The Tyranny of the Politically Correct

by Keith Preston

  The Tyranny of the Politically Correct -

  Totalitarianism in the Postmodern Age

  by

  Keith Preston

  The Tyranny of the Politically Correct

  - Totalitarianism in the Postmodern Age

  by Keith Preston

  Copyright © 2016 Black House Publishing Ltd

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  Table of Contents

  The Tyranny of the Politically Correct

  Introduction

  1: The New Totalitarianism

  2: The Ideology of Totalitarian Humanism

  3: Herbert Marcuse and the Tolerance of Repression

  4: Should Libertarianism be Cultural Leftism Minus the State?

  5: The Myth of the Rule of Law and the Future of Repression

  6: The Roots of Political Correctness

  7: The Oppression of “Human Rights”

  8: Totalitarian Humanism and Mass Immigration

  9: American Imperialism vs. The Identity of the World’s Peoples

  10: The Fruits of Anarchist “Anti-Racism”

  11: Balkanization and the State of Exception

  12: On Feminism

  13: Reply to a Left-Anarchist Critic

  14: Reply to a Cultural Marxist Critic

  15: No Friends to the Right, No Enemies to the Left?

  16: More Anarchistic Than Thou

  17: Ignoring the Elephant in the Room

  18: “Visions So Radically Different…”

  19: The Argument from Atrocity

  20: The Legacy of Anarchist Successes?

  21: Left Only, or Beyond Left and Right?

  Introduction

  An important transformation has slowly occurred within the Western industrialized democracies since the 1990s. It is a transformation that is now widely recognized, frequently criticized, and often considered to be a source of amusement by many people even as many others seek to deny its reality, or the genuine nature of its underlying implications. The American conservative writer William S. Lind has provided an apt summary of this phenomenon.

  “We call it ‘Political Correctness.’ The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, it’s deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious. If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious. First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted ‘victims’ groups that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges – some star-chamber proceeding – and punishment.”

  The question of “political correctness” is one that I discovered entirely by accident. As an activist on the margins of the radical Left during the late 1980s and early 1990s, I first became exposed to the censorious, inquisitorial, and hysterical attitudes and actions that are now all too frequently common among the proponents of political correctness. At the time, I was inclined to dismiss such occurrences as mere manifestations of excessive zeal by otherwise well-intentioned persons.

  During the course of the subsequent decade, I came to realize that political correctness was not simply priggishness with a progressive face, but a representation of a longstanding tradition within the Left that has existed since the time of the French Revolution. The hallmark of leftist thought is its insistence upon universal human equality and the sanctity of “progress.” There is a pronounced tendency among leftists to adopt a dualistic worldview that defines social and political conflict in terms of the persistent struggle between the forces of reaction and progress, with the former representing darkness and evil and the latter representing justice and virtue. Consequently, leftist movements often assume a religious character in a way that reflects the messianic or apocalyptic zeal often associated with fundamentalism. Just as the fundamentalist crusader feels the need to purge the world of sin or heresy, so does the leftist crusader experience a similar impulse to engage in a holy war against particular manifestations of perceived inequality. These may include racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, classism, Islamophobia, climate change denial, transphobia, patriarchy, hierarchy, looksism, ablism, fatphobia, speciesism, or any other perceived offense against equality. Meanwhile, the list of such offenses becomes increasingly absurd and implausible.

  In more recent times, it has become fashionable to refer to politically correct leftist zealots of these kinds as “social justice warriors.” However, this label is a bit of a misnomer as the objectives of such people are quite anti-social and have little to do with “justice” in any recognizable sense. The essays that are included in this collection constitute an effort to explain actually what political correctness is, from where it originated, and the ominous nature of its implications. It is argued in these writings that political correctness is simply a manifestation of the tendency towards political totalitarianism of the kind that plagued the twentieth century. Political correctness is a representation of an identifiable ideological outlook that regards any limits on the pursuit of power in the name of equality and progress to be intolerable. This is clearly demonstrated by the contempt that is often shown by proponents of political correctness for the autonomy of civil society, the separation of powers, standards of due process, and the conventional liberties of speech, religion, association, property, or privacy.

  I approach these questions from the perspective of a philosophical anarchist who maintains three primary concerns regarding the dangers that are posed by political correctness. First, as an anarchist, I am profoundly critical of the degree to which so many in the general anarchist milieu have adopted and internalized the ideological values and behavioral norms associated with political correctness. I consider this to be the greatest failure and most damaging weakness of contemporary anarchist movements. Second, I regard political correctness as a divisive and destructive force that undermines efforts to build movements to address the most pressing challenges of the present era, such as the ongoing centralization of capital on an international level, the rise of the surveillance state, and the hegemony of American imperialism and its related wars of aggression. Lastly, the ideological framework of political correctness is increasingly being incorporated into the self-legitimizing ideological superstructure of the state just as a theocratic regime might incorporate an interpretation of a particular religion as its own means of self-legitimization.

  Whil
e I approach these questions and concerns from the perspective of a philosophical anarchist as the content of some of the essays in this work will indicate, this collection is not intended to be read solely by anarchists. Instead, this work is intended to be a resource for all of those who are concerned about the excesses of arbitrary power, whether liberal, conservative, left or right, religious or secular, socialist or capitalist. One need not agree with every claim that is made or every conclusion that is drawn in this collection in order to recognize the inherent dangers of unrestrained power masked by moral zealotry. Just as opposition to Stalinist regimes of the twentieth century normally spanned the spectrum of political opinion from conservative traditionalists to dissident socialists, so must the opposition to political correctness become the project of all those who would stand against oppression claiming legitimacy in the name of a closed ideological system.

  Keith Preston

  April 21, 2016

  1

  The New Totalitarianism

  Regular readers of the Lew Rockwell blog (www.lewrockwell.com) are no doubt familiar with the criticisms of Marxism to be found within the classical liberal, traditional conservative and modern libertarian intellectual traditions. However, I come from another tradition that contains within itself those thinkers who were among the very first to recognize what the proponents of authoritarian, statist socialism were up to. Who would the reader suppose was the author who characterized the Jacobins, Blanquists and Marxists as those who would “…reconstruct society upon an imaginary plan, much like the astronomers who for respect for their calculations would make over the system of the universe…”? Ludwig von Mises? Friedrich August von Hayek? Murray Rothbard? No, it was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first thinker to ever call himself an anarchist. Who would one suspect of issuing the following critique of Marxism?

  The expression of ‘learned socialist’, ‘scientific socialism’…which continually appear in the speeches and writings of the followers of …Marx, prove that the pseudo-People’s State will be nothing but a despotic control of the population by a new and not at all numerous aristocracy of real and pseudo scientists. The ‘uneducated’ people will be totally relieved of the cares of administration and will be treated as a regimented herd. A beautiful liberation indeed!

  This prediction of the logical outcome of state-run economies predates the “new class” theory pioneered by the likes of Max Nomad, George Orwell and James Burnham by nearly a century. Its author is the renegade Russian aristocrat and number-one rival of Karl Marx, the classical anarchist godfather Mikhail Bakunin. And nearly one hundred fifty years before the venerable Professor Hans Hermann Hoppe published his thoroughly radical and compelling critique of the modern deification of “democracy,” Proudhon said of the mindset similar to that exhibited by those whom Lew Rockwell has characterized as “red state fascists”:

  “…because of this ignorance of the primitiveness of their instincts, of the urgency of their needs, of the impatience of their desires, the people show a preference toward summary forms of authority. The thing they are looking for is not legal guarantees, of which they do not have any idea and whose power they do not understand, they do not care for intricate mechanisms or for checks and balances for which, on their own account, they have no use, it is a boss in whose word they confide, a leader whose intentions are known to the people and who devotes himself to its interests, that they are seeking. This chief they provided with limitless authority and irresistible power. Inclined toward suspicion and calumny, but incapable of methodical discussion, they believe in nothing definite save the human will.

  Left to themselves or led by their tribunes the masses never established anything. They have their face turned backwards; no tradition is formed among them; no orderly spirit, no idea which acquires the force of law. Of politics they understand nothing except the element of intrigue; of the art of governing, nothing except prodigality and force; of justice nothing but mere indictment; of liberty, nothing but the ability to set up idols which are smashed the next morning. The advent of democracy starts an era of retrogression which will ensure the death of the nation…

  Having been an adherent of the classical anarchist outlook for nearly two decades and a participant, whether directly or peripherally, in the culture of the radical Left during that time, my own political background has given me some important insights into what is going on politically in our country and in Western civilization today.

  Historically, classical liberals, libertarians, traditionalist conservatives, classical anarchists and, quite frequently, religious believers and even dissident socialists have fervently resisted the onslaught of the greatest evil of modernity, that of the totalitarian state. Though I am a traditional Bakuninist anarchist and most of those reading this are likely in the libertarian, paleoconservative, classical liberal or anarcho-capitalist camps, most of us would no doubt agree that the state and the concentrated power it represents is among the gravest threats to human life, liberty, culture and civilization. Therefore, we have reason to value one another. Most of us are instinctively inclined to associate the totalitarian state with the ideology of Marxism. Given that the concept of state-directed “command” economies has fallen into intellectual disrepute in recent decades, some are inclined to regard Marxism as having been relegated to the garbage heap of once prevalent but now discarded intellectual frameworks in the same manner as Zeus worship or the Ptolemaic model of the universe. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  Orthodox Marxists, particularly Stalinists, were in their heyday fond of referring to heretics within their own ranks as “revisionists.” Enver Hoxha’s polemics against the “de-Stalinized” Communist parties of Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s come to mind. Yet, the branch of Marxist “revisionism” that should be of the most concern to us today is that whose roots can be traced to the Frankfurt School of the 1930s and its subsequent influence on the so-called “New Left” of the 1960s. Fortunately, LRC’s own regular contributor William Lind has elsewhere summarized the foundations of this system of thought, thereby saving me the trouble of having to do so. Says Mr. Lind:

  What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, “What is the theory?” The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression – the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression – we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s…

  …These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldn’t just get out there and say, ‘Hell no we won’t go,’ they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it. Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital. Classical, economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the 60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our country today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there – when the student re
bels come into Adorno’s classroom, he calls the police and has them arrested – Herbert Marcuse, who remained here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United States.”

  When I first read the transcript of Mr. Lind’s lecture, I was reminded of the following passage from the autobiography of 1960s counterculture icon Abbie Hoffman, describing the scene at a speech given by Herbert Marcuse during the late 1960s:

  Marcuse was, with the exception of Maslow, the teacher who had the greatest impact on me. I studied with him at Brandeis, and later attended his lectures at the University of California. In the spring of ’67, I saw him speaking-of all places-at the Fillmore East. There he was, this statuesque, white-haired seventy-year old European Marxist scholar, following the Group Image acid-rock band onto the stage, accompanied by the thunderous foot-stomping cheers of America’s most stoned-out, anti-intellectual generation….Ben Motherfucker, leader of the Lower East Side’s most nefarious street gang, spat on the floor, raised his fist, and exclaimed, “Dat cat’s duh only fuckin’ brain worth listnin’ to in de cuntree!

  Of course, this eerie scene resembles nothing quite so much as a sixties counterculture version of the Nuremberg Rallies. The reader may be wondering what such an obscure bit of American folk history has to do with contemporary world politics. To understand the significance of what I have described here, we need to examine some further developments in American political history.

  The Sixty-Eighters and Totalitarian Humanism

  The radicals of the 1960s were first and foremost proponents of a cultural revolution. Though theirs might not have been quite so brutal as the “cultural revolution” going on in China at the same time, it was a cultural revolution nevertheless. During the First Gulf War of 1990–91, I became involved with what passed for an antiwar movement at the time and I once put the question to a then–middle-aged veteran of the antiwar Left of the sixties, a former member of the Students for a Democratic Society, of what he thought his generation had actually achieved, given that the US empire and its imperialist wars seemed to still be going strong. He reflected on the question for a moment and then replied that the problem with sixties radicalism was that it was a cultural movement, primarily involved with questions of race, gender, ecology, sexuality and the like, and had achieved great victories in those areas, but had achieved virtually nothing in the realms of politics, economics or foreign policy. Therefore, the US empire that emerged during the early Cold War period remained intact and largely unscathed, in spite of the upheavals of the 1960s.