The New Right is the Old Left

When I was in graduate school in the late 1980s and early 1990s I developed an interest in what has become popularly known as the "political correctness" movement. I was particularly interested in that aspect of the movement that affected higher education. I read and sympathized with several books on this topic, books with titles such as "Tenured Radicals" and "The Closing of the American Mind," among others. John Searle, a great American philosopher, wrote an essay for the New York Review of Books entitled  "The Storm over the University", which I still consider to be the definitive treatment of the subject.

Because political correctness was mainly a phenomenon of the Left, at the time I was viewed by many of my colleagues as a conservative. And, insofar as my criticisms of campus PC  would have in many ways resonated with your average College Republican, it is not difficult to understand why people thought that. However, I (like Searle) was not and am not a conservative. I have always voted Democratic, I was a critic of the Vietnam War, and I loathed the Nixon administration. My objection to campus PC was that I thought that it undermined intellectual standards of excellence, especially in the humanities.

The common justification for turning classrooms into little more than opportunities for political indoctrination went something like this: there are no objective standards of excellence in the Arts and Humanities, thus educators should be free to adopt whatever standards in the classroom they believe would achieve a socially desirable goal. 

Another justification one heard had to do with the unavoidable political dimension of higher education. Searle writes:

I should say again exactly what the argument is and why it is bad. Its premise is that universities are already instruments of social transformation because the university has all sorts of political effects, some of them conservative, some even reactionary. The conclusion that is drawn from this premise is that it is therefore acceptable and desirable that we should try to make the university into an instrument of social transformation for desirable rather than undesirable ends; and as leftists we should make sure that it promotes left-wing purposes.

The premise is correct but the conclusion does not follow. The university, like all human institutions and activities has all sorts of political effects and consequences. It shares with music, sex, art, religion, physics, gastronomy, and everything else a political dimension in the sense that it can have political consequences. In each field people with different views will gain or lose followers, influence, and power and have effects on the behavior of others. But it does not follow from this, indeed it is a fallacy to conclude, that the only or primary criteria for assessment of its activities are political or that its objective should be political. Universities at their best often achieve social transformations because knowledge can transform people and institutions. But the aim should always be knowledge, not transformation.

In the 20 years since I first engaged this subject I have not changed my mind. I know from personal experience that higher education--again, especially in the humanities--is often plagued by professors with strong political beliefs who use the classroom as a platform for the expression of those beliefs. As it so happens, these beliefs are usually, though not always, of the Left. Among the 20 or so students in my graduate school class there was an actual member of communist party. At my first teaching job one of my best friends on the faculty firmly believed that the purpose of the Berlin Wall had been to keep Western invaders out of the communist utopia of East Germany. Since I left the Academy I have had no further occasion to run into folks like this.

I only mention this history as a preface to what appears to me to be a breathtaking turnaround on the part of conservatives. Many of the same people who used to bemoan the way that university professors used the classroom as an outlet for political indoctrination now routinely engage in and applaud exactly the same approach--for the Right, of course--in the media. Amazingly, they use many of the same justifications as did their leftist academic forbearers. You routinely hear conservatives point out the need for blatantly partisan and ideological outlets, such as Fox News, AM talk radio, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, a need based on the perception that the news is not objective in any case, so why not use it for a politically desirable purpose?

The latest egregious example of this lies in the Right's reaction to a widely-discussed year-long investigation by The New York Times of the attack against the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya. The Times found that, contrary to repeated insistence by those on the Right, that Al Qaeda was not involved in the attack and that an inflammatory American-made video, "Innocence of Muslims", denigrating Islam was one of the main motivations for the attack.

The Times story backs up these conclusions with fairly compelling evidence. For example, the best evidence for an Al Qaeda link was an intercepted phone call from one of the attackers to a a friend with known ties to Al Qaeda. When told of the attack, the friend responded with surprise, as if this were the first he had heard of it. Second, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb sent a letter that was later obtained western media listing notable acts of terrorism perpetrated by the group in the region, but it made no mention of Benghazi at all. As for the influence of the video, The Times claimed to have a Libyan reporter on the ground the night of the attack who spoke directly to many of the principals and they specifically mentioned the video as one of the main issues motivating the assault. They believed that they were standing up for Islam.

The Right reacted to this unwelcome news just about as you would expect. Conservative members of Congress and conservative pundits denounced the Times story as false. This is really simple. If  someone says or writes something that you believe is false, and the claims made were accompanied by specific evidence, you should include along with your denunciation a rebuttal of that evidence. However, the conservative reaction to the New York Times story completely ignored the evidence presented.

Charles Krauthammer declared confidently that the story was "obviously" a political move initiated by The Times as a way to protect Hillary Clinton. Krauthammer's only evidence for this claim was his analysis of New York Times editor Andrew Rosenthal's commentary on the conservative content-free denunciation of the article. Rosenthal wrote

The Republicans hope to tarnish Democratic candidates by making it seem as though Mr. Obama doesn’t take Al Qaeda seriously. They also want to throw mud at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who they fear will run for president in 2016.

This analysis not only seems correct to me, it seems nearly self-evident. How commenting on a political reaction by conservatives to the story is conclusive proof of a political motivation for the story in the first place is spectacularly unclear. Conservatives are just like the radical professors I read about 20 years ago. Because they see politics in everything, they ascribe political motivations to virtually all public activities. Once you start to see politics everywhere in art, journalism, education, and entertainment then your analytical toolbox is limited to merely ascribing political motives and predicting political consequences. That's it. Nothing else matters.

By way of conclusion, Searle reminds us in that seminal article that

Categories like “left” and “right” have a useful place in politics and journalism and even a marginal place in scholarship. But where serious intellectual work is concerned they tend to be the enemies of thought. If one begins an argument with the idea that one is “speaking as a leftist” (or “rightist” or “liberal” etc.) one is unlikely to produce anything that rises above the mediocre intellectual level of the categories themselves.

I suppose that this is what bothers me the most about this phenomenon. It debases and trivializes our public discourse. Really smart people find themselves with little to say beyond expounding silly conspiracy theories and soap box proselytizing.