nationalreview | Once upon a time, “political correctness” was little more than a
benign left-wing version of old-church-lady tut-tutting. Today, by
contrast, the designation is used to describe what has become a
sprawling, unhinged, and invariably unfalsifiable conspiracy theory that
can be used to dismiss anybody who violates this morning’s edition of
the progressive catechism. “Gosh,” one can almost hear DeBoer and Chait
asking themselves, “have we unleashed a brigade of poorly educated,
parodically self-indulgent, and chronically illiberal morons into our
movement, the better to destroy it from within? And, if we have, will we
ever be able to rid ourselves of them?”
The answer to the latter
question, one suspects, may well be “No,” for as Hollywood has taught us
repeatedly over the years, it does not pay to unleash unpredictable
viruses into the ecosystem — even if one gains temporarily by doing so.
And make no mistake, “political correctness” is a virus — a
nasty, cynical, destructive sickness that is akin in both theory and in
practice to the sort of irritating malware that pushes endless streams
of nonsensical dialogue windows onto your grandmother’s computer and
prevents her from e-mailing her friends. In the “politically correct”
settings that Chait and DeBoer are describing, no sooner has a
freethinking person started to say, “Well, I think” — than a grotty
little pop-up box has appeared to interrupt him with a stream of tosh.
“Error 349xxf9: Privileges unchecked,” a typical response might read.
Or, if we are dealing with a more serious case: “Error 948xxer11:
Tolerance Level Low: Fault at LGBT Sector Cis*Trans*Kin:
Intersectionality Improperly Allied.” As within computing, the genius is
the panic that this provokes. Just as scareware thrives on the
elderly’s touching belief that they can “break” the computer by clicking
on the wrong buttons, so today’s young are so terrified of
politically-correct bullying that they fail to do what is obviously
necessary, which is rolling their eyes, clicking quietly on “cancel,”
and uninstalling the problem completely. The Left is arguing about the
right level of “political correctness”? A plague on all their houses.
Want to go to the pub?
