parrot it.

Even less thought goes into it once the sage wisdom of the intellectual right trickles down to poor old average John Bloke. All the while, a good part of the right campaigns to remove freedom of speech, supposedly in the name of freedom of speech, so that they can once again put to boot into the repressed without the inconvenience of being criticised by those neo-Marxist Jews from the Frankfurt School, or anyone else who can be lumped in with them.

~ Bruce