The prehistory of “liberal fascism”

In, IIRC, 1968 Ken Kesey gave a speech about Neo-Fascism in the New Left to a gathering of the same. No joke, folks. Dissenters were already squelching dissent in their own ranks.

Myself @ 2

Please excuse the juxtaposition of the question mark and period. I had a rough day at work, and I’m sipping pastis as I write.

#2, that sounds like Orlando Patterson, but I don’t have a link.

What is noteworthy to me is how at a time when US ‘conservatism’ has become so similar to fascism in many ways they choose to go around labelling their opponents fascists. Interestingly this is the tactic used by Britain’s 100% genuine fascist party the BNP, whose leader Nick Griffin recently remarkde that whites have been ethnically cleansed from London. I don’t think there’s any record of him actually saying something like ‘the white male is the Jew of liberal fascism’ but judging from what I’ve heard from him it would be entirely in character.

A friend of mine heard that song from his FL father.

From what I’ve seen almost everyone i n American politics was calling everyone else a fascist aroun 1938-40. Anti-Roosevelt people called Roosevelt a Fascist, and he returned the favor. But a lot of people including one of the LaFollettes admired Mussolini.

Fascism was a new issue and no one knew what to do with it.

And as I’ve said, one of the isolationists most implicated with Viereck in 1940 (Sen. Lundeen) had been accused of being a communist in 1934.

A Professor Steele in the Wp article says anti-neo-Lamarckians are politically correct. I thought it was the neo-Lamarckians who were politically correct! How is one to know . . .

The term liberal fascism comes from H.G. Wells in 1932, near as anyone can tell. Wells also called for an “enlightened Nazism” in the West. Though it is certainly peppered with polemic, Goldberg’s book is actually considerably more analytical and less inflammatory than most of you kind folks on the left probably suspect. In other words–its worth reading before dismissing out of hand.

http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/35/4/541

D.R. Foster: “Though it is certainly peppered with polemic, Goldberg’s book is actually considerably more analytical and less inflammatory than most of you kind folks on the left probably suspect.”

I’ve read it. It’s every bit as un-analytic and inflammatory as the kind folks on the left suspect. I’m also a bit of a liberal fascism scholar myself, thenk you very much, although I came to it through Wells’ film work. Here’s my prior response, here on CT, to the Coupland piece you link.

https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/24/liberal-fascism-wings-over-the-world-edition/

In other words—its worth reading before dismissing out of hand.

No.

In other words—its worth reading before dismissing out of hand.

So I should read it, and then dismiss it out of hand? Seems a rather inefficient way to go about things if you ask me.

My recollection jibes, to some extent, with JQ’s 2nd paragraph. When I was in college in Chicago in the mid 70s, I had a housemate who served as the trusted mediator between all the leftist factions on campus, and I recall hearing him using ‘politically correct’ in an ironic or derisive way.

Jona Goldberg has every right to be pissed off at what were to be called “politically correct” classmates and instructors and how they treated him. Where he goes wrong is to assume his anger tells him anything about anything more than the people he actually met in college or wherever. One of the most striking features of the part of “movement conservatism” that appeared on college campuses in the 1980s is how unpleasant these young men were.

It’s interesting that campus humor magazines like the “Harvard Lampoon” and “Columbia Jester” were largely staffed by right-wingers like P.J. O’Roarke and John Hughes,* but it’s also interesting that movement magazines like the Dartmouth or Morningside Reviews demonstrated something almost but not quite exactly unlike a sense of humor.

The phrase always reminded me of “social fascism,” as proposed by the Comintern in 1928 setting social democracy against Communism.

I first heard the term when an actual Spartacist used it to describe FDR, and I had to sort of figure it out, not being in on the reference.

I think the campaign to use the term PC and cognates in prosecuting the culture wars (cf ‘loony left’ etc) has gone awry, in Britain anyway. My observation is that among a great many Ordinary People, it’s quite widely used, non-ironically and approvingly, to mean basically ‘not being bigoted’. I think that outcome is assured by the fact that those who proudly announce themselves to be ‘politically incorrect’ are generally of the Clarkson/Carol Thatcher/Littlejohn type, viz. total cunts. In fact you can still hear the opposition using the phrase ‘political correctness gone mad’ – implying a default status of sane – or anyway you could a few years ago.

Actually the above is not quite correct. The actual term ‘PC’ is not very often used, though the concept will be defended against the Littlejohns. ‘Un-PC’ is I think most often used to describe unacceptable but somewhat excusable use of, say, racist terminology by those who know no better e.g. the oldest generation. For those who do (or ‘should’) know better, the specific term: racist, sexist, ‘homophobic’, etc, is generally employed.

Goldberg’s book can now be bought for shipping cost. You need not feel guilty about fattening him up.

Dear Paul: shut up already.

Needless to say, I did not intend to imply above that Jonah Goldberg is not obviously stupid and/or insane.

At first I read the second to last line of Paul’s bit of bible study as “Elvis flourishes when good men (and women) do nothing”

That would have been a more interesting moral to the story.

Matt:

Everyone knows that Elvis flourishes when good men (and women) shake their hips.

Speaking as one who used the term “pc” in the early/mid-seventies, I can assure you that the in-joke was always a pejorative at the same time. Its rather unwitting co-opting by the right was an early indication of a deficient sense of humour and the dissemination a result of a lazy media.

@40: I’m really not sure what you’re trying to say. I didn’t mention persecution. (The only allusion I can find to persecution in what I wrote was the mention of John Hughes, who was quoted saying something along those lines in the articles published after his recent death.)

The main lesson of the history of “political correctness” is that the Right will always and inevitably interpret even wry self-deprecation as weakness and exploit it ruthlessly.

36: They’re 3rd gen hippies

This strikes me as an exceedingly useful notion, and one that, for some reason, had never occurred to me before. We speak, of course, of first-, second-, and third-wave feminism, after all, and while those terms are fraught, we roughly know what we’re referring to.

It could be quite useful to speak of so-called hippies in this way. Perhaps it’s been done and I was unaware. Ixnay on the “all smell of patchouli” however.

I’m just noting that in my experience, with a surprising number of people, their most visceral and deep seated reasons for identifying with conservative politics are linked to some some oddly persistent sense of persecution that they acquired in college.

Yeah, but nothing happened in college. Some kids organized a sit-in for a living wage. Some other kids volunteered for unsuccessful left-wing politicians. Given all the other shit that happens in college, this couldn’t possibly cause a lifetime reaction that leads to thinking that John McCain would be a good President.

Some people are just conservative. Some people just think that the world is the way it is for a reason, and they don’t trust people who talk about helping the powerless or “doing good.” They approve of master morality and are hostile to slave morality. The hippies didn’t make them that way, they’re just an obvious target.

Barbar, I agree that there are some basic temperaments and that when one is heading strongly a particular way, the incidentals don’t matter much. But they can feel like they matter a lot. College was the first time for a lot of conservatives to feel seriously judged, and that rankles a lot for many authoritarian types – in some cases because the authoritarian follower’s urge to submit sets them up to feel like they ought to heed the judgment except that it’s all wrong and nasty to agree with that sort of person, and the cognitive loops spin wildly. Listening to conservative dormmates rant about it, I felt like I was sometimes seeing the aftermath of an experience as traumatic as realizing that one is gay or transgendered, or losing a closely held religious faith, and scrambling to reestablish security.

John
we used the term “right on” in Britain (to describe someone who was a bit too pleased with their own political correctness/ideological soundness). This was the early-to-mid-80’s, and certainly in the US, by the later 80’s we were using “PC” to mean the same thing. Looking back, I wonder whether the term “right on” came from “The Young Ones” — the Rik Mayall character was a caricature of the right-on young man — but without being offensive at all to the left (I didn’t really watch The Young Ones, but everyone else I knew on the left watched it and loved it, partly for the Rik Mayall character).

First time I heard of the phrase ‘pc’ was is late 1990, when an England-based American grad student remarked to my then girlfriend “Chris is a bit PC, isn’t he?”

Up til then, we were all “right-on”, which could be admitted to slightly ruefully by its unrepentant adherents, but never got the same kind of reactionary traction which PC still has.

FWIW, we had a self-conscious Nazi on our campus in the late 80s – leather coat and funny haircut and all. He never looked half so pleased with himself as when he exercised his right to free speech at a Union meeting with a horde of seething Trots hissing every word. Unfortunately, while he definitely deserved to be gone for with a knife, so did a lot of them, not least for their unpleasantly octopoid tendency towards young female first-years, if you know what I mean.

[help i’m trapped in moderation: is “sp3c!4l!st” also a problem?]

I graduated from college in 1980 at the age of 34. Some of my fellow students were 19 or 20, whereas some of the TAs and young faculty were about my age or a few years older.

It was pretty jarring, because the young facultyI knew were ex-New-Leftists, more or less, trying to carry their politics into the future, whereas most of the students couldn’t care less. The faculty guys looked sort of silly because they assumed that they were charismatic, whereas few college students have ever thought of faculty that way. (One faculty member had a little shock when a student said of one of Ibsen’s restless-wife characters, “I don’t understand why she had so much respect for her husband. He was just a professor, after all”.)

One thing that was happening then, though, was a sorting out of the entering students into left and non-left, and along with this went a lot of other stuff, certain kinds of taste in movies and food and books and clothes and sex and drugs, and it was often perceived as a split between the better, left class of people and the inferior, crass, rightwing class of people. And the separation of the sheep from the goats was often accomplished via snide forms of ridicule.

Thinking about this kind of thing people make two mistakes. One is assuming that the hard right is hillbilly trailer trash, when a lot of it, maybe most, is well-off and educated. The second mistake is thinking that the people we’re talking about are entirely hard-core wingers. I’m willing to right off the hard core 30% of the American electorate, but the people we shouldn’t write off are the 50% who aren’t conservative but just plain don’t like liberals.

One thing that happened during the last 50 years or so is that economic liberalism has come to be defined as “us” doing good things for “the poor and unfortunate” out of a sense of noblsse oblige. A lot of lower middle class people have n feeling of noblesse oblige, and why should they? They’re at risk of becoming poor and unfortunate themselves.

This split is so thoroughly woven in to American culture that any academic seeming guy who speaks in a certain tone of voice counts as a liberal even though he’s center right. (I’m thinking specifically of Bill Schneider of CNN, who has the mild professorial manner down to a T, but is unmistakably centrist and often center-right).

I must admit that I experience an involuntary recoil at the tendency of some to believe that if everybody were properly informed, everybody would agree with whatever position they hold. Rightly or wrongly, I associate this tendency with liberalism. Rightly, in my opinion, I associate this tendency with an overly optimistic view of human nature.

AT@54: Sounds horrific, but at least they had substantive points to make. What I remember of the Morningside Review is primarily ridicule of female Democrats (though they may have ridiculed Jean Kirkpatrick too) on the ostensible basis of their looks. The MR is, I think, the one that got National Review funding and was based on the kind of thing the Dartmouth Review was doing. Googling reminds me of the Federalist Paper, which was founded by ex MR members and which I do actually remember as sometimes readable. But on a campus as political and as reliably left as Columbia, where most of the humor pieces in the Jester (which may well have been staffed by leftists, I have no way of knowing), poked fun at political correctness avant la lettre (wear more buttons! the poor of the world need you to wear as many buttons as possible!), the conservatives didn’t seem to have much to say except to make all the nasty remarks they got criticized for elsewhere.

Claiming that 80% of Americans ‘just plain don’t like liberals’ is an over-statement, I’m pretty sure or at least I hope. If it isn’t then the US really does have a problem with something at least closely resembling facism, just not the one that Goldberg claims.

Neo-populism recently has mostly been people like Carville and Mudcat X who want to go for the Southern white vote. (When it’s not neo-Nazis). To me the target would be discouraged voters, something like 40-50% of the electorate.

It wouldn’t be an imitation of the old Populism either, going after the farmers in bib overalls. It would involve trying to define “us” in temrs of todays America, while defining “them” in terms of high finance, the super-rich, and the various people who have had their hands of the controls.

The financial collapse is going to continue to bite for another 5-10, and it may get worse. Someone will be blamed, and if it’s not the Republicans, it will be the Democrats. The Republicans are already tooling up, but the Democrats are still just mumbling around as per usual.

Someone just pointed out that Obama has an aversion to conflict. WTF is he doing in politics? But he’s characteristic of the typical Democratic wonk, who thinks that it’s possible to evade every issue with slick technical fixes and backroom deals.

Some say that the Democrats’ weaknesses are purely due to simple corruption. They have a point, but I’m not convinced. Democrats can be self-defeating even in terms of their own pathetically limited goals. I’m sure that there’s something in the DSM-IV that covers the Democrats’ problem, the Chickenshit Personality Disorder or something. For some it’s high principle based on Orwell and Gandhi. For some it’s the occupational psychosis of the professional and administrative classes. For some it’s the belief that the future is knowable, and that it’s stupid to fight battles since you already know who will win.

To the best of my recollection, Engels, John isn’t exaggerating when he talks about the gap between the positions most Americans support and what they’re willing to call themselves. A decent American Prospect piece on the subject turns up with a little googling, and there’s more. Movement conservatives won the battle for terms and identities even though they’re widely hated.

I also really strongly agree that the targets of voter outreach should be those who don’t vote because they don’t quite see a reason to bother, with the prospect of some changes that would make it worth their while. But I think that will be harder in 2010 and 2012 and on into the future than it was in 2006 and 2008, because of how completely the Democratic Party betrayed hopes for an end to the Iraq occupation and for improvements at home.

Sorry for the transatlantic language, I just don’t quite know the American for posh and oik.

I should know better than to number comment replies here. FTR I’m not agreeing with myself in that last post, but with Emerson’s on Neo-populism three posts up.

I find it strange to hear about hippies in this topic. Hippies were not self-righteous enough to be PC-ers or fascists, or to persecute college conservatives. The hippie phenomenon was a spiritual movement, not a political one.

There have been meaningful changes.

For inventment bankers.

also for investment bankers.

That one’s actually not much of a change thus far.

BTW, one man who appears to understand (though not to care about) the critique about liberals, and appears to want (and to care) to move the debate onto a terrain that the left can win, is Mark Ames.

Alex wrote, Finding a way of showing that this ain’t necessarily so [if indeed, it isn’t] is a central challenge for the maintenance of anything approaching a ‘left’ into the future …

Huh? It’s been known since at least the time of American self-educated economist Henry George more than 100 years ago that the main redistribution performed by government is from the (relative) landless to the landowners.

Thus, the problem with the “left” is its obsession with Marx’s dichotomy of capitalist vs worker, rather than George’s correct capitalist and worker vs landowner (and other rent collectors).

The stimulus was a defeat or a failure.It wasn’t big enough, and we’re due to have another jobless recovery. A second stimulus could save the day, but the Republicans and Blue Dogs will be ferociously opposed. And the stimulus debate was one of Obama’s bipartisan specials.

Some for the bailout. He had them over a barrel, and he gave him a no-strings-attached bailout. This is worse than a failure, though, because it means that Obama is in Goldman Sach’s pocket.

Other failures/ betrayals: Don’t Ask don’t Tell, two wars, and too many civil liberties / unitary President / official secrecy issues to count.

They all were business as usual. There had to be some kind of bailout and stimulus. What we got was the minimal one.

Actually, a lot of that was Bush, but Obama didn’t improve anything, and he could have.

I think we’re working with different definitions of “meaningful,” Substance.

Obviously, and I mostly agree with the criticisms you and Emerson make, and I’ve made the same criticisms in some cases. But I don’t believe everything Obama has done has been meaningless, which would seem to be your assertion.

I don’t believe everything Obama has done has been meaningless

I’m not using the word in any grand existential sense. The definition of “meaningful” I’m working with is roughly equivalent to “substantive.” I do not believe the change Obama has effected to date, particularly on the major questions that got him elected, is substantive.

Honduras? HIV Travel Ban? Stimulus that wasn’t all tax cuts? Re-establishing oversight on intelligence gathering? Hate Crimes? Health Care with P.O.?

It’s true that it’s hard to be “disappointed” by someone who advertised themselves as the same brand of sucky centrist that’s been muddling along in American politics for the past forty years. OTOH it was sort of legit to hope that some things would be beyond a particular centrist pale, like reprising the mistakes of LBJ in re: foreign wars or trying to implement rhetoric as a substitute for policy in re: clearly illegal torture policies. But bottom line is, it looks right now as though Obama’s on track to discredit the old line centrism as a complement to his predecessors’ discrediting of the old line movementarianism. Best case is that a glimmer of actually sane politics emerges from the rubble.

It’s not hard to just google “obama achievements” and come up with something you think is worth a cheer

It is hard to do so and find substantive movements on the core issues that got the guy elected. I mean, yay no HIV travel ban, that’s great, it really is, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not pivotal to the nature of the American republic and the big questions the entire planet is dealing with courtesy of the Cheney Administration. Aggressive warfare, institutionalized torture and the “unitary Executive” are.

I mean, yay no HIV travel ban, that’s great, it really is, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not pivotal to the nature of the American republic and the big questions the entire planet is dealing with courtesy of the Cheney Administration.

Sure. But a $2500 tax break on college tuition is gonna be a substantial thing to a bunch of people, as will be access to cheap birth control, not getting arrested for using marijuana as medicine, and so forth.

If there’s any lesson the Democrats should long ago have learned from LBJ, it’s that expensive wars seriously affect your ability to pay for and to push any other program, be it tax breaks on college tuition or anything else. That’s a major reason why the big issues are more meaningful than the little issues. The social and economic woes that ultimately sunk LBJ were directly tied to Vietnam. Similar woes today are directly tied to the massive expenditures in Iraq and, now, Afghanistan. It’s not avoidable.

101: “Tax break” says it all. Big fucking deal.

Does this go to your knowledge of the realities of philosophy departments?

Tax breaks is the Republican answer for everything, for Christ’s sakes. The ones who need help the most are exactly the ones who won’t get it.

Everyone here but you came into the Obama Admministration hoping for some big changes from the previous administration, which was possibly the worst administration in American history and achieved some enormous degradations of American life. We haven’t seen any of those changes. You can throw out as many small things as you want, and it’s not going to help.

Obama really had some historic opportunities, but instead of seizing them he basically asked Olympia Snowe what to do.

But I don’t think that even really cool gains for any particular little segment of the population are likely to matter much if we’re stuck with continued collapse into latter-day feudalism with endless war.

I agree entirely. Obama will have to fight to win re-election.

For the record, I didn’t expect anything but moderate centricism from Obama. Even if one did its been 6 months; give him a year to turn America into a populist paradise.

A tax credit for college is exactly the sort of thing I think of as not helping in the big picture: it moves the margin of who can afford college now some, and that’s good. But it provides no incentive to colleges to manage their budgets differently, nor any incentive to employers to consider something other than the growing reliance on degrees in more and more fields. So it lets more people keep propping a system that cannot be sustained.

I’m not opposed to amelioration, but I’d like it much more strongly tied (indeed, tied at all) to actual reform.

they help people live, and not go bankrupt or to prison or die

But of course. He’s one of those “sane evil people”, as Jon Schwarz calls them.

You seem to think that the one step is a big deal.

Size is relative, as many people have said to me. I am arguing that the one step is some sort of deal: a meaningful thing. I guess I get to say that on marijuana he’s moved further forward than the last Democratic president.

As far as I can tell, there’s been no net so far.

If you mean “nothing has been done” that’s false. I’m agreed with you about health care not looking so hot. We’ll see.

In all seriousness, screw The Arts and screw The Humanities. They’re nice things, but that other stuff dwarfs them.

it might be worth mentioning (i don’t know…maybe it’s not) richard bernstein’s own take on goldberg’s book: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/world/americas/30iht-letter.1.9602546.html

Yeah, “better than Bush” is enough. “Undoing what Bush did” is Utopian. And when someone consistently makes the wrong choices for ten months, you should wait another few years.

I hate Democrats. I hate liberals. I just told the Troll of Sorrow to fuck off, but he’s right.

Yes, but apart from the stimulus, non-Federalist-Society Supreme Court justice, honest-to-god diplomacy, pullback on prosecuting medical marijuana operations, pullback on torture, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Honduras, HIV Travel Ban, Stimulus that wasn’t all tax cuts, Re-establishing oversight on intelligence gathering, Hate Crimes and Health Care with P.O. what have the Romans ever given us?

Why doesn’t Obama go after the bankers?

I don’t get the joke, Engels.

Engels: I absolutely refuse to grant things like “pullback on torture”. We’re getting cosmetic gestures. Where are the full and open investigations, and prosecutions of high-ranking officials who have confessed/bragged of their role in war crimes? When do we find out what’s been going on in Bagram AFB and elsewhere? Where are the statements that of course piece-of-shit rationales like Yoo’s and Addington’s aren’t sufficient cover and that no one who conspired to violate treaty and constitution can expect safety from the law? Where are the new constraints on the use of mercenaries and prison-industrial complex bruisers to do our dirty work?

Likewise with “Re-establishing oversight on intelligence gathering”. I’ve missed immunity repeals, or anything of that sort that might impose any real constraint on the administration doing whatever it damn well pleases. I’ve also missed the administration ceasing to make extraordinarily broad claims of executive privilege and the like to keep its secrets. Kind words do not do it.

At bottom for me it’s pretty simple: an administration that can make war this way is an administration that nobody should trust to do anything else reliably morally or legally. It’s not that there’s nothing to like in what they’re doing, it’s that there’s no reason to trust any of it to last the moment it conflicts with the imperatives of empire.

Remember, kids, if we all just hate at the same time and with sufficient intensity, then, and only then, will things will finally start to change. And jokes are a tool of ideological state repression.

‘Undoing what Bush did’ over eight years in nine months probably is ‘utopian’. For the record I am not a fan of Obama and said people here were massively over-estimating him before the election, at which time I was accused of being ‘cynical’. I think Tariq Ali put it nicely: Augustus was a better emperor than Nero.

(I think your points in #131 are good ones.)

Substance McGravitas @ 128

I clicked your “Thomas ‘Obama is Hitler’ Sowell” link and reviewed every entry on the first page of hits that Google returned. Not a single link there implies in the slightest that Thomas Sowell likens President Obama to Adolf Hitler.

In one case, some wacko comments posted make references like these. In one other case, the link summary says something about “similarities,” but there is no indication where that comes from, because Hitler is neither mentioned in the article or even in Google’s cached page of the article.

In the other articles the name, Obama, appears somewhere in one context and the name, Hitler, appears somewhere else in a completely different context. That’s the summary of the Google search you supplied.

I know that you realize — as any educated person familiar with searching on the Internet must — that searching “Obama+Hitler+whomever” will return all sorts of things. In separating the wheat from the chaff you may find yourself left with nothing but chaff, as in this case. As such, I’m skeptical as to whether yours is an honest mistake. More likely, you would have the reader conclude that Thomas Sowell is just another hysterical tea bag protester. Shame on you.

If you don’t like the man, why not simply accuse him of being a “fascist”? There is precedent for that kind of slander; moreover, the casual reader is much more likely to be discouraged from reviewing the author’s entire corpus to see whether or not the label holds up.

You may find you’ll have better luck that way.

Engels: Genuinely sorry I missed your intent. It’s just very difficult to manage sometimes, and it’s not because of the limits of text so much as because of the genuine craziness of our social/intellectual environment. People I have respected seize up and commit to amazingly stupid, wrong things routinely, and people I never did respect nonetheless astonish me with the depths of their revealed vileness. It’s very hard to have any foundation of trust on which to build the expectations against which humorous juxtaposition could happen.

The beats were like precursors. 1940-1955 that culture was concentrated in tiny enclaves in Manhattan, San Francisco, and very few other places. The hippie thing was a new development from that root. It was new, though, and the hippies I knew back in the day didn’t especially like the grumbly old beats.

I first encountered the use of the term “politically correct” or PC on the University of Wisconsin campus — in 1983.

It was used by liberals to critique fellow liberals who thought it useful or bright to run around policing allies for insufficient solidarity with a generally hard-left stance, esp regarding policies revolving around women’s rights, gay rights, the anti-Apartheid movement, a pro-multi-culti/diversity outlook, or an anti-Reagan politics in general. None of which appeared particularly radical to me at the time (because they’re conservative in their adherence to Constitutional values).

Point being, politically incorrect is and always has been a contradiction in terms: how can anyone possibly be political and incorrect at the same time?? Political opinions have always been intractable in character and infinite in variation, and by definition under our Constitution, none of them can be correct, as they’re all always contested.

Calling someone “politically incorrect!” because they disagree with you, no matter how right you are about the rights of various parties or the wrongness of a given foreign policy, is just an attempt to keep someone in line without exploring the more interesting aspects of an issue at a more detailed and difficult level. It’s a rhetorical trump card. But no opinion is more ‘correct’ than any other in an arena fraught with interpersonal politics and politics defined more broadly: any political position has to battle it out for primacy — not be granted an ideological throne based on some code word used to police one’s allies by some self-appointed guardian of a puritanical position within an already degraded discourse.

Adherence to Constitutional principles may render political positions worthy and accurate and consistent with the system that upholds

So — in the usage I had seen, PC had been wielded, with a great degree of irony, against liberals who’d gone overboard with the dogma. It was then misunderstood by those ideologues and adopted by them, and further misunderstood by the national commentariat (George Will & Co.), who had no sense of humor and no conception of irony and mischaracterize both the multi-culti ‘left’ and the meaning and origin of the term ‘PC’ itself.

So simple. So easy to grasp.

rich, I think some text may have disappeared at the point where the italics kicked in (‘at the same time’ as what?). But a couple of of remarks:

*It’s a rhetorical trump card. But…any political position has to battle it out for primacy—- not be granted an ideological throne*
How does the rule ‘PCs are trumps’ gain its unfair (boo hoo, widdle piddle) authority over those who don’t agree? Or: what plays the role of a sovereign’s use or theat of force in your ‘enthronement’ metaphor (see #144)? Or: what makes ‘PC’ something other than a move in the battle for primacy among political positions? Why can it not be countered by ordinary argumentative means, instead requiring something like appeal to an umpire/parent figure?

*PC had been wielded, with a great degree of irony, against liberals who’d gone overboard with the dogma. It was then misunderstood by those ideologues and adopted by them, and further misunderstood by the national commentariat (George Will & Co.), who had no sense of humor and no conception of irony*
Finding it less than simple to grasp what the posited second layer of misunderstanding consists of – it looks as though the first misunderstanding does all the work. See in any case #44.

More generally, I thought the main element of the views labelled ‘PC’ (with or without various kinds of ever-so-subtle irony) is the idea that certain terms, jokes, concepts, practices etc have implicit meanings or presuppositions that are (as you point out, mostly uncontroversially) unacceptable if made explicit. Thus attacks aganst ‘PC’ from the right commonly take (or used to take) the form of examples, mostly spurious, in which such implicit meanings were wrongly attributed, e.g. ‘bah bah white sheep’ etc, rather than suggesting that the substantive politics were at fault (‘Yes, the accusation of racism is accurate and relevant to my opinions – but who made anti-racism trumps?’).

Tim @ 146 —
I don’t see any missing text, and I can offer a quick clarifier to part of your query there, though not in great depth tonight (see next paragraph). On your comment @ 150, it is incorrect to surmise that “the para as a whole depends on some highly questionable (dare [you] say incorrect?) philosophy” — perhaps at another juncture my observations can be elaborated, but for now responsibility is borne by the reader to do their share of the lifting.

Returning to your initial query:
me: It’s [used as] a rhetorical trump card. But…any political position has to battle it out for primacy—- not be granted an ideological throne….

Tim: How does the rule ‘PCs are trumps’ gain its unfair (boo hoo, widdle piddle) authority over those who don’t agree?

I didn’t say it was successful. Nor did I offer some plaint of unfair treatment or claim to have suffered merely because some self-appointed guardian of political purity among the like-minded has so little political acuity or so few interpersonal skills as to actually presume to condescend to tell their peers what does and does not qualify as thinkable thought on a given issue (without examining its real-world complexities). Nor for that matter, more currently, is any authority conferred on peers with so little intellectual heft or awareness of interpersonal politics that they feel free to presume to condescend to know and disrespect the ‘philosophy’ on which a paragraph I penned must in your view ‘depend’ (without doing the responsible, readerly work of examining that text from a range of angles).

Not sure where you’re comin’ from, Tim. I was not responding to your comment @ #144. I had not read it. But a passing familiarity with rhetoric or a handful of poststructuralist texts, or for that matter a few key texts falling squarely within what was once considered the canonical patrimony, would easily situate what I was getting at within the realm of the correct (accurate)— if not the unquestionable(!) (clause contingent on your ability to get the joke there).

Point being, ‘politically incorrect’ is not a matter of etiquette. Nor could ‘enforcement’ of this particular worldview ever remotely begin to approach some variant of ‘fascism’. Initially used as a highly effective critique of the left by the left, it handily exposed many self-important ideologues who could not distinguish between political difference and retrograde anti-Constitutionalist heresy — and who did presume to enforce their party line of choice. Those serious folks doing the policing, missing any sense of irony and entirely missing the pointed contradiction in terms inherent in the phrase, soon adopted the term as a rhetorical trump card, and used it sincerely and ineffectively. The phrase was subsequently adopted by the ilk of George Will, who also misunderstood its the term as badly as he misunderstood progressive politics.

You may have to divest yourself of some disciplinary baggage, Tim, to fully appreciate the normative usage of the term. Multiple views on a single issue about which there is general agreement should signal that no one opinion among those perspectives can be held up as the “politically correct” perspective. The point of free expression is that no single human arbiter of sound opinion, thinkable thought or effective policy is really reliable. The point of politics is that it is opinionated and subjective, consisting of more than a statistically-verified body of facts. One viewpoint may win out as the result of the exercise of power, and another opinion may be inconsistent with Constitutional principles, but none are ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ in a contested political arena. (I’d go on to argue, however, that our core Constitutional principles form a social commons and a set of rules for engagement, and hotly contested opinions may describe accurately or be consistent with that framework; such political positions may be termed politically correct, without risk of aneurysm or seizure).

Couple additional responses:
Or: what plays the role of a sovereign’s use or theat of force in your ‘enthronement’ metaphor (see #144)?

No one plays “the role of a sovereign,” nor assumes to wield the “sovereign’s use or threat of force.” Why would they? Don’t know what you’re getting at here. Think small ‘e’ ‘enthronement’ within the average use of language, not Big Allegory Enthronement. We’re talking rhetoric and argument-ending tactics here, not literary tropes in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

Or, labeling something ‘PC’ does not end the debate, and no one needs to wield concrete power or literal threats for anyone to realize this.

Or: what makes ‘PC’ something other than a move in the battle for primacy among political positions? Why can it not be countered by ordinary argumentative means, instead requiring something like appeal to an umpire/parent figure?

Who requires appeal to an umpire or authority? Ordinary means are enough, are they not? The misuse of the term is so patently crude that it’d be weak, if the compulsion for political control wasn’t so virulent.

I don’t believe I said ‘PC’ was something other than “a move in the battle for primacy”; I said it was often an ineffectual, self-contradictory and off-target move that chose in-fighting among allies and later handed all its ammunition to the conservatives it loathed. Those conservatives proceeded to get the term and its usage and the political positions of the left completely wrong, of course, waving the bloody shirt or straw man of supposedly dogmatic liberals in the national media and making much hay in the process. Why look, now that the careers of George Will, Sarah Palin and Calvin Thomas are at their zenith, having won universal admiration and unimaginable influence, we can sit back and assess how they’ve wielded all that power to win for gays and folks of color and white men too the full slate of creator-endowed liberties guaranteed in teh Constitution but gutted in practice that conservaties so espouse.

“Social fascism” comes from Stalin. Here is Trotsky disagreeing that social democracy (liberalism?) is fascism:

…with Stalin’s words, “Fascism is the military organization of the bourgeoisie which leans upon the Social Democracy for active support. The Social Democracy, objectively speaking, is the moderate wing of fascism.” Objectively speaking, it is a habit with Stalin, when he attempts to generalize, to contradict the first phrase by the second and to conclude in the second what doesn’t at all follow from the first There is no debating that the bourgeoisie leans on the Social Democracy, and that fascism is a military organization of the bourgeoisie; and this has been remarked upon a long time ago. The only conclusion which follows from this is that the Social Democracy as well as fascism are the tools of the big bourgeoisie. How the Social Democracy becomes thereby also a “wing” of fascism is incomprehensible. Equally profound is another observation by the same author: fascism and Social Democracy are not enemies, they are twins. Now twins may be the bitterest enemies; while on the other hand, allies need not be born necessarily on one and the same day and from identical parents. Stalin’s constructions lack even formal logic, to say nothing of dialectics. Their strength lies in the fact that none dares challenge them.