Nobody likes political correctness

 Nobody likes political correctness. Which puts us in the position that it isn’t correct to defend political correctness. It is like picking your nose or flashing in a park – not the kind of thing you want to be associated with.

I think the phrase – and its villainizing character – goes back to a Cold War liberal discourse, in which the Communist figures as an authoritarian personality and the Western liberal figures as a groovy dialoguer. However, it occurs in a few places before World War II. Arnold Bennett submitted a novel of his to Lord Beaverbrook, who looked it over for “political correctness” – as Bennett’s diary puts it. However, I think this simply meant that it was realistic with regards to the political processes and political characters that it described.

Political correctness jumped majorly into the major outlets of the media with the civil rights movements and the New Left. The media, which had subserviently gone through the anti-Communist 50s with nary an op ed by a communist or a reflection on the merger of American foreign and domestic policy with anti-communism was jolted by the New Left attack on that monolithic ideology. It was an attack that, as was quickly seen, had a weak spot: for how about the “line” that the New Lefties themselves followed? The inner attitudinal policing – which, as all groovy liberals knew, was all to reminiscent of Big Brother and Communism itself. This made political correctness a great and bountiful phrase. All good things could be reaped from it.

One of the good things is humor. The groovy liberal was ever liable to laugh and joke, while the political correct policeman only knew how to sulk and snarl. This is put well by Erica Jong (who, author’s note, I adore) in an interview in Cosmo in 1978, explaining the lesbian scenes in her novel, How to Save Your Own Life.

“The chapter is the broadest parody- a humous takeoff on that whole period in the women’s movement when everyone I knew felt compelled to have an affai rwith a woman because it was chic… And, as a satirist of my society (which I assuredly am), I have the right (possibly even the duty) to spoof the fads of my day. That doesn’t mean I’m antilesbian or antiwoman or that I don’t support the very legitimate demands of gay activists for equal rights. But as a writer and humorist, I refuse to toe a party line and to inhibit my satire because certain humorless, sullen people think political “correctness” is more important than laughter. The fact is, even if a writer wanted to be politically correct, she couldn’t be. What pleases one group alienates another. So a writer really has no choice but to write books to please herself… Laughter and poetry may, perhaps, transcend their time. Politics never do.”

I think that Erica Jong’s comment about political correctness hits all the buttons – it is encyclopedic and at the same time brief. It idealizes the writer’s desire – what she wants – as an expression of freedom that she is compelled to – since any expression will alienate some group. It is a defense of humor – which is given a transcendent cast (along with poetry) – against the political part of political correctness – we don’t, in other words, read the Divine Comedy to get our bearings on the Guelphs, and Swift’s sticking it to the Whigs is, as any Professor of English Lit in the 1950s could tell you, representative of questions about human nature itself and the perennial questions thereunto. And political correctness is attributed to a power that is based in public opinion in America, but that is merely a click away from becoming a totalitarian bureaucracy – of the left, of course.

It is the latter supposition that is curious. Feminists in the 1970s, like antifascists today, were a protesting minority. The majority and the vested power of the Establishment – the makers of laws, the runners of corporations, the judges and cops – were not enforcing politically correct rules about feminism, but were busy being almost all male and all white. Their allergy to being attacked for being all male and all white was to say that the attackers were authoritarians who, by some astonishing accident, had almost no power at all, and who were showing what they would do if they had power with their attitudinal policing, which makes it a good thing that power rest in the hands that hold it.

This is one way of looking at the picture. Another way is to see in, say, movement feminists a possible future – a political one. In fact, for the “everybody” that Jong knew, that future turned out to be bright. Upper middle class women have gone from triumph to triumph since 1978. They have broken glass ceilings – an interesting goal, not exactly aimed at by those leftist feminists who combined feminism with some Marx-y notion of working class power. Perhaps those were the very feminists who were most humorless. Humor among those who see a bright future is, perhaps, a different thing from humor among those who feel, with every instinct, that they are going into the garbage.