“A liberal,” Robert Frost once said, “is someone who can’t take his own side in an argument.” If conservatives are often caricatured by their detractors as unfeeling, liberals are painted as uncertain, weak, and easily bullied. Back in the 1980s, the centrist British politician David Owen joined the two accusations in a jibe against Britain’s Prime Minister Thatcher and her then Labor opponent: “She doesn’t care, and he doesn’t dare.”
These stereotypes exert real-world political effects. In the 1970s, a Yale sociologist went to live for two years among an exotic tribe: not in the South Seas or up the Amazon, but in the working-class neighborhood of Canarsie, next door to New York’s Kennedy Airport. For a political generation, the Jews and Italians of Canarsie had voted overwhelmingly for New Deal Democrats. Since 1970, their preference had shifted to Richard Nixon’s Republicans. The sociologist, Jonathan Rieder, wanted to understand why. Here’s what he found:
Since 1960 the Jews and Italians of Canarsie have embellished and modified the meaning of liberalism, associating it with profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility and sanctimoniousness. The term 'conservative' acquired connotations of pragmatism, character, reciprocity, truthfulness, stoicism, manliness, realism, hardness, vengeance, strictness, and responsibility.
All of this is background to understand yesterday’s Internet dust-up over Jonathan Chait’s powerful new article in New York magazine. Chait is a liberal’s liberal: a warm and consistent supporter of the Obama administration, and a fierce and relentless critic of conservative policies and personalities. This time, however, Chait directed his sharp wit against a leftward target:
Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate … Today’s political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new cultural reach.
Chait condemned the goals of this new political correctness as verging on the totalitarian:
The Marxist left has always dismissed liberalism’s commitment to protecting the rights of its political opponents — you know, the old line often misattributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” — as hopelessly naïve. If you maintain equal political rights for the oppressive capitalists and their proletarian victims, this will simply keep in place society’s unequal power relations. Why respect the rights of the class whose power you’re trying to smash? And so, according to Marxist thinking, your political rights depend entirely on what class you belong to. The modern far left has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones.
That set off a stinkbomb!