MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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of manipulation and control.
Political correctness on the left has been through many phases in the
past twenty years - Marxist, anticolonial, poststructuralist, radical femi–
nist, now multicultural - but it has been consistent in preferring solidar–
ity over autonomy, the community over the individual, ethnic or racial
pride over a broader, more universal view of human rights. Leftist PC has
less interest in civil rights than in exposing "hegemony" and delegitimjz–
ing authority. It has focused on blacks, gays, and women more as victims
than as agents; it is concerned more with exposing ideology than with
achieving practical results. PC chooses psychological and cultural critique
over politics of any kind , which helps explain its success in the closed-off
world of the university. As Gitlin remarks of the theorists of identity
politics, "the more their political life is confined to the library, the more
aggressive their language."
In this focus on cultural warfare and ideological purity, conservative
polemicists have often mirrored their opponents. With his hatred of rela–
tivism and love of the classical tradition, Allan Bloom was genuinely
committed to his own eccentric vision of Western civilization, anchored
in Plato and Rousseau at their least tolerant, the Plato and Rousseau
who were our most eloquent spokesmen for a dictatorship of virtue.
But Bloom's successors, Hilton Kramer, William Bennett, Roger
Kimball, Dinesh D'Souza, merely pay lip service to a complacent,
unexamined notion of tradition. Their real aim is trashing the left,
satirizing its absurdities and excesses, winning the ideological combat.
Writing about the university, they idealize an earlier academic
environment in which many issues were simply never discussed, just as they
hypostatize the canon into a fixed body of masterpieces, an official set of
Western values rather than a constantly shifting series of rhetorical and
moral challenges.
Here too both ends meet, for today's ersatz radicals loudly condemn
the ossified but factitious tradition that conservatives invent and cele–
brate. On the other hand, in the liberal view that came to the fore in
the sixties, the classics of Western literature and philosophy were unset–
tling, prismatic, and subversive. Echoing W. H. Auden, Lionel Trilling
was fond of saying that great books read us as much as we read them.
John Searle describes how his generation
found the critical tradition that runs from Socrates through
The
Federalist Papers,
through the writings of Mill and Marx, down
to
the twentieth century, to be liberating from the stuffy conventions of
traditional American politics and pieties.. . Ironically, the same
tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an
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