CHAPTER TWO

Three kinds of leftism

The campaign against political correctness took aim at what were presented as the excesses of the great social movements associated with the New Left, such as feminism, the gay and lesbian rights movements, and the struggle against racism.

But the history of these social movements was not as straightforward as this presentation suggests. Rather than an uncomplicated progression, the movements — and the left as a whole — developed through phases associated with distinct tendencies, in ways that became very important for the right’s struggle against political correctness. In a sense, the emergence of the modern left could be understood less as a simple evolution and more as a series of ruptures, a process marked by the clash between distinct, and often antagonistic, sets of ideas.

The great revolts of the sixties emerged from a period of social stability and political quiescence. In the United States, an upsurge of industrial action after World War II had been beaten back before the Cold War marginalised both the unions and the Old Left. Buffeted by anti-communism, the activists of the 1950s and the early 1960s were, for the most part, committed to what might be called ‘palliationist politics’, in which a minority of courageous, middle-class activists spoke and acted on behalf of the oppressed, who weren’t expected to take part themselves. Palliationist politics generally involved an embrace of respectability, a commitment to lobbying mainstream politicians for limited reforms, and a general sense that change would be wrought by well-meaning and well-educated people working to assist a largely passive constituency.

For instance, the most important early political organisations for gay men and lesbians in the US were (respectively) the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis. Though its members were committed and brave, the Mattachine Society was assiduously non-confrontational, even secretive, and liberal rather than radical (despite the communist convictions of some of its leaders). Its mostly middle-class members just wanted, as Lillian Faderman put it, ‘to be allowed to live just like any other citizen and not to be told they were different from their fellow Americans’.1 The Daughters of Bilitis were similar. Again, the very existence of the group was courageous; again, its mission was much defined by respectability, with its members emphasising their conventional clothing and appearance as they sought to integrate lesbianism into the mainstream.2

The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56, a key struggle of the early civil-rights movement, signalled a shift in American politics, one that opened up space for wider dissent after the scarifying experience of McCarthyism. On the campuses, the fight against segregation led to the formation of the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee, while Students for a Democratic Society emerged as a radical offshoot from the Social Democratic League for Industrial Democracy. The escalation of America’s intervention in Vietnam in 1964 spurred a renewed antiwar movement, and the mass protests that followed provided a unifying focus for activists of all sorts. The Berkeley protests popularised civil disobedience among white students; riots rocked the black ghettos every summer from 1964 to 1968; and the Mexican and Chicano members of the United Farmworkers Union under Cesar Chavez launched a boycott and strike of grape growers.3

In his compendious account of the 1960s, the activist-turned-historian Todd Gitlin gave a sense of the new mood, describing how, in the spring of 1969 alone, major demonstrations took place in something like 300 colleges and universities, with many of the protests involving occupations and other militant gestures. The progress of ‘the movement’, as it was invariably described, featured every day in the mainstream press, as well as in a burgeoning number of alternative newspapers, radical magazines, and independent radio programs, all of them discussing ‘arrests, trials, police hassles and brutalities, demonstrations against the war, demonstrations of blacks and then Hispanics and other people of colour and their white allies, demonstrations by GIs against the war, crackdowns by the military’. By July of that year, Gitlin noted, ‘the Los Angeles Free Press sold 95,000 copies a week, the Berkeley Barb 85,000, The East Village Other 65,000 — all up from 5,000 or fewer in 1965’.4

The prevailing tendency might be described as ‘direct politics’: a focus on mass action, on grassroots mobilisation, on participation and self-organisation by workers, students, and the oppressed. Mario Savio’s reference to the ordinary individual preventing the machine of politics from functioning captured the flavour perfectly: rather than depending on respectable saviours, the free-speech demonstrators urged ordinary people to put their own bodies on the line.

The distinction between palliationist and direct politics could be seen most clearly from a comparison between the earlier forms of gay and lesbian activism and the iconic riot that took place after a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York in 1969. State violence against gays and lesbians was, of course, nothing new. But Stonewall was different because ordinary people resisted, with chants of ‘Gay Power’ and ‘We Want Freedom’.5

‘When did you ever see a fag fight back?’ asked one of the participants rhetorically. ‘Now, times were a-changin’. Tuesday night was the last night for bullshit … Predominantly, the theme [was], “this shit has got to stop!”’

Stonewall gave rise to gay liberation, a movement that, symptomatically, took its name from black liberation and women’s liberation, both of which had been inspired by the national liberation struggle in Vietnam. Where palliationist politics insisted on the distinction between particular interests, direct politics drew connections between issues. In his brief account of Stonewall, Fred Wasserman noted, ‘The early gay liberation activists — and some of the rioters themselves — drew on the militant tactics and radical rhetoric of the New Left; the counterculture; and the black, women’s, student, and antiwar movements, in which many of them had been (and continued to be) involved.’6

The members of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis tended, for obvious reasons, to preserve their anonymity. Activists in gay liberation, by contrast, openly proclaimed their sexuality. An earlier generation of gays and lesbians merely sought tolerance; those radicalised by Stonewall demanded revolution — or at least profound structural change.

To identify the later 1960s with direct politics and the 1950s with palliationist politics does not, of course, imply that all — or even most — activists in those decades shared the same ideas or advocated the same tactics. Obviously, they did not. Nevertheless, the distinction between the two types of politics captures something about the prevailing tendency, the political centre of gravity.

The small groups of radicals active in the 1950s were, for instance, often forced to adapt to the respectable mood of the times, just as, during the late 1960s, liberals found themselves embracing the tactics and ideas of direct politics: accepting the importance of demonstrations, embracing the need for profound structural change, and insisting on mobilising from below. Direct politics might not have been universally embraced even in 1969, but for a time it became a kind of common sense, giving the period its distinctive flavour.

The spectre of direct politics haunted both the so-called education wars in the late 1980s and the debates about political correctness a few years later.

Bloom, for instance, openly blamed the calamitous state of American education on the 1960s, a decade he dubbed an ‘unmitigated disaster’ for the universities. He — and others — repeatedly cited the 1969 student occupation of Cornell by armed black militants, an event that led the administration to introduce ‘Black Studies’ (an almost primal wound for the American right). Yet though Bloom sounded as if he were decrying the protesters’ use of violence, this wasn’t his argument at all. For Bloom, the problem with the Cornell occupiers wasn’t so much their guns as their demands — in essence, their insistence that a university curriculum should be relevant to the people.

Because he saw philosophy as necessarily detached from society, any call that the university reflect the community was, in and of itself, an assault on philosophers. Therein lay his problems with the 1960s — the activists insisted that the curriculum take into account the changing status of African Americans, women, and other excluded groups, and by so doing challenged the autonomy and objectivity of liberal education. Bloom put it like this:

The university [after the 1960s] had abandoned all claim to study or inform about value — undermining the sense of the value of what it taught, while turning over the decision about values to the folk, the Zeitgeist, the relevant. Whether it be Nuremberg or Woodstock, the principle is the same.7

It was an extraordinary passage, a comparison of protesters to Nazis, not on the basis of their authoritarianism but because of their tolerance. As Christopher Hitchens quipped, for Bloom, ‘the American mind was closed because it had become so goddamned open’.8

Bloom’s view of the 1950s as ‘one of the great periods of the American university’ slid over the systemic exclusions of that decade, a time in which the few African-American students able to enrol in southern universities faced physical violence merely to attend class. Yet he presented his argument as a defence of tolerance in the face of intimidation, claiming that, after the 1960s, it became ‘almost impossible to question the radical orthodoxy without risking vilification, classroom disruption, loss of confidence and respect’.

Yet by the time he was writing, the direct politics of the 1960s were no longer ascendant. Todd Gitlin noted that, as far back as the mid-1970s, a once-widespread commitment to revolutionary change had given way to ‘the practical pursuit of reforms’, with many former firebrands becoming what he called ‘crisp professional lobbyists’ or devoted to winning local office, usually as Democrats. The sense of a unified movement had given way to distinct interest groups, as ‘all were compelled to play by the political rules in an unfavourable political climate: to formulate programs, at last, and push them across in a time of tax revolt and shrinking revenues’.9 Gitlin’s account captured what might be described as a third shift: a general move among activists from direct politics to ‘delegated politics’.

As the radicalism of the 1960s waned, many former activists were able to obtain relatively prestigious positions that pertained in some way to their activism, simply because the movements themselves had changed the culture, particularly in higher education. If the paradigmatic figure of the 1960s radical was the demonstrator, the period of the late 1970s might be associated with a leftism embedded in various professional settings. The creation of Black Studies, women’s studies, and, eventually, queer studies required lecturers with knowledge of those fields, and so a whole layer of radicals made their way into new academic disciplines. Elsewhere, the social movements gave rise to new non-governmental organisations (NGOs), health services, consultancies, and businesses, all of which required new personnel with distinctive skills and experiences.

Those who retained a commitment to the ideas of the New Left under such circumstances found protests and demonstrations harder to organise. Many became accustomed to making arguments on behalf of a constituency that they no longer mobilised. In the new climate, progressives moderated, for understandable reasons, their slogans, and tempered their rhetoric according to the prevailing mood. The rhetoric of liberation no longer possessed the same force without crowds on the streets, and thus gave way to more achievable, practical demands.

Crucially for the development of anti-PC, the former student protesters who had moved into academia now concentrated on reforming the university. They’d once hoped to change the whole world, but with America moving to the right, making a progressive haven within higher education — or even a single department — became a more realistic goal, particularly since their new professional status gave them access to mechanisms for instigating reforms. Increasingly, leftists who’d once attacked the structures of the university now saw those structures as useful political tools.

Again, this was a general tendency, not a universal law. In some places and for some campaigns, direct politics continued to prevail. Nowhere was the dominance of delegated politics ever total. Nevertheless, at the most general level, a shift in the strategies and sensibilities of activists could be detected, with delegated politics becoming more influential and direct politics declining accordingly.

That was the context for the right’s discovery of anti-political correctness: an American higher-education system in which delegated politics was ascendant. The new curricula that the anti-PC crusaders hated so much — the rejection of the traditional white, male, and European canon, the sensitivity to exclusion, the desire for social relevance — had all been popularised by a mass movement that no longer existed. Bloom might have scoffed at Black Studies. But, contrary to what he suggested, such courses were not implemented to assuage an unrepresentative minority, but rather reflected a widespread sentiment among the African-American population. In 1972, for instance, 30,000 people marched in Washington DC in support of the inaugural African Liberation Day, with marches taking place the next year in thirty different cities.10

But by the early 1990s, mobilisations on this scale were unthinkable. The response to the right’s attack on progressive curricula accordingly came not from the masses on the streets but from professors at the university, which gave the debate a quite different dynamic.

More than anything, anti-PC took hold because it was able to present the campus left — and later the left as a whole — as censorious and oppressive, a minority using bureaucratic measures to enforce progressive ideas.

Obviously, this involved considerable hyperbole and not a little overt dishonesty. New York Magazine illustrated John Taylor’s 1991 feature ‘Are You Politically Correct?’ with pictures of the Hitler Youth and Maoist Red Guards, even though, for the most part, the article discussed what would now be seen as fairly unexceptional attempts to combat racism and sexism.11

Likewise, Jerry Adler’s Newsweek article ‘Thought Police’ described a student protest against professor Vincent Sarich of the University of California, a controversial figure who’d told students that women possessed smaller brains than men, that race made a difference in academic ability, and that homosexuals preferred to work with female bosses. Did a brief disruption of Sarich’s class in protest against his claim that affirmative action discriminated against whites constitute censorship? No, not really. In fact, with a slightly different framing, the protest might have been understood as an exercise in free speech by students who, in an earlier era, would have been compelled to endure a bigoted authority figure in obedient silence.

Again and again, widely circulated examples of campus ‘political correctness’ rested on misrepresentations or outright deception. ‘[A] relatively small number of instances,’ explained D. Charles Whitney and Ellen Wartella in their study of early media coverage of PC, ‘virtually all of them from a small number of elite institutions (and virtually all of them major research universities), have been used to characterize intellectual and political life on thousands of American campuses.’12 Nevertheless, the nature of delegated politics made the charges of the anti-PC campaigners seem credible.

A comparison of two different actions (on two different continents) against campus homophobia provides a useful illustration.

The first — a textbook example of direct politics — emerged from gay liberation in Australia. On 26 May 1973, Jeremy Fisher — a resident of Robert Menzies College at Macquarie University — tried to commit suicide after struggling to come to terms with his sexuality. When he was taken to hospital, the administration discovered leaflets revealing Fisher’s affiliation with gay radicalism. Dr Alan Cole, the master of the college, subsequently informed Fisher that he needed to seek professional help to repress his sexual orientation — and that until he got it, he would be excluded from the institution.

The student union — dominated by activists committed to direct politics — organised a demonstration in support of Fisher, and the staff association pledged its solidarity. Most importantly, the activists approached the Builders Labourers Federation, whose members were currently working on the college. A meeting of unionists on campus voted unanimously to support the campaign, slapping a black ban on the site. Fisher later recalled his discussions with the BLF leadership:

[O]ne day in the Students’ Council basement, Bob Pringle, part of the union’s leadership, asked me: ‘Why do you want to go back into that place?’

‘I don’t,’ I said.

‘But we’re out on strike to put you back,’ he said, a hint of anger in his eyes.

‘I thought because I’d been kicked out for being gay,’ I answered.

Bob looked at me for a moment, directly into my eyes. All sorts of thoughts whirled in my head. Was he going to withdraw the BLF’s support? Did he think I’d tricked him? Did he want to hit me? Then he said: ‘I guess you’re right. It’s the principle of the thing. They shouldn’t pick on a bloke because of his sexuality.’13

The college eventually bowed to the pressure generated by an intense media campaign, and offered to take Fisher back, though for obvious reasons he never returned.

The second example came from America in 1989. That year, a student called Nina Wu was ordered to move off campus by officials at the University of Connecticut, and then banned from dormitories and cafeterias. Allegedly, she’d put on her door a sign detailing people who would, she said, be ‘shot on sight’ — a list that included ‘preppies’, ‘bimbos’, ‘men without chest hair’, and, some students said, ‘homos’ (Wu denied this). As a result, she’d been disciplined under a newly rewritten ‘student behaviour code’ that prohibited ‘personal slurs or epithets based on race, sex, ethnic origin, disability, religion or sexual orientation’.14

The Wu case became a cause célèbre for the right, and featured as a vignette in many of the early anti-PC exposés.

A comparison of the two incidents highlights, in some respects, just how much the left had achieved. A few decades earlier, homophobia had been official policy in most universities — but by 1989 even a minor college in Connecticut accepted Bob Pringle’s once-radical argument about not picking on ‘a bloke because of his sexuality’.

Yet even though both the Wu and the Fisher cases involved a student being disciplined by the university about homosexuality, the internal dynamics of the two incidents were very different, in ways that reflected the distinction between direct and delegated politics.

In the Fisher episode, the administration used its institutional power to insist that a gay man not express his sexuality. The direct campaign by Fisher supporters was unambiguously against homophobia and for free speech. It depended on mobilising — and thus convincing — students and workers, who thereafter felt some responsibility for the outcome.

With the Wu incident, however, the response came not from a campaign of workers and students, but from a university administration. No doubt many University of Connecticut students opposed homophobia. But they were not personally involved in responding to Wu’s sign, and so didn’t feel any obligation to defend the administration’s harassment policy. It was thus far easier for conservatives to frame Wu’s exclusion as a bureaucratic measure imposed by an unrepresentative minority.

That was precisely what Adler did. He wrote that the case illustrated how:

[A] generation of campus radicals who grew up in the 1960s … no longer talk of taking to the streets … because they now are gaining access to the conventional weapons of campus politics: social pressure, academic perks (including tenure) and — when they have the administration on their side — outright coercion.15

The analysis, with its suggestion of a leftist conspiracy, was typical anti-PC hyperbole. For most former activists, the so-called ‘long march through the institutions’ wasn’t a stealth route into power but a desperate effort to find work in a suddenly harsh economic climate. Even at the most progressive institutions, radical academics were a small and often beleaguered minority, while anti-gay slurs continued as a fairly common part of everyday life.

Weigel noted that, even in 2016, almost no one described themselves as ‘politically correct’. To use the jargon of classical rhetoric, the term is an ‘exonym’: a phrase used by speakers to indicate that they don’t belong to that which they described. As a result, she insisted:

[T]here was no neat history of political correctness. There have only been campaigns against something called ‘political correctness’. For 25 years, invoking this vague and ever-shifting enemy has been a favourite tactic of the right.16

This was correct. The targets of anti-PC campaigners varied immensely — and often the supposed incidents of PC censorship simply weren’t true. It was rare, for instance, to read a journalistic account of political correctness that didn’t mention the story of kindergarten children forced by oversensitive teachers to sing ‘Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep’. The anecdote circulated for years — despite being based on an incident where children changed the words as a language game entirely unrelated to race.17

More recently, the revived anti-PC that coincided with the Trump campaign painted a picture of an American higher-education system dominated by those whom the New York Times’ David Brooks described as ‘student mobbists [who] manage to combine snowflake fragility and lynch mob irrationalism into one perfectly poisonous cocktail’.18 In a widely cited piece, Jonathan Chait declared that ‘the PC movement has assumed a towering presence in the psychic space of politically active people in general and the left in particular’. In Time, Cliff Maloney Jr (‘the Executive Director at Young Americans for Liberty’) said that ‘America’s college campuses look and feel a lot more like an authoritarian dictatorship than they do the academic hubs of the modern free world’.19

Again, much of this was either exaggerated or dishonest. As Nathan J. Robinson (and many others) argued in reply, the anti-PC polemicists extrapolated from a few high-profile incidents at elite universities to draw conclusions about the 17 million students enrolled in tuition (in precisely the fashion Whitney and Wartella had complained about three decades earlier). Again and again, the anti-PCers elided the distinction between censorship (a speaker silenced) and debate (a speaker criticised). They presented as edicts speech codes intended as guidelines; they confused student protests with state bans.20

Most of all, they ignored the extensive campaigns by conservatives — often aided and abetted by university administrations — to discipline, censure, and sack progressive students or academics. Glenn Greenwald, for instance, documented in exhaustive detail the various well-funded initiatives ‘devoted to outlawing or otherwise punishing criticisms of Israel’, while activists like David Horowitz, media personalities like Bill O’Reilly, and various well-funded conservative student bodies had run longstanding and often successful drives to dismiss academics they regarded as disloyal.21 If free speech was under threat on the modern campus, the threat came from the right as much as or more than from the left.

In some ways, though, the hypocrisy of anti-PC merely illustrated how the shift from direct to delegated politics had enabled the right to forge such a powerful weapon. From its inception, opposition to political correctness had been, in Weigel’s words, a campaign against ‘an impossibly slippery concept’, one that presented itself as an apolitical defence of freedom, but that always and only attacked the left. That rhetorical ambiguity gave anti-PC a tremendous flexibility, allowing it to adapt as the priorities of the right changed.

But irrespective of its target, the discourse of anti-PC retained the same structure, always implying that unrepresentative elitists were enforcing their views on fair-minded ordinary people. Such rhetoric was effective, because, as Michael Walzer suggested, by the early 1990s many in the left really had come to rely on victories won ‘in the courts, the media, the schools, the civil service — and not in the central arenas of democratic politics’.22

Anti-PC targeted, in a sense, a style of activism, rather than any particular argument or ideology — a style fundamentally associated with the top-down character of delegated politics. That was why so many people were prepared to believe spurious stories about teachers censoring ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’: they’d come to believe that was the kind of thing that progressives might do.