There was a lot of blogosphere talk this week about the new PC, rising particularly on campus and in lefty-precincts, due to a Jonathan Chait essay. I’m definitely not your go-to guy on this stuff, because I always underestimate its strength. The notion that sane persons would want to stage or see something called the “Vagina Monologues,” even just once, never mind over and over again, never computed in my noggin, let alone the idea that at one campus it would be canceled because by linking female gender to, er, anatomy, it purportedly dishonored the set of transsexuals who demand that everyone call them women. Similarly, my initial reactions to the “war on women” theme pushed by the Obama campaign of 2012, were gleeful ones, ones assuming that the Dems would pay for such a tired, pathetic, and baldly defamatory approach. I’m clueless about this stuff.
I guess I just haven’t encountered some of the worse forms of PC speech-policing when teaching, outside of the now-typical, if by no means universal, resistance to criticism of anything that seems to be criticism of gay marriage, and outside of the usual eggshells concerning certain race-linked controversies. I’d like to tell you that my experience indicates that there is less of the PC nonsense out there then the conservative blogosphere would lead you to believe, but friends who teach at more typical, and thus more liberal, institutions, indicate that the growth in the last half-decade is real.
So I’ll refer you instead to Ross Douthat’s column today, which offers two explanations for the rise of the New PC in our time. First, the campaign for gay marriage, which is now seen as overwhelmingly successful, has provided a template for forcing other issues. Second, the massive debt, and the related political resistance to increasing taxes, mean that campaigns for economic leftism can’t really go anywhere, Piketty-sales and Warren-mania notwithstanding.
Does that sound right?
If you’d like something a bit more alarmist on this, Rod Dreher’s your guy. That link is simply to one of several recent pieces, all of which do point to the real concerns about our 1st-Amendment freedoms of speech, religion, and association, and more importantly, about the decline of the American ethos that stands by those values, particularly the last of the three, when they’re threatened in ways that don’t involve the Constitution. I.e., Mozilla Firefox violated the spirit, but not the letter, of our freedom of speech by forcing Brendan Eich out. BTW, one of those Dreher threads contains some of my comments on the recent de-recognition of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship by the California State University system.