MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department, and dozens of once-au–
tonomous federal agencies. If neoconservatives deserve credit for having
pointed up the follies of academe in the 1980s, they did so without
shading or discrimination, mixing harmless incidents, serious abuses, and
half-understood theories to paint a picture of apocalyptic decline.
Meanwhile, they turned a blind eye on the administration's shameful re–
treat on civil rights and its crude manipulation of social symbols - the
flag, the fetus, the AIDS epidemic, Willie Horton - to demonize blacks,
gays, welfare mothers, and liberals in general. Neoconservative intellec–
tuals, without much power themselves, gave Republicans a new ideolog–
ical heft, while the religious right hounded candidates who failed to toe
the line on social issues. Conformity and intolerance have plagued both
sides in the culture wars.
PC is a form of groupthink fueled by paranoia and demonology and
imposed by political or social intimidation. During the Reagan-Bush
years, Cabinet officers could fall under a cloud if their ideas received fa–
vorable notice in
The New York Times,
just as academics could be bad–
gered or ostracized if they audibly departed from the political consensus
of their colleagues on race, feminism, the canon, or American imperial–
ism. At academic conferences and even routine department meetings, a
certain politics was simply assumed. Alternative views, on the rare occa–
sion they were expressed, would be greeted with embarrassed silence or
withering scorn. Similarly, in forums organized by neoconservatives,
those who spoke up for liberal positions on affirmative action or on
Israel's occupied territories were greeted with savage vituperation, with
scarcely a show of civility; the right demonized its adversaries as much as
the left.
PC is the opposite of pluralism, which presupposes that your oppo–
nent may actually have something worth saying and every right to say it.
Hilton Kramer calls PC "liberal McCarthyism," but it conflicts dramati–
cally with any known form of liberalism - by forwarding speech codes
on some campuses, for example, and hygienic limitations on speech else–
where. Ironically, this has allowed some conservatives to emerge as
champions of free speech, while others have allied themselves with radical
feminists
to
support local ordinances against pornography. In PC, both
ends of the spectrum meet, united against liberal tolerance.
Many conservatives would argue that liberalism itself went through a
post-sixties mutation that conflicted sharply with classic liberal positions.
This is not even half-true. The real fault-line lies between a liberalism
which is open, pragmatic, morally concerned, libertarian - balancing the
rights of the individual against the needs of the community - and a
complex of skeptical, postmodern, anti-foundationalist positions devel-
