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PARTISAN REVLEW
dictates.
Some of this is purely cynical, of course. It is a way of getting ahead
in a political environment that now anathematizes all dissent from PC
orthodoxy as racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on. But whether the
support for PC is cynical or genuine, the result is the same. At every level
of culture and the arts, PC has already altered the terms of employment,
the agenda of events, the patterns of patronage, the language of criti–
cism, the choice of books to be published and accorded favorable notice,
and even the way bookshops stock their shelves and display their titles.
Careers are now made and unmade on the basis of PC criteria, and pro–
fessional life is divided along PC lines. So, too, is the social scene that is
an important accessory to professional life.
There is resistance to political correctness, to be sure - I take this
symposium to be an example of it - but it is now resistance to an estab–
lished order of power and belief. And such resistance as exists is greatly
impaired, if not entirely crippled, by a refusal, especially among liberals,
to examine the origins of PC in the illiberal doctrines and policies that
were given a liberal sanction as the movement was gathering its forces.
Foremost among these doctrines and policies is the concept of
"affirmative action," which, in establishing race-based and gender-based
criteria of employment and preferment, succeeded in demonizing tradi–
tional standards of merit in favor of "minority" quotas.
Once the policy of affirmative action was embraced and enforced as
legitimate liberal doctrine, it was bound
to
have a shattering effect on
liberalism itself. Acceptance of affirmative action entailed the dismantling
of the meritocratic system that had long been the foundation of liberal
culture. When the liberals caved in to the radicals on this issue, they sur–
rendered their right to invoke any but a race- or gender-based criterion
of judgment in the assessment of professional accomplishment. Their
docile support of affirmative action thus guaranteed that liberals would
be made politically hostage to the imperatives of the political correctness
movement. For one of the purposes of the movement is, after all,
to
protect the beneficiaries of affirmative action from criticism based on
what had once been the intellectual standards of the liberal meritocracy,
and this protection racket soon degenerated into a programmatic effort
to discredit all critical discourse - which means, in effect, all standards of
cultural achievement - that are not based on race and gender. It is be–
cause of this history of liberal surrender to an illiberal ethos that the at–
tempt lately made by certain liberals to mount their own attack on PC
is so hollow, for it addresses only the effects of the political correctness
movement and leaves its causes unexamined. Or else it takes refuge in the
mendacious claim that PC militancy has somehow been caused by the
actions of conservatives who have opposed political correctness from the
