HILTON KRAMER
571
outset.
It is worth recalling that it was undergraduate students at some of
our most liberal universities who were the first to protest the hypocrisy
of Pc. The term "political correctness," in its current usage, was coined
by these undergraduates to ridicule the kind of instruction they were re–
ceiving from faculty recruited through affirmative-action hiring practices.
Such ridicule - almost always ascribed by PC
apparatchiks
to racist, sexist,
or homophobic motives - had to be quelled, however, to allow the
policy of affirmative action to complete the task of enforcing race- and
gender-based quotas and the race- and gender-based teaching that fol–
lowed in their wake. Hence the introduction of speech codes and other
official prohibitions restricting the open expression of all opinion that
could be construed as casting doubt on the new ideologies of race and
gender. For the juggernaut of affirmative action to succeed in its mission,
derision had to be made a punishable offense.
In
a great many areas of
cultural life, it now is.
Opponents of PC should have no illusions about the obstacles to be
surmounted in combating this ideological plague. They have to be pre–
pared for a long and unremitting struggle if its devastating effects are ever
to be repaired and reversed. The prospects for such a reversal are bleaker
than ever, of course, with a PC administration in the White House and a
PC Congress now adding their considerable administrative and legislative
weight to the PC orthodoxy already dominating the academy, the me–
dia, and the cultural bureaucracy. Coverage of the Senate hearings over
the appointment of Sheldon Hackney for the chairmanship of the
National Endowment for the Humanities was a reminder, if we needed
one, that not much in the way of truth or judicious inquiry is now to
be expected on these matters - even when they involve clear violations
of the First Amendment! - from the journalistic establishment, which is
itself hostage to affirmative-action hiring practices and the PC standards
of reporting that accompany them. Between the views of a liberal mili–
tant like Senator Kennedy and those of the editorial page of
The New
York Tillles
there is now no discernible ideological difference. Nor is
there any longer a significant political difference between the way
The
New York Times
and
The Nation,
for instance, report on PC issues.
Opponents of PC thus face an ideological monolith that daily increases
its power and prerogatives.
Still, I do not believe that opposition to the political correctness
movement - or
to
multiculturalism, its bastard offspring - is by any
means a lost cause. We are a long way from having become a totalitar–
ian society, despite the success of PC militants in moving us in the direc–
tion of what the British writer Paul Johnson has called liberal fascism.
