It's always nice when you have an opinion and find out that people who are smarter than you, better informed, and generally superior all around turn out to have a similar opinion.
I wrote this during the week after the Oscars:
Everything is a political litmus test for [the Right] now. The movies you like, the TV shows you watch. The way you raise your children, how you handle your checkbook, the church you go to, the jokes you laugh at, the car you drive, the sports you follow, who you're glad to see is dead.
I used to teach college and I thought I knew what Politically Correct was.
Apparently, though, the post-modernists, deconstructionists, historicisits, feminists, and queer studies profs of the mid 90s can't hold a candle to the frat brothers of the wingnut faction of the blogosphere when it comes to being PC.
These guys can't make a move, think a thought, buy a book, see a movie, or sing a song that hasn't been thoroughly vetted by the elders of the Church of the Republican Jesus and stamped with the imprimatur of Pope Karl Rove.
They don't even use hot water when they wash their hands because it comes out of the left side of the tap.
And, you know what? Liberals started it. We did. Those of us who were overly-influenced by the Marxists among us. Those of us who still are, still do it.
But they've gone farther and done it better. No surprise when you look at how many former Marxists there are among the neo-cons. Marxists, hell. Stalinists.
It's also turned out that the students who learned the most from all the -ist professors in the 70s, 80s, and 90s were their most conservative students.
All those kids who whined about how they couldn't get a fair shake from their liberal profs grew up to think exactly like them, at least when it came to methodology.
Which makes sense. The best students would have been the ones who loved their subjects. In the literature classes, that meant that the best students were paying much closer attention to the books they were reading than to the rhetorical tricks their professors were using as ways of stimulating discussion of those books.
The smart kids who didn't care about the subject paid attention to the prof.
So the other day I came across this by Ian Reifowitz in the New Republic, which I'm sorry to report is subscriber only. But here's the key graf:
Today, the appeal of radical multiculturalism has faded, and a new challenge to American pluralism has arisen: the political philosophy of the Christian right. On the surface an analogy between the two movements seems imperfect; after all, radical multiculturalism never exercised even half the political power during the 1990s that the Christian right exercises today. And yet the two movements share one crucial attribute: Both reject the need to build a common national identity with which Americans of different backgrounds and belief systems can identify. In other words, like the radical multiculturalists of ten years ago, today’s Christian conservatives reject the central project of American pluralism. They merely come to that rejection from the opposite direction. . . .
Then the Moose the other day makes this point:
The right has become the mirror image of all they dislike about the left. Both the secular and the religious right kvetch about their victimization while they control at least two branches of government and their penetration of the media is thorough and growing. They are crybabies who patrol the halls of power.
Learning how to whine was one of the main lessons on the leftist academics' syllabus back in the '80s and early '90s. As I was saying, it was only the conservative kids who were paying attention. Think it over though. What's the distinguishing characteristic of Right Wing intellectual types these days? Power worship. They love to grovel before the big tough daddy figures who run things in Washington. It makes sense then that back in college, when the people who had power in their world were their professors, they'd have worshipped their profs.
Would have been a love-hate thing for them, of course, since they actually despised academics and everything they stood for. Imagine adoring someone you hate. I was crazy for a conservative little greedhead once back in college and she was nuts for me and all we did was fight and try to torture each other. It's a weird and kinky thing, masochistic and sadistic, and offering no fullfillment, no release, with all sorts of roads to self-hatred.
Another time I was smart before somebody else smarter said what I'd said only more smartly, was when, implying that the reason Right Wing intellectual types act so much like ultra-left intellectual types, which is to say, like Stalinists and Maoists, is that a lot of them are in fact former ultra-left intellectual types who've turned their coats but not changed their m.o.'s. People like David Horowitz. I wrote here that:
For two decades now David Horowitz has been pushing the idea that colleges and universities actively discriminate against conservatives, as though taxis all over America were being driven by and bookstores up and down both coasts were staffed by conservative ABDs and Ph.Ds who just couldn't find work in their fields because of their politics.
Horowitz is a bomb thrower. He was a bomb thrower when he was a leftist and he's a bomb thrower now that he's a neo-fascist. He was of the Left because at that time that was the best direction from which to throw bombs, and he's on the Right now because the Right provides an even better launching pad and pays for his bombs and provides him with fur-lined foxholes with comped mini-bars.
When he threw bombs with his left hand he aimed them at academia, and now that he's chucking with his right his target hasn't changed.
That was me. This is Matt Welch, writing a couple weeks later:
How bizarre and distasteful is it, that the same people who -- unlike almost all of my liberal friends -- actually *did* believe in Marxism and apologize for dictators, are the most vocal in their blanket condemnations of people who never did any such thing? If I had ever been a Trotskyite, I'd spend one hell of a long time dwelling privately on my own character defects and terrible judgment, instead of immediately joining some other troupe & screeching out the same old insults to an appreciative (and forgetful) new audience.
And I'm not just talking about Horowitz here, or of people who made, in the paraphrased words of Martha Gellhorn "that dreary and predictable late-life journey from left to right." I'm talking about pacifists who became warhawks, Weekly Standard socialites who became Brentwood socialists, Castro apologists who became Iran liberators, college potheads who became parental drug-warriors, right-wing bagmen who became left-wing "truth-tellers," earnest Naderites who became earnest Wolfowitzians. People who confuse their own team-changing with some kind of "new politics" that they can't stop yammering about.
These people, in one direction or another (and frequently both) have made grave errors of judgment in the past. And yet many apparently believe that the best way of paying penance is not to quietly look inward, but to noisily accuse most anyone on the chunk of spectrum they just vacated of being anti-American, objectively pro-whateverist, and worse. Well, excuse me for ignoring morality lessons from former Fellow Travelers.
So, either they learned to be PC from their PC professors or they've learned it from following the example of the old Marxists in their ranks.
A third possibility, which someone else will no doubt express more cogently soon, is that they are victims of the old adage that you become the thing you hate. After 40 years of hating the Commies, they turned into mirror images of them. They seem to be working more efficiently at becoming like their new enemies, the radical Islamic terrorists, theocratic, anti-Western, violent, sadistic, and self-destructive.
However they've gotten there, they are all Marxist now. Everything is political---art, literature, career choices, what car you drive, what church you join, how you worship at that church. What used to be thought of as facts, that is science, and boy, howdy, how they've become like the Soviets on this one. There is a party line on everything, from evolution to global warming to sex. Whatever advances the revolution is deemed worthy. Whatever does not advance it is condemned as counter-revolutionary and must be eradicated.
As Roy Edroso reports, the first seat on the next bus to the re-education camp is now ticketed for---wait for it...
That plot with the evil genius lurking behind a benign front starting a war as a way of consolidating power, discrediting and eliminating all his political enemies, and establishing an imperial dictatorship based on the ruthless exercise of power?
Turns out it's not a Republican campaign commercial.
(Roy has a follow up here. The link to the Bull Moose is courtesy of Jack Shannon of Common Sense Desk, which, you will please note, is listed over in the right column under the heading To Be Read First Thing in the Morning. I give you nothing but good advice.
And the link to Reifowicz's New Republic piece comes from Jack O'Toole. Jack was away from the keyboard for most of March and all of April but he's back now and the world is a better, saner place for it.)
That plot with the evil genius lurking behind a benign front starting a war as a way of consolidating power, discrediting and eliminating all his political enemies, and establishing an imperial dictatorship based on the ruthless exercise of power?
A ripe subject for parody, my friend. Tragedy meets farce yet again!
Posted by: The Heretik | Friday, May 06, 2005 at 11:18 AM
Are you referring to "Revenge of the Sithies?"
Posted by: sfmike | Friday, May 06, 2005 at 12:29 PM
i thought you were still a professor. if you aren't, what are you doing now?
Posted by: harry near indy | Friday, May 06, 2005 at 08:03 PM
oh yeah --
the re-education camp won't be called that.
it'll be called the attitude adjustment facility.
Posted by: harry near indy | Friday, May 06, 2005 at 08:04 PM