Jonathan Chait has decided he’s been mugged enough by the campus fascists:
The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs. It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement. (For those inclined to defend p.c. on the grounds that racism and sexism are important, bear in mind that the forms of repression Marxist government set out to eradicate were hardly imaginary.)
American political correctness has obviously never perpetrated the brutality of a communist government, but it has also never acquired the powers that come with full control of the machinery of the state. The continuous stream of small-scale outrages it generates is a testament to an illiberalism that runs deep down to its core (a character I tried to explain in my January essay).
Of course, given his own history, he’s not the best standard bearer for the message.
After all, the the guy already flying the plane has no need to hijack it.
Chait is only upset because Democrats are becoming targets. Should this stop, so will denunciations of Democrat activists by Democrats.
I think this is quite untrue. He is a liberal, but the whole point of heterodoxacademy (and he was one of the driving forces behind it) is to put for diversity _of viewpoint_ in academics. Which means seeking representation of conservative viewpoints, even if most academics are liberals. That’s what he’s pushing for, and it’s an awesome idea.
“People on the left need to stop evading the question of political correctness — by laughing it off as college goofs, or interrogating the motives of p.c. critics, or ignoring it ”
Maybe he would agree with me.
This PC stuff has been going on a long time but only recently have Democrat activists started affecting Democrats and only recently have people like Chait spoken out about it. It is my assumption, and rather reasonable one, that should these Democrat activists go back to attacking non-Democrats, that Chait would no longer care about their actions.
Maybe I am wrong and it just took this long to wake up to things and going forward he will defend people targeted by the Democrat mob even if Democrats are no longer targets.
I don’t see that he’s being inconsistent. He doesn’t say that we need to respect all opinions, he says that people have the right to say them without others forcing them to stop. He can still believe that a particular opinion is lunatic and he would never vote for such a lunatic opinion and neither should anyone who isn’t a lunatic.
I feel the same way about many liberal opinions, such as the belief that worldwide government action restricting carbon use is a good idea.
He should know that the first people put up against the wall and shot by a Marxist government are the useful idiots that put it into power.
The left always eat their own.