Yes, banning comedy is the canary in the mine since the left has no sense of humor and no defence against humor unless its bans it completely.

@Krunoslav You mean canary, don't you? Unless you're talking about canned humor.

@GaryMysels Ups, yeah, Canary the little bird. Type. Autocorrect must have misfired. I will correct it. Usually in totalitarian systems, humor is outlawed because the powers that rule know that humor can be used as a powerful weapon against them, so they usually try to prevent it altogether instead of trying to fight the meme war, which they know they will lose. So when the comedy is under attack by force, you know something sinister and dark is afoot. In the EU, they try to pass Article 15, which is essentially legislation to prevent people from using original material for social commentary (fair use) unless there is permission from the original author. In other words, they wanted to prevent memes from being made, because they didn't know how to manufacture something that requires a genuine sense of sarcasm or irony, and if they could not fake it, they wanted to ban it all together. After a lot of push back, it didn't pass, but I'm sure they will try again.

@Krunoslav I haven't isolated the exact difference between right and left humor. It's too mixed in with my personal political biases for me to isolate what it is.

Probably something to do with intent. Left wing political humor primarily seems mean and personal.
When I look at it, someone is usually a target. Right wing political humor can be as well but seems less personal and mean. More of an intent to make light of a bad situation or see a flaw in some act or statement than to intend something hurtful. Dunno for sure?? The left usually has to take something out of context or distort or misinterpret a statement or act in order to inject humor, whatever it is it doesn't work too well.

@FrankZeleniuk Left and right are bizzar terms in this, but if you mean radical lefty commies, you have to understand that they are first and foremost ideologues. meaning they don't think of anything as independent of their ideological mission. Language is not a medium or tool for communication of ideas or report on events, in their view, For ideologues its a weapon to shape perception of reality. Hence they cannot allow irony, sarcasm, or even Etymology, study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time, to get in the way.

ideologues are distrustful of meaning of the words, because they always see it as a weapon, and unless they control it, they see it as losing power, hence they cannot afford double meaning other than one they control. They cannot afford humor. They also cannot afford taking words at face value, because the words if taken at face value could illuminate their own illogical claims. Hence ideologes imply three methods as far as I can see when it comes to language.

One is obvious double speak a form of linguistic engineering. Where same words are used for differnt outcome. Other is something French postmodernists used to do, which is to hide bad ideas behind complex and hard to understand linguistical phrases. And third is censorship. Ban words altogether via censorship or impose political correctness.

Having experienced the reality of totalitarianism first-hand, Orwell knew all too well the ways in which people far removed from it employ “soothing phrases” to disguise more sinister ends. Of course, he would later coin the term “Newspeak” in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). This was the totalitarian language created to meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism under Big Brother.

In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands (2015), Roger Scruton reminds us that “intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society in the belief they will be in charge of it” (p. 12), and this is one reason why they most often start with the area over which they have the most control: language.

Another reason is because reality has a stubborn habit of not cooperating with their utopian visions: thoughts are easier to control than economies or the revealed preferences of individuals.

Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak. -- Erica Jong

"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right." -- George Orwell

In George Orwell's dystopian classic 1984, doublethink is the act of holding, simultaneously, two opposite, individually exclusive ideas or opinions and believing in both simultaneously and absolutely. Doublethink requires using logic against logic or suspending disbelief in the contradiction.

The three slogans of the party — "War Is Peace; Freedom Is Slavery; Ignorance Is Strength" — are obvious examples of doublethink. The act of doublethink also occurs in more subtle details throughout the novel.

Project Vertias - A reading from Orwell’s 1984 by James O’Keefe - Book 2, Chapter 9

During scamdamic in Australia the Orwellian goverment used the phrase. Staying apart keeps us together.

@FrankZeleniuk “In their propaganda today’s dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization — the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State.

As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.”

• Brave New World Revisited (1958) by Aldous Huxley

I think Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his Warning to the West speech summarized communism well.

“Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform his delicate operations with a meat ax. All that is subtle in human psychology and in the structure of society (which is even more complex), all of this is reduced to crude economic processes. The whole created being—man—is reduced to matter. It is characteristic that Communism is so devoid of arguments that it has none to advance against its opponents in our Communist countries. It lacks arguments and hence there is the club, the prison, the concentration camp, and insane asylums with forced confinement.”

Something we are starting to see in the west, don't we.

Are you factually correct, or politically correct?

“The cultural situation in America today (and indeed in all Western societies) is determined by the cultural earthquake of the nineteen-sixties, the consequences of which are very much in evidence. What began as a counter-culture only some thirty years ago has achieved dominance in elite culture and, from the bastions of the latter (in the educational system, the media, the higher reaches of the law, and key positions within government bureaucracy), has penetrated both popular culture and the corporate world. It is characterized by an amalgam of both sentiments and beliefs that cannot be easily catalogued, though terms like 'progressive,' 'emancipators or 'liberationist' serve to describe it. Intellectually, this new culture is legitimated by a number of loosely connected ideologies— leftover Marxism, feminism and other sexual identity doctrines, racial and ethnic separatism, various brands of therapeutic gospels and of environmentalism. An underlying theme is antagonism toward Western culture in general and American culture in particular. A prevailing spirit is one of intolerance and a grim orthodoxy, precisely caught in the phrase "political correctness.” ― Peter L. Berger

“Political correctness is a war on noticing.”
― Steve Sailer

“The truth has become an insult.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

The problem you can't talk about.... is now two problems. So lets talk about it.

“Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.”
“Yes, Dimitry, it is. But it is politically correct.”

“The point of Political Correctness is not and has never been merely about any of the items that it imposes, but about the imposition itself. Tacit collaboration by millions who bite their lip is even more essential than lip service by thousands of favor seekers. Hence, to stimulate at least passive cooperation, the party strives to give the impression that “everybody” is already on its side. ”

― Angelo Codevilla (The Rise of Political Correctness)

@FrankZeleniuk (Political Correctness) Continued..... INTRODUCTION: THE DEBATE AND ITS ORIGINS

But the worst thing they do, according to the accusations, the thing that arouses so much angry resentment, is generate an atmosphere of campus repression. In the name of “sensitivity” to others and under pain of being denounced as a sexist or racist, the postmodern radicals require everyone around them to adhere to their own codes of speech and behavior. Professors and students who remain outside the new movement have to walk on eggshells, ever reminding themselves to say “high school women” instead of “high school girls” or a hundred other politically incorrect phrases. Already the zealots of political correctness have intimidated a handful of well-respected professors into dropping courses that touch on controversial topics. They have succeeded in imposing official speech codes on a large number of campuses. And the resulting atmosphere—the prissiness of it, the air of caution that many people in academic settings have adopted, the new habit of using one language in private and a different and euphemistic one in public—has finally come to resemble, according to the accusers, the odious McCarthy era of the 1950s. Except this time the intimidation originates on the left.

The main accusation is summed up by the title of a 1986 article from Commentary magazine: “The Campus: 'An Island of Repression in a Sea of Freedom’" (by Chester E. Finn, Jr.). But there are secondary accusations too. The repression, bad enough in the universities, is said to be spreading to the museums, where the political slant of the new ideas has a disastrous effect on art, and to the cultural journalism of a beleaguered politically correct city like Boston. And still worse, the same trends have made the fatal leap to the curriculum committees of public school education.

New curncular developments emphasizing hyperethnicity, Atrocentrism, and other notions of the avant-garde have been adopted in quite a few school districts around the country and are on the verge of being adopted in some of the major states, with effects that, in the view of the critics, can be predicted to be calamitous. There is going to be a deliberate miseducation of children from impoverished backgrounds. The educational emphasis on ethnic distinctions and the suspicion of American democratic institutions are going to wear down the bonds that hold the country together. And sooner or later, according to these accusations, problems that are political and social, not just educational, will come of all this, and the United States will break up into a swarm of warring Croatias and Serbias. "Déculturation prefigures disintegration," in James Atlas’s sardonic phrase.

All in all, these were very exotic accusations, which made them interesting—but also easy to doubt, as some of P C ’s severest critics have frankly acknowledged. Any number of liberal and left wing professors instantly stood up to challenge the entire complaint and to scoff at the alarmist tone. (In a moment I will mention some aspects of that response.) Yet the accusations were not without a historical background. In some respects they have been with us for a decade or longer—ever since the engagé art critic Hilton Kramer used to scandalize the readers of The New York Times with his thunderings against the radical counterculture and the left. Elements of the argument surfaced in the national political discussion as early as 1984, when William Bennett, at that time the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, criticized the universities in a pamphlet called 7b Reclaim a Legacy.

Allan Bloom’s oddball best seller of 1987, 77«? Closing of the American Mind, brought the debate to a wider public. Bennett’s conservative successor at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne V. Cheney, produced a pamphlet of her own called Humanities in America—which was answered by the liberal members of the American Council of Learned Societies in their own pamphlet, Speaking for the Humanities. There was a national debate in 1988 about the curriculum at Stanford University and the merits of substituting “multiculturalism” for the traditional study of Western Civ. And the same argument took other forms—the debates over artists like Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe (accused respectively of blasphemy and obscenity) and over Yale University’s literary theorist, the late Paul de Man, whose secret life turned out postmortem to include a stint as a pro-Nazi book critic in German-occupied Belgium.

Aspects of the debate turned up in other countries too. There was a battle at Cambridge University in 1981 when university authorities more or less declined to make room for some of the new literary theories. France saw the biggest arguments of all—measured in ink spilled and probable influence (once the news of these arguments begins to spread into other languages), with the subjects ranging from the influence and politics of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger to the new glass pyramid at the Louvre to the meaning of Third World revolution.

What was new, then, in the American controversy over political correctness in the early 1990s? A few things, certainly. The name was new. “Politically correct” was originally an approving phrase on the Leninist left to denote someone who steadfastly toed the party line.

“Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.”
“Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.”
(The Rise of Political Correctness)”
― Angelo Codevilla

Then it evolved into “P.C.,” an ironic phrase among wised-up leftists to denote someone whose line-toeing fervor was too much to bear. Only in conjunction with the P C. debate itself did the phrase get picked up by people who had no fidelity to radicalism at all, but who relished the nasty syllables for their twist of irony. Apart from this phrase, some of the particulars had a fresh aspect: the focus on campus speech codes, and the amusing experience of watching people on the right argue for the First Amendment and people on the left against it. The way that certain liberals and old-school leftists joined the neoconservatives in making several of the arguments was also new, and perhaps quite significant, since previous debates tended to observe a chaste division of left and right.

Yet at bottom, the P C. debate was just a continuation of an argument that is more than a decade old. And the longevity of this argument, the way it keeps reappearing in different forms, growing instead of shrinking, producing best-selling books about university education every couple of years, its international dimension, the heat and fury—all this should tell us that something big and important is under discussion. How to specify that big and important thing is not so easy, though. The closer you examine the argument over political correctness, the more it begins to look like one of Paul de Man’s literary interpretations, where everything is a puzzle without a solution. No three people agree about the meaning of central terms like “deconstruction,” “difference,” “multiculturalism,” or “poststructuralism.” Every participant carries around his own definitions, the way that on certain American streets every person packs his own gun. And when you take these numberless definitions into consideration, the entire argument begins to look like ... what?

I would say it looks like the Battle of Waterloo as described by Stendhal. A murky fog hangs over the field. Now and then a line of soldiers marches past. Who are they? Which army do they represent? They may be Belgian deconstructionists from Yale, or perhaps the followers of Lionel Trilling in exile from Columbia. Perhaps they are French mercenaries. It is impossible to tell.

The fog thickens. Shots go off. The debate is unintelligible. But it is noisy!

What explains the confusion? One explanation—there are others—lies in the peculiar history of certain very radical ideas that came out of the sixties’ left, both in this country (USA) and in France. The left-wing uprisings of circa 1968 had two phases, which were in perfect discord, like two piano strings vibrating against each other. The first phase was an uprising on behalf of the ideals of liberal humanism—an uprising on behalf of the freedom of the individual against a soulless system. The second phase was the opposite, as least philosophically. It was a revolt against liberal humanism. It said, in effect: Liberal humanism is a deception. Western-style democracy, rationalism, objectivity, and the autonomy of the individual are slogans designed to convince the downtrodden that subordination is justice.

This second phase, the phase of ultra-radicalism, received a supremely sophisticated expression at the hands of various Paris philosophers, in the theories that can be called postmodern or poststructuralist. Or maybe it’s better (since everyone argues over what is the correct label) to call these theories “ '68 Philosophy,” as suggested by two of the younger Paris thinkers, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. The theories were, in any case, something other than mild doctrines of social reform. They were extravaganzas of cynicism. They were angry theories (though coolly expressed), hard to read, tangled, more poetic than logical. They were by no means internally consistent, one theory with the next. But if they had a single gist, it was this: Despite the claims of humanist thought, the individual is not free to make his own decisions, nor is the world what it appears to be. Instead, we and the world are permeated by giant, hidden, impersonal structures, the way that human forms in Invasion of the Body Snatchers are inhabited by extraterrestrial beings.

What are these permeating structures? They can be described every which way, mix- and-match style, according to the different versions of’68 Philosophy. There was, thus, the version of the Paris Heideggerians, for instance Jacques Derrida (we are permeated by the entire unfortunate tradition of Western thought). Or the Paris Nietzscheans, for instance Michel Foucault (we are permeated by the will to power). Or the Paris Freudians, for instance Jacques Lacan (we are permeated by the structures of the unconscious). Or the Paris Marxists, for instance Pierre Bourdieu (we are permeated by economic structures). Or the Paris anthropologists who were influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss (we are permeated by unchanging cultural structures).

Mostly there was the idea that regardless of how the permeating structures are labeled. One Big Structure underlies all the others—and if this deepest of all structures can be described, it is by means of the linguistic theories that derive from Ferdinand de Saussure. That is: We are permeated by the structures of language. We imagine that language is our tool, but it is we who are the tool and language is our master. Therefore we should stop deluding ourselves with foolish humanist ideas about the autonomy of the individual and the hope of making sense of the world.

Or maybe—this is an implicit alternative possibility in several of the ’68 theories—by recognizing the existence and power of the permeating stmctures, we will bring on a grand revolution, Marxist-style, or even grander. The theories rarely said anything specific about such a possibility, though a writer like Foucault might speak of “an Apocalyptic dream ." But even without a direct invocation of the Apocalypse, there was an urgent tone in how these ideas were written, and the tone sometimes conveyed a touch of millenarian expectation.

Now, whatever else could be said about these theories, they were wonderfully expressive. The whole period from World War I through the end of the Cold War was (maybe still is) an era of ever-recurring catastrophe and mass death, with still greater catastrophes lurking in the future in the form of nuclear war or God knows what; and in such an era, to cast a cold eye on rationality and humanism seemed entirely sensible. It was a way of saying that a) things are out of control, and b) the effort to get them under control by looking to logical analysis or proposing a lofty view of mankind is like summoning a criminal to stop a crime. The theories evoked something about middle-class life in noncatastrophic conditions too—the emptiness of middle-class existence, the feeling of drift and purposelessness that seems to afflict the middle class everywhere and that makes some people susceptible to the idea of an impending catastrophe.

The theories were modern art's extension into philosophy. They were the equivalent of Finnegan’s Wake or canvases by Rothko, and in that respect they were artistically faithful to the bleak twentieth-century spirit. But there was no point in asking whether these theories were faithful to truth and reality in the ordinary sense of social science or conventional philosophy. Super-brilliance was their panache, and the more super the brilliance became, the murkier became the ideas. The prose was characteristically mud, as befitted a philosophy that regarded clarity and lucidity as engines of Western oppression. Sometimes the theories were put-ons or jokes. Or the theories were fictions that claimed to be nonfictions. They elevated puns into a literary genre. The truest class struggle in the ’68 sense was always the struggle between the hip and the unhip, and these theories were, in short, the Das Kapilal of hip. They were illegal thoughts, so to speak—“provocations, not programs,” in Allan Megi Il’s phrase. Of course that will always be the subversive appeal of ’68 Philosophy.

Still, sooner or later the irritating flatfooted question about ordinary truth and reality and its relation to these ideas is bound to intrude. For what if, by unlucky chance, it turns out that everything in the world is not a language structure? In the field of politics, for instance, what if the difference between democratic societies and nondemocratic societies turns out to be real, not just rhetorical?

The many dazzlements of '68 Philosophy were never any use in addressing mundane questions like these. The great god of the Paris thinkers was Martin Heidegger, who was second to none in holding Western rationalism and humanism responsible for all the unhappiness of modern life and for hinting at millenarian alternatives. But the alternative he ended up embracing was the Nazism of Adolf Hitler. Of course, the Paris ultra-radicals who imbibed the theories of '68 Philosophy were anything but right wing. Yet there was nothing in their leftism to prevent a substantial number of them from tilting to an opposite extreme and celebrating dictators like Mao Zedong, so long as the horrors of liberal civilization were being opposed. For the whole point of postmodern theorizing was, after all, to adopt positions that were so far out, so wild, as to blow your mind.

In Paris, the '68 theories had their day, which lasted well into the late seventies and beyond. Then a new generation of writers came along, the people who were students in ’68 but came into adulthood only in the calmer years that followed—writers like Ferry, Renaut, Pascal Bruckner, Alain Finkielkraut (and writing in English, the late J. G. Merquior), who worried about the mind-blowing ultra-radicalism of the older generation. These younger writers began to suspect that '68 Philosophy, in turning so ferociously against liberalism, sometimes bore a closer relation to the old German romantic philosophies of the far right (the cult of irrationalism, the eagerness to disparage universal ideas of rights, etc.) than anyone seemed to imagine when the theories were in vogue. They worried that by carrying skepticism to extremes, the '68 Philosophers were turning into a species of idiot, the sort of people who can no longer make sensible judgments because they stumble around wondering: Is that a door? Is that a window? The younger writers raised an eyebrow at the muddy prose style, too, and suspected, as Merquior commented (citing Pope), that..

Much was believed, but little understood, and to be dull was construed to be good.

The younger writers set out to resurrect the very notions that '68 Philosophy was designed to debunk—an admiration for Enlightenment reason, clarity, lucidity, and Western-style freedoms. Their resurrections have sometimes leaned in a more leftish direction, sometimes in a more conservative direction (whatever those terms might mean in today’s world). Either way, the drift toward humanism was unmistakable. Even a few of the elders of the sixties, disturbed by the implications of their own doctrines, pulled back over the course of the later seventies and the eighties. There were writers like Tzvetan Todorov, the Paris literary theorist, who shifted camp altogether. And in the realm of ideas a new liberal age, the era of human rights, was at hand—in Paris.

@FrankZeleniuk The history of leftism’s ultra-radical phase in America was very different. The sixties’ revolt against liberalism in America was a matter more of action than of theory. Political liberalism seemed to have pushed America into Vietnam. Liberalism seemed incapable of redressing the grievances of black America. It seemed to have failed—and radicals responded simply by going outside the liberal way of doing things.

They turned away from the liberal civil rights movement, away from the liberal Democrats and the unions and the social democratic intellectuals, and they took actions and built organizations of their own. And among these ultraradical efforts, the most important, the ones that made a permanent change in American life, were the sundry campaigns that arose at the end of the sixties and eventually came to be known as “identity politics”—the movements for women’s rights, for gay and lesbian liberation, for various ethnic revivals, and for black nationalism (which had different origins but was related nonetheless).

IDENTITY POLITICS - The term identity politics in common usage refers to a tendency of people sharing a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity to form exclusive political alliances, instead of engaging in traditional broad-based party politics, or promote their particular interests without regard for interests of a larger political group. In academic usage, the term has been used to refer to a wide range of political activities and theoretical analysis rooted in experiences of injustice shared by different social groups. In this usage, identity politics typically aim to reclaim greater self-determination and political freedom for marginalized groups through understanding their distinctive nature and challenging externally imposed characterizations, instead of organizing solely around belief systems or party affiliations.

Identity is used "as a tool to frame political claims, promote political ideologies, or stimulate and orientate social and political action, usually in a larger context of inequality or injustice and with the aim of asserting group distinctiveness and belonging and gaining power and recognition."

The term identity politics has been in use in various forms since the 1960s or 1970s, but has been applied with, at times, radically different meanings by different populations. It has gained currency with the emergence of social movements such as the women's movement, the civil rights movement in the U.S., the LGBTQ movement, as well as nationalist and postcolonial movements.

Examples include identity politics based on age, religion, social class, culture, disability, education, ethnicity, language, sex, gender identity, occupation, race, sexual orientation, urban and rural habitation, and veteran status.

The secret of these movements, their genius, was simply to invent alternative personalities and encourage people to adopt them. The radical left fell apart after a few years in America just as in France, mostly because it became too extreme for its own good. But the identity-politics movements remained. They were useful, even indispensable, to their own adherents. And they were adaptable. They didn’t stay forever locked in a war with political liberalism; they pushed their way into the Democratic party and the general culture, and they became permanent features of American life.

The May 1968 events in France refers to the volatile, two-month period of civil unrest throughout France punctuated by demonstrations, major general strikes, and occupations of universities and factories. At its height, the events brought the economy of France almost to a halt. The protests reached such a point that political leaders feared civil war or revolution; the national government itself briefly ceased to function after President Charles de Gaulle secretly fled France for a few hours. The protests spurred an artistic movement, with songs, imaginative graffiti, posters, and slogans.

The unrest began with a series of student occupation protests against capitalism, consumerism, American imperialism and traditional institutions, values and order. It then spread to factories with strikes involving 11 million workers, more than 22% of the total population of France at the time, for two continuous weeks. The movement was characterized by its spontaneous and decentralized wildcat disposition; this created contrast and sometimes even conflict between itself and the establishment, trade unions and workers' parties. It was the largest general strike ever attempted in France, and the first nationwide wildcat general strike.

The student occupations and wildcat general strikes initiated across France were met with forceful confrontation by university administrators and police. The de Gaulle administration's attempts to quell those strikes by police action only inflamed the situation further, leading to street battles with the police in the Latin Quarter, Paris, followed by the spread of general strikes and occupations throughout France. De Gaulle fled to a French military base in Germany, and after returning dissolved the National Assembly, and called for new parliamentary elections for 23 June 1968. Violence evaporated almost as quickly as it arose. Workers went back to their jobs, and when the elections were held in June, the Gaullist party emerged stronger than before.

"May 68" affected French society for decades afterward. It is considered to this day as a cultural, social and moral turning point in the history of the country. As Alain Geismar—one of the leaders of the time—later pointed out, the movement succeeded "as a social revolution, not as a political one"

Barricades in Bordeaux in May 1968.

"For start the thing that most struck me about those students in the street was the sentimentality of their anger, it was all about themselves, it wasn't about anything objective. Here they were the spoiled middle-class baby boomers who never had any real difficulties to cope with, shouting their heads off in the street and burning the cars belonging to ordinary proletarians who they pretended to be defending against some imaginary oppresive structures erected by the bourgeoisie. The whole thing was a complete fiction based on antiquated ideas of Karl Marx, ideas which were already redundant in the mid nineteenth century. They were enacting out, if you like it, a self-scripted drama in which the central character was themselves." ― Sir Roger Scruton

True in 1960's France, as it was in U.S. and still true in 2019.

Scruton said: rights imply obligations.

May 1968 is an important reference point in French politics, representing for some the possibility of liberation and for others the dangers of anarchy. For some, May 1968 meant the end of traditional collective action and the beginning of a new era to be dominated mainly by the so-called new social movements.

Counterculture of the 1960s. Several factors distinguished the counterculture of the 1960s from the anti-authoritarian movements of previous eras. The post-World War II baby boom generated an unprecedented number of potentially disaffected young people as prospective participants in a rethinking of the direction of the United States and other democratic societies. Post-war affluence allowed many of the counterculture generation to move beyond a focus on the provision of the material necessities of life that had preoccupied their Depression-era parents. The era was also notable in that a significant portion of the array of behaviors and "causes" within the larger movement were quickly assimilated within mainstream society, particularly in the US, even though counterculture participants numbered in the clear minority within their respective national populations

Former liberal Democrat Ronald Reagan, who later became a conservative Governor of California and 40th President of the US, remarked about one group of protesters carrying signs, "The last bunch of pickets were carrying signs that said 'Make love, not war.' The only trouble was they didn't look capable of doing either."

The "generation gap" between the affluent young and their often poverty-scarred parents was a critical component of 1960s culture. In an interview with journalist Gloria Steinem during the 1968 US presidential campaign, soon-to-be First Lady Pat Nixon exposed the generational chasm in worldview between Steinem, 20 years her junior, and herself after Steinem probed Mrs. Nixon as to her youth, role models, and lifestyle. A hardscrabble child of the Great Depression, Pat Nixon told Steinem, "I never had time to think about things like that, who I wanted to be, or who I admired, or to have ideas. I never had time to dream about being anyone else. I had to work. I haven't just sat back and thought of myself or my ideas or what I wanted to do ... I've kept working. I don't have time to worry about who I admire or who I identify with. I never had it easy. I'm not at all like you ... all those people who had it easy."

Radical leftism in the American sixties naturally made all kinds of efforts to work up some ambitious theories, too, and part of those efforts, no small part either, was to import ideas from France. But that was slow going, possibly because the original works in French were translated only gradually, and in several cases made it into print only after the radical spark from the sixties was gone. Or it was because the French ideas were too baroque for American tastes, and too cynical; or because writers like Herbert Marcuse and others from a German tradition of philosophy, who were already established in the United States, seemed to make it unnecessary to turn in French directions.

Herbert Marcuse (1898 – 1979) was a German-American philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and then at Freiburg, where he received his PhD. He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research – what later became known as the Frankfurt School. In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, historical materialism and entertainment culture, arguing that they represent new forms of social control.

Between 1943 and 1950, Marcuse worked in US government service for the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency) where he criticized the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the book Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1958). After his studies, in the 1960s and the 1970s he became known as the preeminent theorist of the New Left and the student movements of West Germany, France, and the United States; some consider him the "father of the New Left". His best known works are Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964). His Marxist scholarship inspired many radical intellectuals and political activists in the 1960s and 1970s, both in the United States and internationally.

Still, the sixties Paris ideas did establish some footholds in the United States, in the art world, for instance, where radical posturing has a certain virtue—the more radical, the more virtuous, if you do it well. But the biggest and most important of the footholds, the foothold that has mattered most in the current debate, was in the humanities departments of a handful of universities. French ideas established themselves in waves of fashion in these departments during the course of the seventies and into the eighties. There was an early vogue for the anthropological/Marxist/linguistic ideas of Roland Barthes.

Next came a wave for the Heideggerian/linguistic ideas of Derrida, in the form of “deconstruction" (meaning, interpreting literature in order to show the impossibility of a definite interpretation). Then came a feminist wave for the Freudian/linguistic ideas of Lacan, and after that a wave for Foucault.

But of all these waves, the one that finally sparked the P C. debate of today didn’t begin in Paris at all It was an authentically American mutation of’68 Philosophy, something different, a New World spin on the Paris ideas—a novel variation to add to the already-established mix-and-match versions that drew from Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, linguistics, and anthropology.

The new variation drew from American identity politics. Its fundamental unit was the identity-politics idea that in cultural affairs, the single most important way to classify people is by race, ethnicity, and gender—the kind of thinking that leads us to define one person as a white male, someone else as an Asian female, a third person as a Latina lesbian, and so forth. With this idea firmly in place, the new American thinkers picked up the freshly translated volumes from Paris plus a few that were written over here and went rummaging through the already-existing varieties of’ 68 Philosophy, picking and choosing selected components, sometimes finding ideas that were already suited for the new version and bringing them into stronger American focus, other times making a few alterations.

From Derrida and ’68 Philosophy as a whole came the idea that language and literature are the vast impersonal structures that, more than government or economics or politics, determine the nature of society. Likewise from Derrida and the linguists, who defined the meaning of words by their difference from one another, came the idea of defining people in the same way, thus offering the crucial analogy between identity politics and linguistic analysis. From Foucault and the Nietzschean theorists of culture (and from Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist) came the idea of looking at culture as a field of struggle for achieving political power. Also from Foucault came a focus on marginal social groups. From Marxism came the idea of an impending beneficial social change. From Lacan and the Freudians came a focus on the erotic and on male domination. From the Third Worldist writers came an anti-imperialist variation on Heidegger’s view of the regrettable intellectual tradition of Western civilization.

@FrankZeleniuk And voilà: the great new mélange, ’68 Philosophy in its American mutation. Its name is, or ought to be, “race/class/gender-ism,” since “race, class, and gender" is the phrase that dominates its analyses. There is no single author who has succeeded in giving the idea an authoritative definition, no one book or article that you can point to. But I will draw a caricature.

Race/class/gender-ism, in my caricature, pictures culture and language as the giant hidden structure that permeates life. But culture and language are themselves only reflections of various social groups, which are defined by race, gender, and sexual orientation. (The word “class” is invoked only for the purpose of conjuring a slight aura of Marxism.) Groups, not individuals, produce culture. Every group has its own culture, or would, if oppressors didn’t get in the way. Thus we have the cultures of white men, of black men, of women, of black women, of homosexuals, of Hispanic women, and so forth. Categories that go beyond race, gender, and sexual orientation might also play a role—especially any trait that could put a person at a disadvantage, such as being handicapped.

The different cultures are engaged in a struggle for power. The culture of white males (specified sometimes as European males, other times as “whitemales,” most popularly as Dead White European Males or DWEMs) has pretty much won this struggle, and thus has achieved domination over the rest of the world. The domination has succeeded by using terms like rationalism, humanism, universality, and literary merit to persuade other people of their own inferiority. But by shining the light of race/class/gender analysis upon it, this success can be revealed as the power play that it is.

Race/class/gender analysis will show the culture of white males to be a culture of domination and destruction, more or less the way Heidegger pictured Western philosophy, or the way anti-imperialists picture imperialism. By teaching everyone to appreciate the culture of all groups in equal measure and by discouraging the use of certain common phrases that convey racial and gender hierarchies, in short by altering the literature and the language, we will bring to an end the domination of this one small group.

The name of this domination, “Eurocentrism,” evokes the “ethnocentrism” that is criticized by the French followers of Lévi-Strauss as well as the "logocentrism” that is analyzed by the French Heidegerrians. (Logocentrism in this context means the intellectual tradition of Western civilization that has led to the errors of rationalism and humanism—and can be conflated with still another centrism, phallocentrism, to become phallogocentrism, meaning, more or less, the regrettable tradition of imposed masculine logic.) And in eliminating these various centrisms, in abandoning the idea of any kind of cultural “center" at all, a new and more egalitarian society will emerge, giving full rein to diverse cultures of every kind.

Race/class/gender-ism is, in short, a bit of the old ultra-radicalism.

It is ’68 Philosophy, American style, with certain virtues of the French original too—the impiety carried to eye-opening extremes, sometimes the wit, though the American version tends to be more earnest and less clever than the French. The American idea even offers something of the old Apocalyptic spirit, not openly but by implication—in the excitement that these ideas have aroused, the feeling that a new intellectual revolution is at hand, something monumental like the invention of modern physics at the beginning of the century. This is, by the way, an intriguing notion. For even if the theory that I've just described is utter nonsense, it is true that due to the social reforms in the Western countries during the last few decades, and due to the democratic revolutions around the world, the social basis for a global culture is far huger than it ever was before, and who can say what this will produce a hundred years hence?

Still, if the American doctrine has some of the appeal of ’68 Philosophy, it is also vulnerable to all the criticisms and questions that were posed several years ago in Paris. For instance: Does race/class/gender-ism, in putting primary emphasis on a category like race as a factor in culture, offer a refreshingly candid view of influences that have always existed but are normally concealed? Or does the emphasis on race bring us back to the dubious theories of the European past, as Todorov has suggested? Is there a hint in these ideas of the old German romantic philosophies of the far right?

It pains the admirers of Yale deconstruction and of race/class/gender-ism when anyone mentions the early career of de Man, the Yale critic, on the grounds that a young person’s early mistakes should not be used to hound his later achievements. Yet the controversy over de Man and his youthful errors has had one merit at least, which is to give everyone the opportunity to read some Nazi-style literary criticism, for instance de Man’s collaborationist article from 1941, “The Jews in Contemporary Literature,” which has been brought back into print. Now, here was an example of cultural analysis in which writers were categorized on the basis of racial “difference," the Jews on one hand and the Europeans on the other.

Exactly what makes de Man’s early reactionary harping on race different from the postmodern, supposedly progressive harping on race today? It is argued that "race” in the postmodern, sociological, progressive usage has nothing to do with “race” in the old, reactionary, biological usage, and that only someone who is motivated by hostility or by a stubborn unwillingness to entertain new ideas would detect in these up-to-date progressive ideas a scent of old-fashioned reactionary rightism. Yet the distinction between the postmodern ideas and the reactionary ones is not necessarily so clear—if only because, among some of the deconstructionist masters of literary interpretation, there is a peculiar inability to detect any Nazism at all in de Man’s Nazi articles, which raises doubts about the reliability of the new techniques. And because, in the movement for multiculturalism that has emerged out of race/class/gender-ism, a touch of the young de Man’s Euro-style racial thinking does sometimes creep into the discussion, obviously not among the sophisticated thinkers, who are embarrassed by the problem, but on the margins of the movement. It was disturbing, for instance, but not terribly surprising, to discover a certain inappropriate fixation on the Jews in the thinking of a couple of the professors who helped draw up the proposed new multicultural public-school social-studies curriculum in New York State.

Of course someone might say about the several doubts and problems that hover over these new ideas: so what? Just because a doctrine is a bit dotty or has trouble fending off unattractive elements, valuable results might come of it anyway, in the right hands. “Saying absurd things,” as Richard Rorty observes, “is perfectly compatible with being a force for good.” Especially in America, I would add. In France, every educated person receives a pretty good schooling in philosophy, which has the evil effect of encouraging people to be logically consistent in their foolish ideas. But in America we tend to be suspicious of philosophy, unless it is something like John Dewey’s mixture of see-if-it-works pragmatism and social democratic reform. We like ideas—but we water them down.

The natural instinct for most American intellectuals, when it comes to doctrines from France, is silently to demote the philosophies into methods—into techniques that you apply, the way you might apply a carpentry technique, when the occasion requires, and not on other occasions. Some of the professors who promote race/class/gender-ism are happy to embrace the idea in all its radical grandeur. But a far larger number have no interest in way- out implications. Working up a philosophical opposition to humanism and rationalism was never their idea, except maybe for rhetorical effect. On the contrary, these professors are humanists, and always were. They seek the further flowering of liberal democracy.

When they argue for multiculturalism, they don’t mean to displace the culture of rationalism and humanism with a variety of nonrationalist and nonhumanist traditions. They merely wish to remind everyone not to allow the central culture that does exist to fall prey to habits of bigotry or smallmindedness. Fundamentally they wish us to be more rational, not less. Tolerance, that grandest of concepts from the Western Enlightenment, is the name blazoned across their jackets. They don’t mean to overthrow the Western literary canon the way Heidegger wanted to overthrow the Western philosophical canon. They want to expand it. They mean to remind us to look around to see if, because of discrimination in the past or its persistence today, certain authors and works of art have been overlooked. And sure enough, certain authors and works and perspectives have indeed been overlooked, and today some of them have been rediscovered, which is a testimony to the new ideas. And it is good to look for still more writers and more traditions and variety of every sort, not in order to undermine the general culture, but to strengthen it.

The liberal professors who play with these ideas are not revolutionaries against modernity. Mostly they mean to teach a good course—even if, here and there on the faculty, someone may like to keep the students and the state assembly on their toes by uttering a rattling enigmatic Paris slogan now and then or by railing against universal standards and the rule of white males.

To professors like these and their supporters, to the postmodern liberals who spice up their teaching and writing with a few sprinkles of race/class/gender-ism or a bit of world-weary deconstruction, something about the current debate is very chilling.

They see the Newsweek cover pointing a finger at the “Thought Police,” which means themselves, and they see President Bush denounce them, and they look around for their own allies, who turn out not to be many. And they have reason to feel a pinch of fear. It is because of the disproportion between their own power and that of the hostile institutions arrayed against them.

@FrankZeleniuk They wonder: Isn’t something overblown about the outrage over P C. and the new theories and the curricular debate? There are silly panels at the MLA conventions, but do these merit a national crusade? The tales of P C. power make them rub their eyes. And these charges of McCarthyism! The real-life McCarthyism of the fifties was a hysterical movement against a relatively small number of American Communists, but its real target, according to one very sound interpretation, was the heritage of New Deal liberalism from the thirties. Mightn’t something similar be at work today, and mightn't the real target in the anti-PC. campaign, as some writers have conjectured, be the heritage of democratic openness and social reform that dates from the radical sixties?

The feminist transformation of American universities has the look of irreversibility, if strictly on demographic grounds. But in the age of AIDS, it’s hard to know what will be the eventual status of the freedoms that have lately attached to homosexuality—the freedom to speak about it openly, for instance. The future status of racial integretation in the universities is likewise hard to predict. Official segregation in American universities sounds like something out of the Middle Ages but was entirely common no more than thirty years ago. At a place like Duke University, today the home of some of the friskier literary theorists, black students were simply not admitted, as the literary critic Louis Menand has pointed out. The anti-P.C. argument leapfrogs sometimes from a criticism of P C. obnoxiousness and the daffiness of the new literary theories to a criticism of affirmative action, in fact to an argument that affirmative action has turned into a fiasco, not just in its details but as a whole. But that may not be the case.

At the time when schools like Duke were barred to black students, the university- educated African-American middle class was small. Today that class has multiplied severalfold, partly because of affirmative action pressure on the universities, which suggests success, and on a grand scale. Yet the success could easily enough be rolled partway back, given the wrong confluence of political forces. The statistics on African- American admissions to universities seem to bob up and down for mysterious reasons, even without any effort to push them down, and the statistics on keeping the students in school are not good, and the entire situation seems to wobble.

Does the vehemence and enthusiasm of the campaign against PC. threaten these shaky successes, possibly because of an extra anger that clings to the P C. debate, some last lingering resentment from the long struggle to achieve campus desegregation? It may sound insulting to the fair-minded academic crusaders against P C. even to ask that question. Yet the popular enthusiasm against P C., the way the issue has seemed to appeal to a public far wider than the academy, raises the question all by itself. Even on campus, where life is supposed to be a little rosier than in the rest of the world, incidents of racist meanness against black students and other minorities are not exactly unknown. For a while in the late eighties, those incidents grew more common, sometimes with the encouragement of right wing campus journalists, who in turn were backed by conservative foundations and powerful political figures. Isn’t that the biggest problem on the American campus?

The postmodern professors gaze at their accusers, and they see bad faith. They see conservatives who claim to be more liberal than the liberals, and cultural critics who talk about insulating culture from politics but who wield the literary canon like a club, knocking heads whenever their own political preferences come under attack. And the post-modern professors would laugh—if they weren’t ducking under a table.

Are their responses foolish? Mostly they are incomplete, I would say. For there still remains what is, finally, the central issue—the intellectual atmosphere on the campuses (and in a few other places). The anti-P.C. professors' organization, the National Association of Scholars, has its share of well-regarded members, not all of them operatives of the conservative movement, who are eager to recount unpleasant memories in gory detail: the hazing they have undergone at the hands of politically correct university colleagues, the need they feel to bite their tongues or to move to a different department merely to get on with their conventional work. The N.A.S. journal, Academic Questions, publishes new complaints all the time. A spirit of hyperbole animates some of these complaints, just as it animates the debate as a whole, and doubtless the entire accusation against P C. would sound more convincing stripped to essentials, without any of the entertaining references to Mao’s Red Guards. But exaggeration does not make a complaint untrue.

Todd Gitlin writes: “A bitter intolerance emanates from much of the academic left." The thing exists—even if not everywhere. And if the intolerance is bitter among some of the professors, how much worse it is in the world of their own students—among the hard-pressed student leftists especially. Merely to hold a reasonably well-attended left- wing meeting at a campus today can turn into a nightmare when the politically correct
requirements are insisted on, what with the demands for racial and gender balance and correct phrasing and the accusations about racism, sexism, homophobia, and Eurocentrism that fly at the drop of a hat. The leaders of the conventional adult left are always pulling their hair out over these things, looking for ways to offer a word of friendly advice to the self-persecuting student leftists. (Some of the friendly words appear in the following documents.) The very history of the term P C. testifies to the left-wing awareness of a left- wing syndrome. But the syndrome doesn’t disappear.

Here is the mystery in the debate over P C. For if the professors and their students are as devoted to every kind of tolerant and humane idea as they say, and if their radical instincts are closer to Michael Harrington than to Martin Heidegger, and if pluralism is their utopia, how can they work up, some of them, so much zeal for small-time inquisitions? All sorts of explanations can be proposed—for instance, the explanation that points to a heritage of Hawthornean puritanism that is every bit as nasty and unconscious among liberals as among conservatives. Or there is the argument that liberals, too, have their share of bad faith. You could point to old habits of left-wing intolerance that persist long after they have been discredited. Or you could observe that if most of the postmodern professors have a liberal heart, the anti-liberals of the left sometimes end up determing the atmosphere.

But without slighting any of these explanations here is an additional one suitably based on structures of language, which derive from Pierre Bourdieu's theory of academic jargon. In a polemic against Heidegger, Bourdieu observes that professors like to suppose that academic jargon can mean anything they want it to. If someone defines a word to denote ideas that are, say, strictly liberal and open-minded, the professors imagine that no other meanings will inhere. But Bourdieu (who was trying to show that Heidegger remained something of a Nazi even when he was merely an unpolitical academic) insists that words, even academic words, carry meanings of their own that can’t be wished away, even by professors.

Currently we have a lot of academic terms like “difference,” “diversity," “the Other," “logocentrism,” and “theory,” that are intended to be consonant with humanist traditions of the liberal left. But these words willy-nilly hark back to a cultural theory that has its roots in the anti-humanist intellectual currents of a generation ago, and buried within those terms may be certain definite ideas that are anything but liberal. There is the idea that we are living under a terrible oppression based on lies about liberal humanism, and that with proper analysis the hidden vast structure of domination can be revealed. There is the temptation to flirt with irrationalist and racial theories whose normal home is on the extreme right.

And there is the idea that, sparkling like jewels here and there, a millenarian alternative is somewhere lurking, that we can turn the world upside down—if we, the anti-bigot reformers, can only get hold of the dominating verbal structures. For if we can only command the school curriculum, or dictate the literary canon, or get everyone to abandon certain previously unanalyzed phrases that contain the entire structure of oppressive social domination, and replace these phrases with other phrases that contain a new, better society—if we can only do that, great results will occur, and the radiant new day will be at hand.

That is a wild notion, which consciously no one believes, at least not in full. Yet bits and pieces of that idea peek out from within the academic vocabulary. And wild or not, the bits and pieces have a popular appeal, if only because they promise that something can be done about the social inequalities and injustices in the United States that seem so intractable in a conservative age. Perhaps if America were experiencing right now a significant movement for radical social reform, the temptation to embark on verbal campaigns and to invest these campaigns with outlandish hopes would be less, and the students and younger professors would put their energy into real-life democratic movements instead, which might be a relief to their harassed colleagues. A peculiar sort of leftism is plainly an origin of the P.C. syndrome, but it’s easy to imagine that another kind of tum to the left—to a conventional movement for social reform—would also be the solution.

Meanwhile here is a phenomenon that is weirder and less productive than any conventional movement for democracy. Dwight Macdonald defined 1930s fellow-traveling as the fog that arose when the warm ocean currents of American liberalism encountered the Soviet iceberg. Political correctness in the 1990s is a related syndrome. It is the fog that arises from American liberalism’s encounter with the iceberg of French cynicism.

This book contains twenty-one of the most interesting statements that have been produced on the subject of political correctness—broadly defined to include not only the argument over speech habits and official codes but the related issues of the literary canon and the public school curriculum. There is even one comment on the art museums, by Hilton Kramer. I have selected writers and statements from every kind of journal—popular, academic, intellectual, and political—and even from a television show.

I have tried to balance the different views, so that here is Dinesh D’Souza, who writes for the conservative journals, but also, at the opposite end of the book, Cornel West and Barbara Ehrenreich, with perspectives from the democratic left. Here is Catharine R. Stimpson, 1990 president of the Modern Language Association, and here, too, is Roger Kimball, arch-critic of said association, and so on through the anthology. Diane Ravitch and Molefi Kete Asante debate the merits of Afrocentric public school curricula. And then one of the surprises in reading these pages is to discover writers who on political grounds ought to disagree (and with a grudge too), but who seem to harbor a secret point of agreement, out of mutual love for literature.

Some of the super-radical positions are without expression here, which is too bad—for instance, the position that views multiculturalism as itself a form of white male domination.

On the other hand, readers will find three documents from one of the sharpest local disputes over P C. and multiculturalism, the debate about curriculum at the University of Texas, Austin. I regret to say that too many academic people will stumble across their own names in one or another article, cited in an unfriendly polemical spirit by their severest critics.

And nowhere in the book will these criticized persons get the chance to rebut or reply. That is injust. I beg the forgiveness of every one of these people, the wronged leftists and the wronged rightists and the wronged in-betweenists, and I ask them to remember that injustice as well as incompleteness is always the outcome when large debates shrivel into small anthologies.

The literary critic Gerald Graff has argued for some time that the best possible response to the crisis in the universities is to “teach the conflict”—to make a study of the debate itself. This proposal strikes the most radical of the professors as a wishy-washy way to take a real debate and render it toothless, and it strikes other people as a misguided proposal to drag into the classroom arguments that should be conducted among the professors themselves, not in front of their students. But Graff s proposal seems to me the soul of sense. The debate over political correctness has managed to raise nearly every important question connected to culture and education—the proper relation of culture to a democratic society, the relation of literature to life, the purpose of higher education. Naturally to raise a question is not to settle it, which means the crisis in education goes on. But only in medicine are crises a sign of impending death. In intellectual matters, crises are signs of life.

― Debating P.C.: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses (1995) by Paul Berman (Editor)

@FrankZeleniuk The left hates memes and humor, because they take their absurdity seriously and therefore cannot make fun of it, while the other side can make fun it in indirect ways. This is the power of memes, something the left cannot and will not tolerate. They will always lose the meme war and they know it, so the next step is to ban it altogether. If they can, they will.

For something to be genially funny is has to be true. The ideologues live in world that is not full of truths but lies. To make fun of their own lies would undermined their dogmatic belief in those lies, and to try to make fun of truth, is not funny. hence the ideologues have no sense of humor. They cannot afford it.