Political Correctness

The Tyranny of the Majority

A commonly used phrase by minorities to denigrate the will of the majority.
A fundamentally anti-democratic expression.
Note the selectivity with which it is used.
The phrase is only applied to selected majoritarian policy preferences.
In fact, it is fairly safe to observe that
it is only used against majorities which are heavily white and/or Christian.
In practice, it is used heavily by the usual practitioners of PC
to attack the policy desires of the non-PC.
Finally, consider a variant:
When have you ever heard the phrase
“The Tyranny of the Minority”?
Is it only possible for majorities to be tyrannical?
Of course not,
but who would want to admit the possibility of a tyranny of the PC?
Might sound too much like what we really have.


An excellent discussion of the origins and history of political correctness
is given in a roughly half hour video by William Lind
a YouTube playlist for the William Lind talk
The playlist embedded:

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Miscellaneous Articles

2007

2007-05-13-Will

A Bustling Hate-Crime Industry
By George F. Will
Washington Post, 2007-05-13

2008

2008-09-03-WP-Myerson

Economy? What Economy?
By Harold Meyerson
Washington Post, 2008-09-03

[Its conclusion; emphasis is added.]

But the economy is not all;
the GOP’s last best hope remains identity politics.
In a year when the Democrats have an African American presidential nominee,
the Republicans now more than ever are the white folks’ party,
the party that delays the advent of our multicultural future,
the party of the American past.

[Some of us, but evidently not Mr. Meyerson, still admire and respect that past
and abhor the notion of a multicultural future.]

Republican conventions have long been
bastions of de facto Caucasian exclusivity,

[The word “exclusivity” is perhaps misleading here.
If the Republican Party is heavily white,
that is not because Republicans keep blacks out,
but because blacks choose, out of their own free will, not to join.
Also, when black Republicans run for office in majority-black districts,
they are usually defeated by black Democrats.
And note how such black Republicans as Clarence Thomas
are shunned and reviled by the bulk of the black community.]

but coming right after the diversity of Denver,
this year’s GOP convention is almost shockingly -- un-Americanly -- white.

[Evidently in the eyes of Mr. Meyerson
the founders of the American republic,
and the signers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution,
were “un-American.”]

Long term, this whiteness is a huge problem.
This year, however, whiteness is the only way Republicans cling to power.
If the election is about the economy, they’re cooked --
and their silence this week on nearly all things economic
means that they know it.

[“Anti-Semites” have traditionally said that a main objective of Jews was
to undermine the power of the white Christian majority.
Is telling the truth “anti-Semitic”?]

2009

2009-11-19-TAC-Lind-the-roots-of-political-correctness

The Roots of Political Correctness
By William S. Lind
The American Conservative, 2009-11-19



In response to the killing of 13 American soldiers at Ft. Hood by an Islamic U. S. Army major, a number of senior officials have expressed their fear, not of Islam, but of a possible threat to “diversity.” “Diversity” is one of the many false gods of “Political Correctness.” But what exactly is Political Correctness?

Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. Its history goes back not to the 1960s but to World War I. Before 1914, Marxist theory said that if a major war broke out in Europe, the workers of every country would join together in a revolution to overthrow capitalism and replace it with international socialism. But when war came, that did not happen. What had gone wrong?

Two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, independently came up with the same answer. They said that Western culture and the Christian religion had so “blinded” the working class to its true (Marxist) class interests that Communism was impossible in the West until traditional culture and Christianity were destroyed. When Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bela Kun Bolshevik government in Hungary in 1919, one of his first acts was introducing sex education into the Hungarian schools. He knew that destroying traditional sexual morals would be a major step toward destroying Western culture itself.

Lukacs became a major influence on a Marxist think tank established in 1923 at Frankfurt University in Germany, the Institute for Social Research, commonly known as the Frankfurt School. When Max Horkheimer took over as director of the Frankfurt School in 1930, he set about in earnest to do Lukacs’ bidding by translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms. Other Frankfurt School members devoted to this intellectually difficult task were Theodor Adorno, Eric Fromm, Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. Theirs was not the Marxism of the Soviet Union – Moscow considered them heretics – but it was Marxism nonetheless.

The Frankfurt School’s key to success was crossing Marx with Freud. They argued that just as under capitalism everyone lived in a state of economic oppression, so under Western culture people lived under psychological repression. From psychology they also drew the technique of psychological conditioning. Want to “normalize” homosexuality? Just show television program after television program where the only normal-seeming white male is homosexual.

In 1933 the Frankfurt School moved from Germany to New York City. There, its products included “critical theory,” which demands constant, destructive criticism of every traditional social institution, starting with the family. It also created a series of “studies in prejudice,” culminating in Adorno’s immensely influential book, The Authoritarian Personality, which argued that anyone who defends traditional culture is a “fascist” and also mentally ill. That is why anyone who now dares defy “PC” gets sent to “sensitivity training,” which is psychological conditioning designed to produce submission.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Herbert Marcuse translated the abstruse work of the other Frankfurt School thinkers into books college students could understand, such as Eros and Civilization, which became the Bible of the New Left in the 1960s. Marcuse injected the Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxism into the baby boom generation, to the point where it is now that generation’s ideology. We know it as “multiculturalism,” “diversity” or just Political Correctness.

That is the dirty little secret of Political Correctness, folks: it is a form of Marxism. If the average American knew that, I suspect Political Correctness would be in serious trouble.

The Ft. Hood killings raise an interesting question: why would Marxists of any variety come to the support of Islam? After all, if the Islamics took over, they would cut Marxists’ throats even before they cut the throats of Christians and Jews. The answer is that cultural Marxism will ally with any force that helps it to achieve its goals, destroying Western culture and Christianity.

Obviously, there is far more to the history of the Frankfurt School and its creation of Political Correctness than I can cover in a short column. This is just a bare-bones outline. For those who want to learn more (and I hope you do), you can find a short book on the subject, which I edited, on the website of the Free Congress Foundation (www.freecongress.org). Free Congress also produced a short video documentary history of the Frankfurt School, which I’m told is available on Youtube (look under Frankfurt School or under my name). The video is especially valuable because we interviewed the principal American expert on the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay, who was then the chairman of the History Department at Berkeley (and obviously no conservative). He spills the beans.

Most people in the U. S. military hate Political Correctness, but they don’t know how to fight it. The way to fight it is to find out what it really is, and make sure all your friends find out too. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, which is to say intellectual Soylent Green. Here more than in anything else, knowledge is a weapon!

2011

2011-04-15-NYT-Sexism-surgeons-semen

Sexism Charges Divide Surgeons’ Group
By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D.
New York Times Well Blog, 2011-04-15

A Valentine’s Day editorial in the official newspaper of the American College of Surgeons has set off a firestorm of controversy that has divided the largest professional organization of surgeons in the country and raised questions about the current leadership and its attitudes toward women and gay and lesbian members.

The editorial, written by Dr. Lazar J. Greenfield, an emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Michigan School of Medicine and president-elect of the American College of Surgeons, extols the mood-enhancing effects of semen on women.
It begins with a reference to the mating behaviors of fruit flies,
then goes on to discuss studies on
the menstrual cycles of heterosexual and lesbian women who live together.
Citing the research of
evolutionary psychologists at the State University of New York,
it describes how
female college students who had been exposed to semen
were less depressed than their peers who had not,
concluding:
“So there’s a deeper bond between men and women
than St. Valentine would have suspected,
and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.”

This month, in response to complaints, the editorial was retracted and pulled from the group’s Web site, and Dr. Greenfield was asked to step down from his position as editor in chief of the surgeon’s newspaper. But criticisms continue to mount.

“I was aghast,” said Dr. Colleen Brophy, a professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, and a member of the organization for over 20 years. Dr. Brophy, who served as chairwoman of its surgical research committee, publicly resigned from the College on Thursday. “I’ve gone back and reviewed the science, and it’s erroneous,” she said. “But I’m resigning from the college not so much because of the editorial but because of the leadership’s response to it.”

The organization has more than 75,000 members (I am one). Roughly 10 percent are women. There are five women on the organization’s 22-member governing board; this month, they issued a letter requesting that Dr. Greenfield step down as president-elect. The entire board is set to vote on the issue on Sunday.

Dr. Greenfield has not issued a formal statement and could not be reached for comment, but in an e-mail to his colleagues in response to the criticism, he wrote that his editorial “was considered by the Women in Surgery Committee and the Association of Women Surgeons as demeaning to women.
Despite my apologies, they brought the issue to the Board of Regents.”

[“Demeaning to women”?
What baloney.
The feminists just can’t stand to think that men might provide something women lack.
What bitches they are.
In fact, to call them bitches probably demeans dogs.

If the science is erroneous, that is a legitimate criticism.
The science deserves to be scrutinized.
But the word "demeaning" has no scientific standing.
Rather, it is a political judgment.
But feminists subordinate science and truth to their political values.
So do some (male) psychologists, by the way, as I discovered in the early 1980s.]

Dr. L. D. Britt, the current president of the organization and chairman of surgery at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, also did not respond to requests for comment. But at a surgical meeting this month, he invoked the experience of “oppressed” South Africans who chose “reconciliation,” adding, “If someone is truly apologetic, we have to consider that.”

While women now make up almost half of all entering medical school classes in the United States, fewer than a third choose to go into surgery, in part because of a perceived male bias, negative attitudes of surgeons and a lack of female mentors. Once in practice, studies have shown, well over half of all women surgeons report feeling demeaned, and nearly a third say they have been the objects of inappropriate sexist remarks or advances.

Dr. Greenfield has had what many believe is an exemplary career not only as a surgeon but also as a longtime mentor and advocate of women in surgery. He is the editor of one of the major textbooks of surgery and the inventor of the Greenfield Filter, a device that has been used in hundreds of thousands of patients to prevent life-threatening blood clots from entering the lung. And Dr. Greenfield has been a mentor to countless surgeons, many of them women, while serving as chairman of surgery first at Virginia Commonwealth University and then at the University of Michigan.

“He has always been above reproach,” said Dr. Mary T. Hawn, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Alabama School of Medicine in Birmingham, who worked as a medical student, surgeon-in-training and faculty member under Dr. Greenfield. “Our understanding was that he went out of his way to recruit women on the trainee and faculty level.”

Dr. Diane M. Simeone, a professor of surgery at the University of Michigan who was a co-author of a recent article on barriers faced by women in academic surgery, agrees. “There still is a lot of gender bias in surgery, and I have seen it myself on multiple fronts,” she said. “That was never evident from Dr. Greenfield. I think it’s important to know that this is one event and to weigh it against a long career where he has always been completely above board and a role model for supporting women in surgery.”

It is less clear what attitudes Dr. Greenfield or other leaders of the organization have toward the college’s gay and lesbian members. “I think race and religion have made a lot more progress in the college than women, and particularly gay women or men,” Dr. Brophy said. “This is probably the first time I’ve ever seen the word ‘lesbian’ used in a piece or associated with the college. Ever.”

For some, the controversy is less a matter of Dr. Greenfield’s fate as president-elect and more a reflection of what some see as a deep disconnect between the old guard and its respect of hierarchy and professional omerta, and a newer generation of surgeons and leaders who embrace a culture of transparency in the age of the Internet.

Many surgeons chose not to comment on the matter,
for fear of professional repercussions,
but one said,
“It’s frankly been heartbreaking for all of us.”

“There are all these men and women out there
who are afraid to say something,”
said Dr. Barbara Lee Bass,
chairwoman of surgery at the Methodist Hospital in Houston,
who recently served on the college’s governing board.
“It reveals that there is still this intimidation and fearfulness,
and that’s what troubles me most.”

[Yep, that’s our feminists.
Clamping down on anyone who says anything of which they disapprove.
Reminds me of my married days.]

“I’m not sure some of the old guard see this as the watershed moment it is,” she continued. Referring to the college’s role as a standard bearer for surgeons and an advocacy organization for patient care and patient safety, she added: “It’s not so much about Dr. Greenfield anymore. It’s about the spine of our organization and the principles by which the organization governs itself.”

[Further comments, largely repeating those above:
The feminists have shown both their desire and ability to suppress any communications which suggest that their views are wrong.
See, for example, their successful war against doctors who tried to publicize the fertility problems that the lifestyle favored by feminists impose on women who (eventually) desire to have their own children,
and also their claims that pornography is only for the benefit of men,
rather than having the potential to motivate and encourage both men and women
to engage in mutually beneficial sexual relations
(which it certainly can do)
(see, for example, their attack on Faith Kroll's demonstration of
how she achieves female pleasure).

They are disgusting examples of speech and thought police.]

2011-02-Surgery-News-semen-editorial

The editorial
by Lazar Greenfield

[The above New York Times gives a very small part of the editorial.
I think the whole paragraph in which that part appears is significant,
so here it is:]

As far as humans are concerned,
you may think you know all about sexual signals,
but you’d be surprised by new findings.
It’s been known since the 1990s that
heterosexual women living together
synchronize their menstrual cycles because of pheromones,
but when a study of lesbians showed that they do not synchronize,
the researchers suspected that semen played a role.
In fact, they found
ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers
like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin;
a sleep enhancer, melatonin;
and of course, sperm, which makes up only 1%-5%.
Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina
also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient.
Female college students having unprotected sex
were significantly less depressed
than were those whose partners used condoms
(Arch. Sex. Behav. 2002;31:289-93).
Their better moods were not just a feature of promiscuity,
because women using condoms were just as depressed
as those practicing total abstinence.
The benefits of semen contact also were seen in fewer suicide attempts
and better performance on cognition tests.

2015-11-10-NYMag-Chait-can-we-take-political-correctness-seriously-now

Can We Start Taking Political Correctness Seriously Now?
By Jonathan Chait
New York Magazine Daily Intelligencer, 2015-11-10

...

[T]o imagine p.c. as simply a thing college kids do
relieves us of taking it seriously as a coherent set of beliefs, which it very much is.
Political correctness is a system of thought
that denies the legitimacy of political pluralism on issues of race and gender.
It manifests itself most prominently in campus settings not because it’s a passing phase, like acne,
but because the academy is one of the few bastions of American life
where the p.c. left can muster the strength to impose its political hegemony upon others.
The phenomenon also exists in other nonacademic left-wing communities,
many of them virtual ones centered on social media,
and its defenders include professional left-wing intellectuals.

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).

The scene in Columbia and the recent scene in New Haven share a similar structure:
jeering student mobs expressing incredulity at the idea of political democracy.
As far as the students are concerned, they represent the cause of anti-racism,
a fact that renders the need for debate irrelevant.
Defenses of p.c. tactics simply sweep aside objections to the tactics as self-interested whining.
“It’s not about creating an intellectual space,” shouts one Yalie.
Notably, the events at Yale have redounded in New Haven to the benefit of the protesters,
who have renewed their demands,
and Nicholas Christakis, the Yale administrator seen pleading futilely for reason, issuing apologies for his behavior.
Likewise, at Wesleyan, the student newspaper that sparked outrage
by publishing the op-ed of a student (cautiously) questioning elements of the Black Lives Matter movement has been harshly sanctioned.

That these activists have been able to prevail,
even in the face of frequently harsh national publicity highlighting the blunt illiberalism of their methods,
confirms that these incidents reflect something deeper than a series of one-off episodes.
They are carrying out the ideals of
a movement that regards the delegitimization of dissent
as a first-order goal.
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 —
and make a decision on whether they agree with it.

[It seems to me the designation of dissenting groups as "hate groups"
is rather similar.
One cannot advocate, for example, for the interests of white people
without being designated "a hater".
On the other hand, those advocating for the interests of black people
get a free pass.
The resonance this strikes with me is with a view I first met at Brandeis University c. 1970.
It seemed to be a given in the general campus culture
that something called "the establishment" or "the system"
was something to be opposed, for keeping (presumed deserving) people down.
(This whole anti-establishment attitude was definitely something I had never encountered before.)
An underlying assumption seems to be that the people then "on top" of the system
did not deserve to be there....]

2016

2016-03-17-Murray-an-open-letter-to-the-virginia-tech-community

An open letter to the Virginia Tech community
by Charles Murray, 2017-03-17

Last week, the president of Virginia Tech, Tim Sands, published an “open letter to the Virginia Tech community” defending lectures delivered by deplorable people like me (I’m speaking on the themes of Coming Apart on March 25). Bravo for President Sands’s defense of intellectual freedom. But I confess that I was not entirely satisfied with his characterization of my work. So I’m writing an open letter of my own.

Dear Virginia Tech community,

Since President Sands has just published an open letter making a serious allegation against me, it seems appropriate to respond. The allegation: “Dr. Murray is well known for his controversial and largely discredited work linking measures of intelligence to heredity, and specifically to race and ethnicity — a flawed socioeconomic theory that has been used by some to justify fascism, racism and eugenics.”

Let me make an allegation of my own. President Sands is unfamiliar either with the actual content of The Bell Curve — the book I wrote with Richard J. Herrnstein to which he alludes — or with the state of knowledge in psychometrics.

...