668
PARTISAN REVIEW
the real root of politics, of what is expedient.
It
has been politically ex–
pedient, or good politics, to define the African-American as a
victim.
That the African has been a victim, and a victim of political process, as
the European Jew has been a victim, is true. Can you correct through
politics? Of course you can - that is what politics is all about - but that
doesn't necessarily make politics correct. We can all recognize that ef–
forts to correct a politics that discriminates represent the slow sea change
of constitutional movement toward the common good. To create a
politics that constantly judges what is correct, or rather expedient, and
creates categories of discrimination, is the very opposite.
It
poses a disas–
trous challenge to the idea of fairness. Political correctness and its fungus
"victimology" heralds a twentieth-century world in which not health
but disease, past and naturally present, is what nations aspire to. The cor–
relative in the university literature course is the teaching of the novel, the
short story, the poem as the confession of a victim or the chart of vic–
timization. Literature taught from this perspective alone begins to shade
into an ingenious form of propaganda.
If
political correctness was only a religion of expediency, it would
not be so dangerous, but like all false gods it has an uglier face, for what
the decent, smiling mask conceals is its aspect as fashion. There is some–
thing noble about political expediency, for it recognizes that sometimes
compromises with cherished principle have
to
be made for the sake of a
difficult present situation. I saw such expediency practiced all the time in
my father's career - such compromises are the stuff of politics. If my fa–
ther ruined his political career by refusing
to
be expedient at many mo–
ments, fighting on for lost causes, stubbornly voting against what he
considered corrupt giveaways, still he understood its importance and did
not necessarily denigrate it. We have been witness here in New York
to
a fashion show in which a candidate with strong political credentials,
Elizabeth Holtzman, was judged by the media to be the less glamorous
of the two female office seekers in the last Senate campaign. Her hard–
hitting criticism of Geraldine Ferraro was declared politically incorrect.
It wasn't her criticism, however, but her presence in the race that irri–
tated the opinion-makers. Holtzman was warned to stand aside from the
political process, and when she didn't, she was blamed for the defeat of
the other woman. When the male candidate proved to be an incompe–
tent campaigner and was defeated, as Elizabeth (I freely admit she is a
personal friend) had predicted, she was blamed yet again. Now she has
been the subject of vitriolic attacks at dinner tables of normally intelli–
gent people in Manhattan, to whom political correctness is not just a
religion but the very fabric of their lives.
We arrive at the oxymoron. For the sake of correctness, or fashion,
political correctness asks that politics, that is, the politics of judgment,
