The most common left-wing objection to the Right is that it wants to control others’ lives. But in America and elsewhere, the threat to personal liberty has emanated far more often from the left.
In the past generation, the Left has controlled so much speech and behavior that these controlsare now assumed to be a normal part of life.
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Through the use of public opprobrium, laws, and lawsuits, Americans today are less free than at any time since the abolition of slavery (with the obvious exception of blacks under Jim Crow).
Public opprobrium is known as political correctness and it has suppressed saying anything — no matter how true and no matter how innocent — that offends left-wing sensibilities.
“Merry Christmas” offends leftist views on multi-culturalism, so it’s largely gone.
Honest discussion of male-female differences is also largely gone — a lessonthe former president of Harvard, Larry Summers, painfully learned when he simply asked if fewer women succeed in math and science because of innate differences between men and women.
Discussion of disproportionate rates of black violence is not allowed, no matter how well-intentioned — unless it is to “prove” how racist America is because of the high number of black men in prison.
In Europe — and in all likelihood, soon in America — Christians who, citing the Bible, argue for a heterosexual ideal are arrested.
Thanks to the Left, students at colleges get speech codes. They learn early in life that much speech is not permitted.
One may not favorably compareWestern or American culture with that of any other. Led by Jesse Jackson, leftists chanted “Hey, hey, ho, ho Western Civ has got to go” at Stanford University. And away it went.
The Left owns the language. Married women are not to be referred to as “Mrs.” but as “Ms.” And the words “lady,” “feminine,” and “masculine” have largely gone to their graves. High-school and college teams with American Indian names must drop those names because, by definition, according to the Left, they offend American Indians.
(This last example has always perplexed me. Why does the name Florida State Seminoles offend Indians? One caller to my radio show once responded to that question by asking me how I would feel as a Jew if some team took the name “Jews.” I told himthatI would be thrilled. For nearly 4,000 years, Jews have been looking for fans.)
Back to leftist controls on speech: One can only speak of male-female differences if the difference shows the female as superior. Thus, to say women are innately more intuitive is perfectly acceptable but to say men areinnately more likely to excel at math is “sexist.”
A woman may reveal as much of her body as she wishes. But if a man is perceived by a woman as looking too long at what she reveals, or if he comments on what she reveals, he may be fired from his job or sued for “sexual harassment.” A woman may wear a miniskirt and crop-top, but a man may not have a calendar of women wearing miniskirts and crop-tops on his desk at work. That constitutes sexual harassment and a “hostile work environment.”
Graphic torture and frontal nudity may be shown on screen, but smoking cigars or cigarettes may not. A Churchill museum in London has removed the cigars from wartime Churchill photographs, FDR has had his ubiquitous cigarette holder removed from his photographs, and the cigarettes have been removed from the Beatles’ hands in the famousphoto of them crossing Abbey Road.
It is unfortunate that the political right in this country has not fought these incursions against liberty. I see no sign that conservative politicians are doing so now, or even planning to. By agreeing to sit together at the state of the union, Republicans are only tacitly agreeing with the left that our speech is the problem. Such toadying will only serve to strengthen the left.
Good news, though. I just bought a copy of Abbey Road from Amazon, and Paul still has his cigarette. It's tempting to use the old British slang for cigarette, but it would probably get me censored here.
No. The most common left-wing objection to the Right is that the Right is a bunch of selfish haters who forget on Monday what they're taught on Sunday.
Bravo! One can only hope that your bullet hits it target, Mr P. As responsible gun owners know, the idea that these words would somehow hypnotize us into wildly shooting without the threat of deadly force confronting us is insane. But then again that characterizes much of what is called "thinking" on the Left.
I just wish you'd written it a couple of months ago so me and the Mrs. could have wished you a Merry Christmas!
I've always figured the charges of "the right wants to control..." was just another misappropriation from the left.
They see how crazy we get with judicial activism that gave us such "rights" as abortion on demand, and the "right" not to be offended, and therefore call any court decision they don't agree with as "judicial activism" assuming we will get just as mad.
And if free speech is the only thing you think they're trying to take away you're quite mistaken.
NYC has banned transfats, salt, and smoking amongst otehr things. San Francisco has done the same, and add happy meals and the military to the list. Have they ever seen a gun that's not owned by the government, their own security or even themselves as anything other then something that needs to be confiscated? And lets not even get started on hard earned wealth or a drink at dinner in a restaurant.
When the right is unhappy about certain behavior they condemn the behavior. And get villified for even that. When the left is unhappy about certain behavior they use the full force of law to crush freedom. And they congratulate themselves on how much better they are then the mere peons who will be subject to the laws they themselves aren't.
@MikeB So, let's just to get your objection straight: anyone that disagrees with you and the Left is a "hater." Very convenient. You can now characterize any speech from the non-Left, per se, as "hate speech" and therefore something that should be banned and or restricted. Seems like you are doing a great job of proving Mr. P's point all on your own.
Too true, Dennis Prager, this is a great column! For Conservatives, one of our biggest weaknesses is believing that the Liberal Left are as decent and well-intentioned as we are. Conservatives too often believe the Liberal Left only demands fairness and balance, while the Left is actually demanding that everybody must now be live by immoral Liberal Leftist values. Conservatives, in fact, too often believe the immoral demands of the Liberal Left, more than Conservatives believe in our own conservative values and morality. Conservatives must always remember that the immoral Liberal Left is the relentless Accuser in our culture, relentlessly accusing good and decent Conservatives that we are somehow cruel and wicked to try to force conservative values upon anybody else. This is all a smokescreen as the immoral Liberal Left go about doing exactly what they accuse Conservatives of doing -- forcing THEIR OWN values upon everybody else. Remember that the Liberal Left are liars, always have been from the beginning. Do NOT believe the immoral Liberal Left as they lie. Conservatives must learn only one thing from the immoral Liberal Left -- too believe in and act upon our own Conservative values more than the immoral Liberal Left believe and act upon their opposing immoral values.
Great column, Mr. Prager. It's also necessary to remember where political correctness came from. It came from the Marxists at the Frankfurt School who were trying to marry Marxism to the culture in the United States since it was so difficult to marry it to the economy. PC = RED
Mr. Leed -- Excellent points, all. I think you're accurately describing "Critical Theory" -- another Marxist idea. The idea is basically to criticize everything in order to tear down traditional mores. Now, who does sound like?
MikeB, we had an exchange a few days ago in which I noted that conservatives generally accuse liberals of being wrong, whereas liberals generally accuse conservatives of being evil. You claimed not to understand what I meant, but your comment here that "the Right is a bunch of selfish haters who forget on Monday what they're taught on Sunday" illustrates my point pretty well.
Anyway, it's good to have you on the boards. You're usually wrong, of course, but it's good to have someone to argue with.
Commoner, I still don't understand what YOU mean by "evil."
My meaning is two-parted. The first is plain old selfishness, i.e., it's my property, it's my money, and I want to keep it. The second, the "hater" part, is really an umbrella term for various attitudes. That second part's not all that interesting to me, and in any event I see the left and the right converging over time. It's the first part -- the selfishness -- that really interests me. We learn on Sunday that when someone asks for your cloak, you should give them your coat too, or that when someone slaps you on one cheek, you should offer them the other cheek to slap. We learn that the meek will inherit the earth. We learn that it's harder for a rich man to get into heaven than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. We learn that we don't own anything -- we're just stewards. We learn all that stuff on Sunday. And then what do we do about it on Monday? What drives us on Monday, motivates us on Monday? If the same principles we learn on Sunday motivate us on Monday, how do we establish the connection?
(I really believe the connection can be established quite elegantly, in a principled, consistent way, and that the real conflict between left and right should only be a design process geared toward improving that connection. In that way, I believe I am far more receptive to conservative political philosophy than you might think. It's just that, when you read through the comments on this site in general, every step of the way along the path of establishing a principled, conservative solution to any problem seems to require stopping to clean a pile of doggy-doo off your foot.
You start the crusade, Mr. Prager, and let us know how it worked out after a few weeks. A few suggestions on where to start: put a few pictures of girls in shorts and crop tops on your desk, make (non-lewd) comments on attractive women's appearance at every opportunity, start a campaign to have schools with banned indian mascots re-instated, refer to women as Mrs. or Miss, and so on. Good luck.
MikeB, some conservatives aren't religious and/or don't subscribe to the Biblical injunctions you mention. Of course, the same can be said for many liberals. Regardless, I think most conservatives would argue that they should be free to decide whether and how much to give to charity. The government is an inefficient "charity," and the taxpayer has no (real) control over how his money is spent. I'd much rather contribute to the local food shelf than to a "stimulus" bill to fund various politicians' pet projects and various useless groups who succeed only at feeding at the federal trough.
Keep talking MikeB, you are making our points for us. Okay...okay, they airbrushed one cigarette from the Beatle's hand. There, happy? Doesn't change the point one bit, but you got your jab in. Shallow, stage one, reactionary thought from the left...imagine that.
Commoner ... you're right ... the stimulus package demonstrates exactly why govt doesn't work. If it was designed to fast-track essential infrastructure projects - like maybe a water treatment facility in Winnemucca - nobody would have complained. But instead, we got little if any return on .8 trillion.
I was all ready to set my sights on political correctness, fire up my semi-automatic laptop, and shoot a missive.
Unfortunately, I am not willing to mingle in areas with second-hand smoke. So I think I'll mosey over to the Huffington Post, where I presume the clean air types hang out.
Rest assured that if I encounter any cigar-smoking women's lib types, I'll be back here.
Commoner, there's a lot to respond to there, but my as for charity: Yeah, there's the efficiency argument -- but how good is that argument, especially in the nonprofit sector? If you believe, as doubtless many here do, that the government will always be worse than the private sector at making widgets, can you say the same for cancer research? Please tell me what you think. Kevin Williamson seems to respond to everything by saying that government doesn't have the same ability to process price information as the private sector(and I think that's wrong for reasons related to information asymmetries), but even if that were the case, how the heck would that work in the nonprofit sector? Is the board of directors of the American Cancer Society really better or worse than the board of NIH in determining what cancer research should get funded?
There's a completely separate argument against government-as-charity, and it's the obvious one: Every dollar the government takes from me is coercion, plain and simple, to the extent I'm not totally on board with the concept. I get that, and it's a big number, a big cramp on our style, as opposed to silly little things people here offer up as infringements of their liberty (such as not being able to buy wine in a grocery store, or not being able to buy really good chemistry sets anymore). But is there anything worth taxing ourselves for that's worth it in the "general welfare" sense? And if so, where do we draw the line?
(No, please don't give me "that" argument. "That" argument flies in the face of 200 years of constitutional law and is truly nothing more than a dodge. We can discuss that somewhere else, like on Glenn Beck.)
I composed the rhyme below many years ago when, you may recall, a city manager somewhere was forced to resign because he used the word "niggardly", raising the illiterate among us to arms. The true inspiration for the poem, however, was a PBS television interview with some woman who was unabashedly bashing white, male Western culture and history. I was appalled. I'd never heard such vicious and hateful diatribe against our admirable Western tradition. It was based upon nothing but vile lies, half-truths, manipulations and blatant contradictions. I was indignant and furious. Hope you enjoy my frolic over the dimwitted:
An insipid coalition of weak, unstable minds
Manipulates democracy, tradition it unwinds,
Affecting the unwary in so many evil ways,
As ev’rything they denigrate which comes from bygone days.
Oh, no! I’m very sorry that I used that wicked word,
For denigrate is denigrating. Isn’t that absurd?
Our fine, expressive language they deliberately deprave
To meet the highest standards set by those who thought enslave.
This darkest kind of censorship has bastardized our tongue,
Distorting past and present, and the future for our young.
The purest words they pulverize, communication thrash,
These propaganda wizards are self serving, mindless trash!
The beauty of our language is its natural design
Achieved through evolution which doth gradually refine
Vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation rules
Which are degraded constantly by cretins and by fools.
One may inquire what prompted such a vitriolic verse,
Remark that Western Culture is polluted and perverse,
And worthless, since its based upon brute, vile dead, white males.
No wonder nihilistic nonsense reigns with such tall tales.
At risk of being branded as a white, male chauvinist,
I think it’s time to speak the truth of race and feminist,
Society’s elite pronounce politically correct
The petty, vapid bashing of all white male intellect.
The civil rights and women’s movements both were born of grudge
Against established culture which they claim refused to budge,
Preventing equal rights for all throughout entire nation,
Subjecting women and nonwhites to mean degradation.
The motives of the movements’ so-called leaders are suspect
Because they claim that rioting and crime are circumspect,
Result of past and present wrongs supposedly imposed
Upon the poor minority who now is so disposed.
We need to put a stop to growing culture of complaint,
And start demanding culture which will honor self restraint.
The culture of the West is based on tried and tested ways,
It’s why it has emerged supreme on earth in latter days.
No culture is devoid of flaws, though some have more, some less,
And as with individuals, bad and good find egress.
Evaluating human culture, one cannot ignore
The value of achievements wrought by white males heretofore.
Those dead, white males are Beethoven, da Vinci, Madison,
Saint Augustine and Rembrandt, Goethe, Thomas Jefferson,
George Washington, and Einstein, Charles Dickens, and Tom Paine,
Ben Franklin, Robert Burns, Hans Christian Andersen, the Dane,
Winston Churchill and Pasteur, Abe Lincoln, Paganini,
Vivaldi and John Locke, Plato, Socrates, Rossini,
Hugo, Isaac Newton, Leo Tolstoi, Albert Schweitzer,
Dostoyevsky, Adam Smith, Sir Thomas More, and Chaucer,
Franz Schubert, Edward Jenner, Thomas Edison, Thoreau,
Copernicus and Bacon, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bach, and van Gogh,
Among those names which place our Western Culture in disgrace.
The rationale provided: They’ve a whiskered, white man’s face!
