LITTLE ROCK — It was a sequence of events almost made to order.
A day after Rasmussen released a survey indicating that an overwhelming majority of Americans think political correctness has gone too far, National Public Radio fired commentator Juan Williams for expressing “bigoted” comments about Muslims that turn out not to have been bigoted at all (unless truth somehow equates with bigotry).
That the Williams firing was absurd seems to be recognized by just about everyone except the little Stalins who run things at NPR. Within this context, the only thing objectionable about demands to defund NPR is that they come many years too late. The government shouldn’t have become involved in subsidizing media outlets in the first place.
Still, the Williams firing could hardly be called surprising. As the Rasmussen survey suggests, we’ve become quite accustomed to such nonsense. The curious part was the 23 percent of the Rasmussen respondents who said political correctness hadn’t gone far enough and wanted more of it in our lives.
Who are these people, and where do they come from (besides NPR)? And if they feel that America is not yet politically correct enough, what would enough look like?
In answering such questions, the first thing to remember is that political correctness is and always has been a movement of the left. The more leftward one goes, the more politically correct the terrain becomes and the more enthusiastic the desire to suppress allegedly offensive speech, defined as anyspeech, however otherwise innocuous or even truthful, that questions leftist bromides and platitudes.
Although reaction to the Williams firing was broadly negative, leftist nutcase Michael Moore undoubtedly spoke for many when he penned a column under the headline, “Dear Juan, Good Riddance.”
The political correctness that we now see all around us, and which ordinary Americans seem to find increasingly stifling, is a direct consequence of the march of the 1960s New Left through American institutions, especially academe, publishing and the mass media. In historical terms, it is little more than an updated version of the “party line” that flourished among the Old (Communist) Left in the 1930s and ’40s.
The idea that there is an established orthodoxy that all enlightened people should embrace and reflexively parrot, lest nasty repercussions ensue, is a crucial aspect of the leftist worldview and one that, along with worship of state power, suggests a strong linkage between leftism of all stripes and totalitarianism.
Just as the left wants regimentation of society in economic terms, it demands conformity of thought and speech in political and cultural matters.
It is no accident, then, to borrowa phrase from the most important leftist of the 20th century, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, that hard thought fails to identify a single idea on the left that has ever been classified as politically incorrect or that the PC disease has most infected those sectors of society (academe and the media) most dominated by leftists.
In the end, it is plausible to assume that, just as some will cut off NPR because of its blatant intolerance of contrary opinions, there will be others who up their contributions for the same reason. Indeed, given the increasing ideological polarization of media sources and audiences, it is reasonable to speculate that a majority of NPR’s left-leaning listeners are quite happy with Williams getting the ax. They are also almost certainly among that scary 23 percent of the public identified by Rasmussen that wants more not less political correctness in our society.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the Williams firing is that the muchdespised (by liberals) FOX News is more tolerant of liberal opinions than NPR is of any opinions that stray from liberal orthodoxy.
Something has clearly gone wrong with liberalism when so many liberals become so enthusiastic about suppressing speech they disagree with. So what is the next step? Putting people in jail for expressing incorrect opinions, as now increasingly happens in Europe? Would that be politically correct enough for our ever-vigilant thought police?
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Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz lives and teaches in Batesville.
Editorial, Pages 87 on 10/31/2010