Right-Wing P.C. Is Still P.C.

By Michael Kinsley

Political fashions drift from left to right. The enthusiastic sectarian style of American communists during the 1930s and 1940s traveled with the neoconservatives when they washed ashore as immigrants to the land of conservatism during the 1970s and 1980s. The rallying cry of race-blind equal opportunity, which was of little interest to right-wingers during the heyday of the civil rights movement, was later taken as the right's own in the struggle over affirmative action. And now, having spent recent years diagnosing a virus of democracy they label "political correctness," some conservatives seem to be succumbing themselves.

What exactly is p.c.? By now it has degenerated into an all-purpose term of political abuse that means little more than "a view I disagree with." But it is meant to suggest a stifling orthodoxy, an intolerance of opposing views that verges on censorship, victimization chic and a stagy oversensitivity to robust remarks. All these elements have lately surfaced on the right, most noticeably in controversies over Clinton Administration nominees.

Attacks on alleged political correctness are themselves often attempts to narrow the range of permissible debate and embrace the chic of victimization. In a May commencement speech about the new intolerance, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas complained that "a new brand of stereotypes and ad hominem assaults are surfacing across the nation's college campuses, in the national media, in Hollywood and among the . . . 'cultural elite' " aimed at "those who dare to disagree with the latest ideological fad." If anyone has ever actually prevented Thomas from expressing his views, I would like to hear of it. Vigorous dissent is not censorship.

In his speech Thomas asserted remarkably, "One of the things I looked forward to when I first went to Washington was the opportunity to debate and discuss difficult issues with those who had competing ideas," but no one was interested. He cannot have tried very hard. This assertion lends special poignance to Thomas' confirmation testimony that he had never debated Roe v. Wade.

Meanwhile Sheldon Hackney, former president of the University of Pennsylvania and President Clinton's nominee for chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, was savaged for saying, after black students seized and threw away copies of a campus newspaper with an offending column, "Two important university values, diversity and open expression, seem to be in conflict." In fact, Hackney's statement also referred to "the overriding importance of freedom of expression," about which "there can be no compromise." (And the students involved face university punishment for their actions.) But merely for suggesting that the feelings of minority students are a concern at all in a diverse academic community, Hackney violated the rules of right-wing political correctness. He didn't get the mantra exactly right.

Feelings are what Dr. Joycelyn Elders, Clinton's nominee for Surgeon General, stands accused of hurting with her controversial remarks about antiabortion activists (they have a "love affair with the fetus," and so on). Elders is, as TIME put it, "a verbal bomb thrower." The sensitivities of Roman Catholics and Fundamentalist Protestants were said to have been offended by her tart tongue. No doubt she wishes that she had bitten her tongue on an occasion or two. If that is not promotion of a stifling orthodoxy, what is?

The case of Lani Guinier is slightly different. Her writings, far from being overly vivid, were downright obtuse. But in them she presented some novel ideas for minority representation in a democracy. When Clinton killed her nomination for head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, Guinier warned against "a new intellectual orthodoxy, in which thoughtful people can no longer debate provocative ideas without denying the country their talents as public servants."

This echoes Robert Bork's complaint in 1987 that his rejection by the Senate would cause potential Supreme Court nominees to avoid leaving a paper trail. But there is a key difference. President Reagan chose Bork precisely because of his paper trail of radical views. President Clinton chose Guinier as an experienced civil rights litigator. There was no danger the tentative academic / musings in Guinier's writings would become locked into policy, even if she had wanted them to. Guinier was doomed for her thinking, not for anything she might actually have done in the job -- a classic p.c. exercise.

The reductio ad absurdum of right-wing p.c. may be the opposition to Tara J. O'Toole, Clinton's nominee for Assistant Secretary of Energy. O'Toole's nomination has been held up by two Republican Senators because -- and follow this closely, please -- she belongs to a study group that once had the name Marxist Feminist Group. The group, which meets about three times a year, changed its name to Northeast Feminist Scholars years before O'Toole joined it. The Administration wrote the Senate that O'Toole "has never endorsed Marxist theory, nor has she ever had the impression that any other members of N.F.S. held such a belief." Why the political beliefs of other members of a three-times-a-year discussion group attended by an Energy Department official are any of the Senate's business is certainly a mystery.

There are legitimate, bothersome examples of p.c. intolerance on both sides of the political spectrum. But when you start getting into guilt by association, you are beyond conventional p.c. of the left or right and back into the more virulent form of right-wing p.c. known as McCarthyism.