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PARTISAN REVIEW
oped in various forms of critical theory since the 1960s. This later view is
anything but liberal. A liberalism grounded in Enlightenment universals
has always been its main enemy, as in Stanley Fish's new collection
There's No Such Thing as Free Speech
(where he notes that "the structure
of liberal thought ... is my target in every one of these essays"). Yet
critical theory chose to speak in, the name of the libertarian movements
of the late sixties: black nationalism, anti-colonialism, radical feminism,
identity politics.
PC's emphasis on victim groups is a calcifi cation of the political
sympathies of the sixties into a repressive orthodoxy. As Todd Gitlin re–
cently remarked, "the long overdue opening of political initiative
to
mi–
norities, women, gays, and other of the traditional voiceless has devel–
oped its own methods of silen cing." The travail of liberals came from
seeing admirable political ideals harden into intolerance or flare up into
mindless rage. This is why liberals were slower than conservatives
to
pin–
point the abuses of PC: they had more to lose - not simply the solidarity
of the left but the elusive goa l of improving the condition of society's
least fortunate.
What makes PC so paradoxical is that at the core it is an attempt to
institutionalize virtue, a way of legislating enlightenment. For the left
this ideal of moral perfectibility centered on race and gender, for the
right on the sanctity of life, the nuclear family, and traditional sex roles.
Liberals opposed
to
PC have been placed in the position of being against
virtue, against two competing forms of righteousness which abridge
choice and justify intolerance. Both descend from the moralizing, puri–
tanical vein of American culture as well as the bland vision of a world in
which no one of any race, gender, or religious persuasion will ever en–
counter anything hurtful or offensive. Black students and older profes–
sionals have told me they're insulted at this assumption that they're so
fragile and vulnerable they need this protection - that they can't handle
words they've been dealing with all their li ves . Our secular liberal insti–
tutions are designed not to make life inoffensive, to sap the young of
ego strength, but to prevent the fierce moral will £i'om dictating terms
to its neighbors.
The last thing we need from the left or the right is a dictatorship of
the pure of heart. The special anguish of liberals is a result of sharing the
goals of the well-meaning left without accepting its methods or dog–
matic outlook. PC is rooted not in the libertarian thrust of the early
sixties, expressed by the SDS in its Port Huron Statement, but in the
il–
liberal strain articulated by Herbert Marcuse in his famous essay on
"Repressive Tolerance" and by Michel Foucault in many versions of his
Frankfurt-style argument that all seeming progress is actually an increase
