political correctness | The Clare Spark Blog

August 6, 2017

The Free Speech Muddle

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 5:42 pm
Tags: anti-Trump protests, fascism, FOIA, free speech, Jeff Sessions, political correctness, statism

free-speech [Update, 8-31-17: I had the same trouble when I was program director of Pacifica radio station KPFK; no one wanted to look at our own ideology. ]

The MSM is all aflutter this week, because Attorney General Jeff Sessions hinted that journalists, as well as leakers, might be held responsible for publishing classified information. This blog is about the fantasy that the West (including the US) distinguishes itself from all forms of tyranny by its vaunted freedom of speech and expression as promised, say, by the US Constitution.

I say “fantasy” because, although freedom of [anything] is a lifelong achievement; a fulfillment that may or may not be achieved even in old age by the best of us.

The notion of journalistic freedom, for instance, depends on the assumption that American print media have never been partisan. (If you want to see polarization, just look at the 1790s as Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian agrarians slugged it out.)

Then there is the issue of government secrecy: anyone who has used the FOIA option, knows that the State can redact at will, so that crucial documents remain off limits to citizens (including academics and journalists).

We might add the barely admitted problem of self-censorship, some on grounds of politeness or intimidation, some from not daring to look inside ourselves too closely, some by ideology: the facts are always in dispute.

Let us now briefly turn to the subject of “fascism” a taunt that is bandied about these days, without much understanding by the anti-Trump protesters, old and young alike. The various fascisms that sprung up after the calamity of WW1 in the 1920s and 1930s, were distinct from one another. But they were all authoritarian and counter-Enlightenment. (Italy and Germany in particular were distinguished by the cult of the charismatic Leader and the one-party state). So “anti-fascists” like to attach themselves to “Free Speech” as proof that there is no authoritarianism in the West, particularly in the post-1960s USA, even as we pass laws affirming “diversity” and arbitrary notions of “community”—all in the name of human rights!

December 31, 2016

Political correctness revisited

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 7:40 pm
Tags: "cultural Marxism", politeness, political correctness, postmodernism, racism, sexism, social democracy, US Constitution

Zero Hedge.com

I have written about Political Correctness (including its origins) many times on the website, but the moral seems to be this: conservative objections to PC miss the point and may even antagonize minorities and women by appearing to lobby for incivility.

It is not the entire Left that has imposed speech codes, but a particular branch of it: the postmodernists who believe, like other trendy mystics, that language (as mediated by institutions ) creates reality, ergo all language is propaganda!. So social democrats and Leninists alike may emphasize changing speech all by itself. But their protocols do not improve institutional controls that would indeed further the goal of intellectual diversity (also known as the marketplace of ideas; see https://clarespark.com/2015/12/29/milton-friedmans-capitalism-and-freedom-1962/).

(Real) leftists reject all capitalist institutions as bogus leftovers from earlier set-ups, while social democrats are out to stop the far Left through co-opting and erasing class as an analytic consideration; also the same phony liberals erase fact-based history and perception as “vulgar.”

(To the extent that Marxist-Leninists believe in the “telos “of history, they participate in the same mystical folly. The materialism of the Enlightenment is rejected by Leninists favoring dialectical materialism.)

Nonconformist society

When I brought this subject up on Facebook, I saw that one or two friends, believed that minorities and women were deficient in those qualities that make (what passes for) success in the modern world. That too is a rejection of history—for instance the astounding vanguard that created the US Constitution minus all the Founders’ class positions (i.e., their historical situation)—which accounts for their support of slavery and of the secondary role of women.

How odd that some “conservatives” idealize those aspects of the Constitution that suit them, while undermining politeness—a very democratic, if bourgeois, concept.

Zero Hedge.com

December 22, 2016

“Angry white male” explanation for the Trump victory

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 8:05 pm
Tags: affirmative action, angry white males, Democratic Party, Donald J Trump victory, Hannah Arendt, Hillary Clinton supporters, mob society, political correctness, social democrats

Bill Track50

Since November 9, 2016, it has become apparent that social democrats (the Hillary Clinton supporters) are going into permanent campaign mode, playing the same tune over and over: The “angry white males” were responsible for their crushing defeat in the electoral college.

There were not weaknesses in the policies espoused by the Democratic Party since the Kennedy administration—for instance, affirmative action as undoing the sin of prior exclusion of minorities from power. Nor was the imposition of political correctness, so the ‘liberal’ argument goes, an inappropriate response to discrimination. Indeed, many Republicans and conservatives mistakenly blame critical theorists and other alleged leftists, for foisting PC on an unwitting public, and not seeing that the Democratic move was a symptom of a failed strategy to vanquish the red specter. (See https://clarespark.com/2013/07/31/the-nefarious-cultural-marxists/.)

But what are the “angry white males” supposed to be upset and vindictive about? Obviously, they are supposed to be resisting “fairness,” “inclusion” and “diversity.” As is their (inherited?) wont, the GOP leads the pack in promoting racism and sexism: Underneath their (imputed) rage, their “fascism” stands revealed, just as it did in the late 1930s as liberals were united in blaming opponents of the New Deal for creating “mob society” in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase.

(Don’t look for economic interest as a motive impelling such finger-pointing: such an imperative would be too much like a focus on class antagonism, a method of analysis that social democrats have done their best to denounce as ‘reductive,’ unlike their more holistic, compassionate approach.)

What social democrats (i.e., the ‘Left’ these days) refuse to face is their record of statist bungling in the interest of stability (i.e., group-think). White males– angry or not– as a cohesive category simply do not exist, except in the imaginations of the Party aiming, it claims, to halt the slide toward disintegration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angry_white_male.

Cartoon by Monte Wolverton

July 18, 2015

Political Correctness and Chattanooga shooting

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 5:53 pm
Tags: Andrew McCarthy, Arab-Israeli conflict, Chattanooga shooting, John McWhorter, lone wolf, moderate men, moral equivalence, Muhammed Youssuf Abdulazeez, multiculturalism, political correctness, social media

Painting by Jeff Wilkie

The moderate men have done it again in generally declining to investigate a precise motive for the Chattanooga shooting, while using the word “extremist” to designate their enemies on either Left or Right.

This will be a short blog, for I have beaten this horse to death, investigating the origins of political correctness in German Romanticism, the hegemony of multiculturalism (shockingly taken up by the once anti-racist Left), and the reluctance to admit to antisemitic subtexts in our political discourses. (For one example among many see https://clarespark.com/2013/07/02/groupiness-group-think-and-race/.)

In the weekend Wall Street Journal, for instance, linguistics professor at Columbia U, John McWhorter, ostensibly a neocon, writes at length about changing meanings of curse words as if they evolved, without identifiable causes. (http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-dare-you-say-that-the-evolution-of-profanity-1437168515.) What he left out in his essay was the time-tested tactic of the liberal establishment, acting in the interests of the neutral state, to promote politeness as a tactic in bringing warring factions into line, so that artful mediators could promote social harmony and their version of stability. For these liberals, offensive language only polarizes the conflict, promoting hate, not love and mutual “understanding.”*

Image by Jesse Lenz

Even Andrew McCarthy, in a National Review piece that correctly identifies the Palestinian background of Muhammad Youssuf Abdulazeez (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421346/chattanooga-shooting-muslim-jihad-muhammad-abdulazeez), does not identify the stakes in the widespread reticence in even suggesting that international terrorism, not some radicalized “lone wolf” was responsible for the mayhem. For we cannot suggest that all Muslims might not be agreeable to peaceful co-existence. That would evade the tenets of mandatory collectivist discourses, prompting broader investigations into individual motives, and in this bogus “lone wolf” case, polluting the dominant “moderate” view that finds moral equivalence in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Social media, rightly or wrongly, has become the new facilitator of terrorism. Yet these media are our only route to dissent in the cultural monopolies staffed by the moderate men.

*In fairness to McWhorter, in his WSJ piece, he does historicize taboo expressions, brings up middle class mores, and mentioning that groups may not be stigmatized by outsiders, but he doesn’t go far enough. All we are left with is changing times, with examples of outdated naughty speech. This from an author frequently identified with the Republican “right-wing.”

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June 24, 2015

Hate speech, revisited

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 7:47 pm
Tags: Alexander Saxton, Father's Day origins, hate speech, KKK, liberal ideology, manifest destiny, political correctness, sentimental song, The Yankee Doodle Society, whiteness studies

John Gast: American Progress, 1872

I have written many times about “hate speech” tracing its origins to the liberal establishment which had several big reasons to institutionalize the demand for politeness: 1. The ideological impulse to explain the rise of Nazism/race riots to rabble-rousing new mass media (https://clarespark.com/2015/05/16/what-is-hate-speech-and-where-did-the-notion-come-from/); 2. The belief that speech creates reality (derived from Plato and the social democrats who suppressed material explanations for social conflict; 3. The notion originating with internationalists that conflicts can be resolved with better communication (and the warring parties subjected to “neutral” mediation on behalf of the ethical state/UN, of course).

It is a common error on the Right to attribute the notion of hate speech (a.k.a. political correctness) to communists hiding under every bed and in every college classroom. What most fail to do is to face squarely the history of expansion in the United States, performed at the expense of Amerindians, slaves and Mexicans. Patriotism in the interests of national unity or Manifest Destiny is the preferred alternative, even if, in some quarters, the Civil War is still raging, with some Midwestern and Southern whites holding on to the symbols associated with the good old lost cause.

Here is the irony of attributing hate speech and PC to the Reds. It was mostly New Leftist professors who, with anti-imperialist zeal inspired by the 60s-70s antiwar movement, invented “whiteness studies,” in the process failing to follow the lead of the Old Left that made class the category that mattered most to the revolution. You would think that such careful analysts writing in the tradition of Marx would have foregrounded the objective study of class, but no, they followed Lenin and Woodrow Wilson in the spirit of internationalism, ignoring the fictional categories of “race” and “ethnicity.” (See https://clarespark.com/2011/03/26/race-class-and-gender/ and https://clarespark.com/2014/06/07/marx-vs-lenin/, but even Alexander Saxton, my dissertation director, a proudly unreconstructed Stalinist, yielded to his contemporaries in promoting “whiteness studies,” as if all white people either all had the identical economic interests, or were hopelessly and permanently racist. (Saxton was especially disappointed in the white working class, apparently.)

This has put me, the director of the Yankee Doodle Society, in a quandary. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the composer Joseph Byrd and I reconstructed antebellum American popular music in the sentimental tradition, using the original lyrics, without expunging the N word. We produced one recording for a local company (Takoma), focusing mostly on Stephen Foster, Henry Clay Work, and George Root, but then got a corporate and then several government grants to produce not only the music of these and other composers agreeable to the middle class, but also we reconstructed the cultural context of such music. We ended up with a set of six-sided LPs and a mammoth 10 and a half-hour documentary played on Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles three times, all unexpurgated, unlike recent reconstructions of Stephen Foster that simply erase the “hate speech.”

The music by itself was distributed by Musical Heritage Society for ten years, and during that time, I got an offer from a Neo-Confederate distributor who would have been willing to cut us in on the profits. I never answered his letter.

The fact is that further distribution of these materials, which are unique and brilliantly performed by top musicians and actors, could lead to abuse by racist groups. As long as I can’t control the context, I hesitate to release them, for minority groups in this country have enough to contend with, without further insults dredged up from the American past.

What would you do in my place? I am sitting on several boxes of recordings that should be heard, but not by irredentists of any stripe or locale.

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March 30, 2015

Hillary, Carly, and the triumph of gender studies

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 7:06 pm
Tags: ethnic studies, free market capitalism, gender studies, political correctness

Only a woman will do to comment on HC

One of the ghastly features of multiculturalism and cultural studies in general, is the domination of the addled notion that “any woman will do.” For instance, Carly Fiorina (who lost her bid to be Senator from California), and whose career at Hewlett Packard did not end in a blaze of glory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carly_Fiorina) is considered to be the appropriate person to take down Hillary Clinton, for “any woman will do.”

If a male were to point out Ms. Clinton’s deficiencies, he could be taken down as a sexist. So into the breach steps a Republican female, for any woman will do. This is the predictable outcome of collectivist ideologies spun by the liberal establishment. (A reminder that until the late 20th century, the communists I knew, unlike liberals, considered feminism to be a “bourgeois deviation,” and it should never displace class conflict as the relevant, pressing structural problem. This position seems to have been modified as the newly minted field of gender studies was obviously dominated by leftists and the most avid environmentalists. “Class” as a variable is important to both leftists and free-market capitalists. For the Left, class struggle will bring communism; for conservatives and Republicans, “class” is a consideration for measuring upward mobility.)

Forget that Ms. Fiorina has few, if any, qualifications to hold such an office as POTUS. It is true that she fits into the upward mobility-meritocracy theme beloved by politicians in either party, for as she bragged on Fox News Sunday, she started out as a secretary before her rise to the top.

When I was in graduate school pursuing a doctorate in US history (UCLA, 1983-1993), I suggested at a crowded conference that the concerns of women should not be shunted off into a corner, but should be integrated into the curriculum (obviously referring to the humanities curriculum). This prompted guffaws from the mostly male, liberal, audience. After the presentations, Hayden White (head of the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz) approached me, and asked if I was in the job market yet. He wasn’t offering me a position, but warning me to lay off.

Not long before that, I displeased two powerful feminist professors, Kathryn Kish Sklar and Ruth Bloch, who cornered me in Sklar’s office because I had brought up class differences in women and criticized a famous article for conflating all women into one big bag. One of them (Bloch) even suggested that I should have been thrown out of the doctoral program for my gaffe.

I got similar screams of rage when I complained about separatist ethnic studies programs at yet another international conference. And when I was appointed as representative of all University of California students in the Affirmative Action Committee, I introduced a motion that all professors in relevant fields should integrate the concerns of minorities and women into their classes, without depending on separate “studies” programs. The next year, no one told me about the yearly meeting, but the year after that I made sure to attend, and was informed that my resolution (unanimously passed in our committee) was never voted upon because it infringed upon “academic freedom.”

New PC Look

Now we can look forward to a campaign for president where only the “crazies” will oppose separatist cultural studies. And for their pains, they will be labeled by the “moderate” and “balanced” press, as I was, “racist” and “sexist.” And at the top of their lungs.

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November 7, 2014

‘Cultural Marxism’ blogs and immigration reform

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 8:54 pm
Tags: "cultural Marxism", Barack Obama, Erich Fromm, Frankfurt School, identity politics, immigration reform, Leo Lowenthal, Max Horkheimer, political correctness, progressivism, Rerum Novarum, Soviet propaganda, T.W. Adorno, The Reformation, Wilhelm Reich, working class authoritarianism

[Update 11-11-14: The illustration that heads this blog is horrid racist propaganda, which I do not endorse. I posted it because it embodies the fear of miscegenation that dominates all ideologies that fear racial mixing.]

This is only a partial index on the subject that has dominated this website. I have been disturbed by those Facebook postings that blame a group of refugee [assimilated, “Marxist-Freudian”] Jews fleeing Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s (sometimes known as the critical theorists) for what is perceived as “identity politics” (“multiculturalism”) and/or “political correctness”. These men (plus Hannah Arendt) include T. W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, and Leo Lowenthal: each of these prolific social critics found sponsorship in already existing social psychology and cultural anthropology as emboldened by FDR’s New Deal.

By focusing on these “critical theorists,” the older revolutions in the West, that of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, have been conveniently ignored by conservatives and liberal Republicans alike, yet the fights between and within Protestantism and Catholicism are among the most portentous events in world history, encompassing a policy that remains current and hotly contested: immigration reform that would presumably increase the number of Catholics likely to support the Democratic Party. [E.g, the nasty aspects of capitalism and “Social Darwinism” are generally attributed to [Hebraic, puritanical] Protestantism, while social democracy, “compassionate conservatism,” and even some aspects of communist ideology echo much of Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). This is not to ignore the liberal Protestants and secularists who supported the Social Gospel, and now the Democratic Party.]

Journalism, so-called “progressivism,” and even the writing of history could be drastically modified were Barack Obama’s plans to massively increase the Catholic population adopted.

Here is my index that 1. Highlights the stakes for writing about social movements and “change” in ignoring the Reformation; and 2. Clears up the misidentification of the Frankfurters as the initiators of PC, identity politics, and the culture wars. The Frankfurt School focus was restricted to “fascism” and Nazism, which they generally blamed on mass media and demagogue-loving popular culture (with its elevation of “social imperialism,” consumerism, bad taste, the Leader principle and celebrities in general). I.e., the supposedly revolutionary working class had been bought off with vanities and luxuries of every type. Such as Erich Fromm located the source of Hitler’s appeal, not in the racial state and the elimination of ‘Jewish domination,’ but in “working class authoritarianism.”

In other words, the critical theorists were bohemian philosphers and, upon closer examination, organic conservatives beholden to German Idealism who disliked the impetus that the Enlightenment brought to the self-confidence of ordinary “puritanical” naifs who pretended to understand “things as they are.” With such a stance, the refugees from Hitler’s Germany were welcomed and promoted by the liberal “progressive” establishment in the most prestigious American schools.

https://clarespark.com/2009/07/04/unfinished-revolutions-and-contested-notions-of-identity/

https://clarespark.com/2009/08/25/t-w-adorno-and-his-funny-idea-of-genuine-liberalism/

https://clarespark.com/2010/01/02/jottings-on-the-culture-wars-both-sides-are-wrong/

https://clarespark.com/2011/10/21/did-frankfurters-kill-the-white-christian-west/

https://clarespark.com/2013/05/30/nostalgia-for-the-middle-ages/

https://clarespark.com/2013/06/23/the-origins-of-political-correctness/

https://clarespark.com/2013/06/30/the-origins-of-political-correctness-2/

https://clarespark.com/2013/07/31/the-nefarious-cultural-marxists/

https://clarespark.com/2014/06/04/did-bureaucratic-rationality-cause-the-holocaust/

https://clarespark.com/2014/09/20/taking-responsibility-for-ourselves-and-society/

“Cultural Marxism produces matriarchy”

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August 16, 2014

Ferguson MO, Masters of Sex, and the dilemma of the white liberal

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 7:42 pm
Tags: affirmative action. multiculturalism, Black Power, Caitlin Fitzgerald, Courtney Vance, Ferguson Missouri race riot, homosexuality, Huckleberry Finn, integration, Intruder in the Dust, Lizzy Caplan, Masters of Sex, Michael Sheen, political correctness, present-mindedness, Virginia Johnson, whiteness studies, William Masters

Imipassioned integrationist demands action from white doctor

[For my first take on this series, see https://clarespark.com/2013/10/22/masters-of-sex-and-70s-feminism/%5D

By an odd coincidence, the last episode of Showtime’s hit series Masters of Sex (10 August, 2014), took on the problem of race relations in St. Louis Missouri at the same time that the suburb of Ferguson was exploding in looting and confrontations between “militarized” police and blacks.

This blog is about the double bind white liberal writers are trapped in, given the particular history of race relations in the US. Should they rescue the black population from bigotry (e.g., Huckleberry Finn, Intruder In The Dust, affirmative action/multiculturalism/whiteness studies) or is it up to blacks to save themselves (e.g., the Black Power movement “by any means necessary”)? (For my blogs on the black power movement see https://clarespark.com/2010/07/15/index-to-black-power-blogs/)

In the last episode of Masters of Sex, Courtney Vance plays Dr. Charles Hendricks, the head of Buell Green, a “Negro” hospital in St. Louis, who has hired the twice disgraced William Masters, expecting him to carry out (Vance’s) specifically “integrationist” project. But Dr. Masters doesn’t see that convincing his white patients to follow him to a dubious neighborhood in the era of segregation is not his, but Hendricks’s priority, a point missed by the Los Angeles Times recap (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-masters-of-sex-recap-racial-tension-flares-at-bills-new-hospital-20140810-story.html.) Masters tells Hendricks that he has his own battle ahead in pursuing his tabooed research on the physiology of sex, while handing off to his mistress the task of persuading his old patients off to follow him to an all black hospital. Virginia, stereotypically enough, is more emotionally attuned and hence more manipulative than he is. The last shots show “Hendricks” leaving in a huff, for the second time pulling down a flyer that Virginia Johnson had put up, soliciting volunteers for the sex study that she and Bill had initiated, and that is, like her, “ahead of her time.”

Disgusted “Hendricks”

[Earlier in the episode, Masters had shown himself to be unusually empathic with blacks by chastising his reactionary wife “Libby” for forcing her black maid to wash her hair (under the delusion that “Coral” had brought lice into the house). She half-heartedly apologizes to Coral’s protective ‘boyfriend’, who classifies her with hopelessly insensitive “white people.” Yet both Bill and Virginia are seemingly floored by the request to adjust their priorities, putting militant integrationism ahead of their sex project.]

The producers and writers of Masters of Sex are nothing if not present-minded, inventing situations and characters that are the essence of political correctness. Seizing on snippets of the real history of the Masters and Johnson collaboration and then their ultimately failed marriage (divorced in 1992), the creators populate their series with assertive women struggling against the odds, repressed authoritarian males, closeted lesbians, tormented homosexuals pretending to be straight then seeking “conversion,” aging women, prostitutes, oppressed but passive-aggressive blacks, outspoken blacks—all characters who have starred in the social movements of the 1960s and 70s; the target audience is presumably fascinated by the transformations they believe they have wrought via their activism.

But with the presence of the ardently integrationist “Charles Hendricks” (who sees himself as a pioneer like William Masters) Showtime has placed itself in a political quagmire, for the American polity (both Left and Right) has no idea how to proceed in the romantic project of making up for generations of slavery, then Jim Crow. The real history of the Masters and Johnson collaboration is interesting enough, but present-mindedness (judging the past through the lens of present mores) is the real spoiler. Like the shows on HBO, Showtime delivers soft porn and the frisson, whatever literary merit surfaces now and then (and it does in the episode where, through Virginia’s skillful extraction, Bill exposes his relations with his cold, abandoning father).

(PS. I could find zero pictures on the internet showing angry confrontations between Libby, Coral, or her ‘boyfriend’ Robert (really her half-brother as we will discover in episode 6), even though these tense encounters are in the script of episode 5. Real life does not imitate art.)

Sunny view of Libby-Robert confrontation

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July 31, 2013

The nefarious “cultural Marxists”

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 7:45 pm
Tags: antisemitism, Erich Fromm, Fellix Frankfurter, Frankfurt School critical theory, German Idealism, Gordon Allport, Henry A. Murray, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, mass culture, Max Horkheimer, political correctness, populist agitators, Prophets of Deceit, repressive desublimation, repressive tolerance, secular progressives, social psychology, T.W. Adorno, technological society

[Update 1-5-16: progressive jurist Felix Frankfurter was already praising balanced expertise and lamenting the effects of mass media on the people in 1930, some years before the Frankfurt Institute refugees came to the US.]

There is a Facebook page “Smash Cultural Marxism.” One must wonder why a handful of German refugees, many with Jewish ancestry, are getting blamed for the sharp turn toward statism in the Democratic Party.

I have written before about this terrifying cohort. See https://clarespark.com/2011/10/21/did-frankfurters-kill-the-white-christian-west/. Also https://clarespark.com/2009/08/25/t-w-adorno-and-his-funny-idea-of-genuine-liberalism/.

Even if you are a fashionable cognitive behaviorist and loathe Freudian ideas, the Adorno blog establishes that his idea of the ever-so-balanced (pseudo)Freud suited the Harvard social psychologists who were proponents of psychological warfare in the interests of “civilian morale.” Such as Adorno and Horkheimer achieved fame because they blamed the Enlightenment and bureaucratic rationality for Nazism and the Holocaust. How convenient for the Harvard cohort that also called a halt to the Enlightenment (see https://clarespark.com/2011/03/27/progressive-mind-managers-ca-1941-42/).

As refugees from Nazism, the critical theorists were vocal about the causes of Hitler’s rise to power, and their indictment of mass culture and by extension, technological society, were understandable. For instance, Erich Fromm blamed working class authoritarianism for the failure of the German working class to deliver a socialist revolution. In the end, all the Frankfurters had explanations for the rise of Hitler, and to a man (whoops! I forgot Hannah Arendt), they blamed “mass culture.” Adorno, that elitist, went so far as to condemn American jazz.

I don’t know of a German refugee whose ancestors were Jewish who identified in any way with Judaism. They were first and foremost philosophers in the German Idealist tradition. Still, some of the ideas of Herbert Marcuse remain useful today in decoding authoritarianism in our political culture. I refer to “repressive tolerance” and “repressive desublimation.”

Repressive tolerance simply states that the social critic loses when s/he allows the opposition to define the terms of debate. Thus, the analysis of propaganda and/or the “rules” of combat allow us to see through authoritarian statists of every stripe, but especially the tricks of the pseudo-moderate men–as delineated in the mass-circulated materials written by Gordon Allport and Henry A. Murray, that were nationally circulated to other progressives, ca. 1941. (See link above.

[Update 12-27-13: It is true that Marcuse was writing from the Left, but such libertarians as Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate in The Shadow University (1998), ignore the collectivist, top-down discourse of the moderate conservatives who shaped current conceptions such as the neutral state and ethnicity/’race’ in the early years of the 20th century. See for instance https://clarespark.com/2009/09/23/progressives-and-the-teaching-of-american-literature/, and https://clarespark.com/2009/09/19/populism-progressivism-and-corporatist-liberalism-in-the-nation-1919/, for the gentlemanly approach to social control of subversive elements. No analysis of academic freedom and the origins of political correctness can proceed without those actions of “moderates” who imposed an organic conservative vocabulary on American institutions–all of them.]

Repressive desublimation argues that the loosening of sexual morals benefits consumerism, in which self-worth is defined with respect to mass media definitions of sexual attractiveness and glamour. One would think that conservatives critical of hyper-sexuality in pop culture would welcome such a critique.

Or take Norbert Guterman’s and Leo Lowenthal’s manual for identifying right-wing agitators, Prophets of Deceit (1949). I read it twice and modified my own self-presentation on the radio accordingly. Some of their guideposts that stick in my mind are as follows: 1. The agitator confides personal “secrets” to the target audience to bind them more closely; and 2. The agitator exaggerates the hurdles that were necessary to overcome in finding the audience: he or she is in physical danger for revealing the secrets s/he is confiding to the target audience; and 3. The agitator wants your money.

While I reject the German Idealism of the Frankfurters, the study of propaganda, of images, and of deceptive language that they favored, are indispensable tools for historians, journalists and all others who would protect liberty and freedom of speech.

I have no doubt that antisemitism accounts for the continued blaming of “cultural Marxism” for “political correctness” and anti-Americanism in general. (See https://clarespark.com/2013/06/30/the-origins-of-political-correctness-2/, and https://clarespark.com/2010/06/19/committee-for-economic-development-and-its-sociologists/ including the internal links. Look to the pseudo-moderate men for the threat to “American culture,” not to the “secular progressives” who represent emancipation from the dead hand of illegitimate authority. (For instance, Henry A. Murray of Harvard, one of their affinity group, argued for the return of the moderate father, for an authoritarian father would drive the children into radicalism. Such a perfectly moderate father (like the Good King or Platonic Guardian) was of course Franklin Delano Roosevelt.)

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June 30, 2013

The origins of “political correctness” (2)

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 7:39 pm
Tags: Bill Lind, Gilded Age, Horace Kallen, Hugh Thomas, individualism, Joseph Breen, multiculturalism, paleoconservatives, Paula Deen, political correctness, Popular Front, Randolph Bourne, the melting pot, Will Hays, William James, Willis Carto

[Update, 9-20-13: rules against “hate speech” were enforced by the institutionalized censorship in the movie industry long before the 1960s. “Entertainment” was sharply differentiated from “propaganda” or any movie that portrayed other countries unfairly. I.e., “Love” trumped “hate”. Amor vincit omnia. Thank you Will Hays and Joseph Breen, and lately, Loretta Lynch!]

The Paula Deen affair has returned the subject of “hate speech” and “political correctness” to the headlines. In part one of this sequence (https://clarespark.com/2013/06/23/the-origins-of-political-correctness/ and https://clarespark.com/2013/07/04/independence-and-the-marketplace-of-ideas/.) I tried to correct the widespread impression on the Right that “cultural Marxism” was responsible for what is considered to be an infringement on the First Amendment. Indirectly, I sharply criticized “paleoconservatives” for aligning themselves with such as Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby that blamed the imputed Jewishness of the German “Marxist-Freudian” refugees for gagging white, Christian Americans. (This was especially notable in Bill Lind’s piece on the origins of PC. See the dissemination of his line here: http://monroecountydailytest.blogspot.com/2011/06/politically-correct-attitudes.html. For more on Willis Carto see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Carto).

In this blog, I will extend my discussion, taking into account 1. The hypocrisy of punishing Paula Deen for using the “N” word long ago while liberals deploy a racialist discourse that fails to criticize the very notion of “race”; and 2. The understandable confusion arising from the politics of the [Comintern initiated] “Popular Front” against fascism in the 1930s, wherein communists and New Deal liberals were seen as one coherent political entity, which they were not. Both were statists and bureaucratic collectivists, but whereas New Dealers were conservative reformers trying to stabilize capitalism, communists were revolutionary socialists, hoping to turn the world upside down.

First, the question of hypocrisy. Even before the Soviet coup, it was the progressive movement that dreamed up the notion of the hyphenated American in the nineteen teens (1916). Their purpose: to counter the then left-wing generated notion of proletarian internationalism with the notion of ethnicity. Out went the melting pot, and in came the hyphenated American, thanks to such as Randolph Bourne and Horace Kallen (the latter a teaching assistant to William James, the pragmatist philosopher).

(See https://clarespark.com/2009/12/12/switching-the-enlightenment-corporatist-liberalism-and-the-revision-of-american-history/, and https://clarespark.com/2009/12/18/assimilation-and-citizenship-in-a-democratic-republic/. The latter blog quotes Horace Kallen.)

American nationality was thus redefined. The syncretic melting pot American was out. The hyphenated Americans were in. There would be a mosaic or salad of grouplets, sharing the same capacity for love and compassion. Hence was born “multiculturalism” prefigured by the German Romantics as a weapon against rootless cosmopolitans. The very notion of the individual was erased, for “individualism” was associated with narcissism, selfishness, jingoism, and hateful big business, the latter allegedly disgraced during the Gilded Age. The “individual” was all Head and no Heart; such a demon atomized society, leaving in its wake the lonely crowd. He was the generic “Jew,” and was indistinguishable from the WASP elite.

As a further weapon against class politics during the Great Depression, the big liberal foundations adopted the notion earlier popularized by William James as cultural pluralism: that social conflict could be managed with better intercultural communication: there would be no problem with “compromise” if we understood each other better. Later progressives would see that abusive language hampered the rational state of mind that would allow warring parties to submit to mediation. Ralph Bunche saw through the intercultural strategy in his lengthy memoranda to Gunnar Myrdal (ca. 1938-1940), and was stigmatized as an “economic determinist” for his pains in Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944). (See https://clarespark.com/2009/10/10/ralph-bunche-and-the-jewish-problem/. Also https://clarespark.com/2011/06/16/the-antiquated-melting-pot/.)

Thus the stage was set for Ivy League professors and big liberal foundations to bargain with troublemaking blacks during the late 1960s. (See https://clarespark.com/2010/07/18/white-elite-enabling-of-black-power/.) I have shown in this review of progressive politics that there was no critique of race or ethnicity, but rather an assault on the dissenting or “different” individual. Paula Deen was caught like a fly on flypaper, and no public figure has, to my knowledge, criticized the liberal media for hypocrisy, for it is they who persist in the racialist language of groupiness, and who believe that keeping the “N” word to oneself will solve major structural problems, e.g., the opposition of teachers unions to school choice and/or merit pay.

Second, the confusing Popular Front. Some readers were unconvinced by part one of this blog sequence. They persist in seeing a purely communist lineage for PC. For many on the Right, the boundaries between social democrats and communists have been blurred. For this, we can blame the Comintern that initiated the coalition of bourgeois parties and revolutionary parties from 1934 onward. But make no mistake: the Democratic Party remains a bourgeois party, making strategic gestures that only appear to be anti-racist, but this strategy will not bear close scrutiny as I argued above.

This passage from Hugh Thomas on Spanish politics at the time of the Popular Front (1934) may help to explain why there are divergent views on the origins of political correctness:

“At this time, with the shadows of war and fascism alike growing, the Soviet Union had a good reputation in Spain as elsewhere among Left and progressive people. The great Russian experiment did not yet seem to have betrayed its ideals. Thanks to an extraordinary programme of propaganda and unprecedented secrecy, the facts of agricultural collectivization were as yet unknown, and the persecution of Trotsky not understood. The communist party was to claim that they were responsible for the pact of the Popular Front which fought the Spanish general elections of February 1936. But it required little prompting for the socialists to adopt the salute with the clenched fist and bent arm (originated by German communists), the red flag, the revolutionary phraseology, the calls to unite in the face of international fascism demanded throughout the world by communist parties. ‘Anti-fascism’ and ‘the Popular Front’ were becoming powerful myths, almost irresistible to those who both loved peace and liberty and were impatient with old parties. Equally important on the Right were the myths of empire and national regeneration. The appearance in the Cortes elected in 1933 of a fascist and a communist was a portent and a warning.” (p.117, The Spanish Civil War)

In Thomas’s account, communism and social democracy bled into one another, thanks to the [preventable] polarization in Spain. Extend that bleed to Europe and to the United States, and you have the impasse of today. Bereft of history, but armed with groupiness, the First Amendment becomes an item in the arsenal of demagogues where “ignorant armies clash by night.”

Paula Deen is road kill.

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