7-05-07, 9:37 am

For many years now, the right wing in the US has used the term 'politically correct' to caricature those who try to remove racist, sexist, militarist and other similarly motivated forms of speech from popular usage. The right has also used the term political correctness regarding people who criticize racist, sexist, and militaristic policies. The underlying attitude that the right seeks to cultivate is that such language and policies are normal and acceptable and represent what people really think, even many of the same people who claim to be critics of them.

The term 'politically correct' has an interesting history. New Left radicals of the Abbie Hoffman variety, whose politics were much closer to anarchism than to Marxism, used the term to make fun of Old Left or Communist activists, who in debates sought to find the “correct position” in terms of theory and practice, which, when you think about it, is what any political group that is neither sectarian nor opportunist should be doing.

The 'new lefties' used the term to poke fun at what they considered old left dogmatism. However, the right now uses its own version of 'political correctness' to caricature those who oppose right-wing policies and reject the 'good old days' when racist politicians used the N-word routinely in Congress, and racist and sexist (including crudely homophobic) stereotyping and humor permeated the mass media. Those “good old days” were the days when all who criticized nuclear proliferation and the threat of radiation, or voiced their opposition to the Korean and later the Vietnam War, were condemned as Soviet agents, Communist dupes, or tender-minded, vaguely effeminate individuals with no knowledge of the real world.

But now that the right has been in power at the national level for most of the period since Ronald Reagan became president and broke sharply with previous Republican administrations, with his policies of union-busting, undermining existing civil rights legislation, and the rejection of detente in the cold war. The concept of 'political correctness,' as it is today bandied about by the right wing bears little relation to the actual state of politics. Like most positions promoted by the right wing, the term “political correctness” needs to be turned inside out in order to get at the truth.

For example, when the right argues that 'socialized medicine' does not work and has been a failure throughout the world, the easily verifiable truth is that it has been an enormous success in every developed nation when compared to the US system. And when the right contends that tax cuts and deregulation create an enormous degree of productive economic growth, the record shows that such policies actually produce stagnation in real wages and a decline in productive investments, while they promote rampant financial speculation, which makes any economic growth that occurs largely parasitic, producing low-wage jobs at home, exporting formerly well-paying jobs abroad, and greatly increasing the real income gap between the wealthy and the general population.

Another example is that while the right contends there is no 'reliable' scientific information to support an imminent danger from global warming and other manmade environmental problems, the overwhelming scientific evidence is that we really are experiencing a huge and immediate global environmental crisis.

When the right wing says that the invasion of Iraq was undertaken because of Saddam Hussein's relationship to Al-Qaeda and his secret development of weapons of mass destruction (even though today the latter is rarely mentioned), no one should be surprised by the actual fact (as much of the world already knew in 2003) that Hussein's government had no relationship except one of mutual hostility with Al-Qaeda, or that the UN inspections that had been going on for years had found no evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Similarly, when the right uses the term politically correct to mock opponents of the death penalty and proponents of gun control, it is important to understand that both gun control policies and the absence of the death penalty are today the norm in most of the developed world, and that one result of such policies are significantly lower crime rates and far lower violent crime and homicide rates.

Given the power of the right and its control of the media (which, by the way, is constantly berated as liberal in order to distract attention from its actual control by the right wing), we cannot easily rid ourselves of the term political correctness, a term which, thanks to the global power of the US media, is now used internationally. But we can perhaps turn the term around and apply it to real politics, by showing that 'political correctness' in language and policy, as defined in the United States in recent years by the right, should instead be used to expose the distortions of reality that the right wing perpetrates.

Let's start with organized labor, which media largely makes invisible in the US. It is politically correct to call euphemistically the anti-union shop laws under section 14B of the Taft-Hartley Act 'right-to-work' laws or “anti-closed-shop' laws. Nonunion workers who are brought in to break strikes and take the jobs of striking workers are called 'permanent replacement workers,' in the right-wing version of political correctness. Now, I am not saying that the term 'scab,' used for more than a century by the labor movement, is a more suitable, but 'permanent replacement worker' is an uncommonly positive way to describe those who are rewarded for breaking strikes and busting unions.

In the mass media, labor leaders are widely referred to as 'union bosses,' especially in situations where there is a strike, while the “corporate bosses” who, unlike labor leaders, are not elected by the rank-and-file but appointed by company boards of directors (on which they themselves often sit), are known as CEOs or chief executives. This is an example of real political correctness applied to class relationships.

When workers lose jobs, the politically correct term today is 'downsizing,' not layoffs, because that is too unpleasant a term (not that “downsizing” is any longer palatable, since the general population definitely associates it with hard times).

If we look at the issue of civil rights, political correctness as practiced by the right calls affirmative action policies 'reverse racism,' a practice the Supreme Court actually recently endorsed when it used a distorted reading of the 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision to violate school board integration plans. The fact is that without planning and policy implementation to redress long-standing social injustices, those injustices will continue even if they have been removed by law, and therefore affirmative action complements rather than contradicts both the spirit and letter of civil rights legislation.

After the defeat of Nazi Germany, simply eliminating the Hitlerite race laws that were been used to murder millions and persecute many millions more, was not a solution. The survivors and others victims could not simply be left to fend for themselves in a society where many of the individuals, and certainly the non-Nazi public and private institutions which carried out the policies of the fascist state, were still active and intact, just as the individuals and institutions which sustained Southern de jure segregation were intact in the US following the 1960s, not to mention the individuals and institutions who practiced de facto racism throughout the country.

In postwar Germany many former Nazis, who now defined themselves as 'anti-Communist conservatives,' contended that while the previous policies of anti-Semitism had gone too far, though they were essentially correct. But, in their view, the postwar policies of 'philosemitism' (portraying Jews as innocent victims of persecution who deserved reparations and other compensation for their suffering) where public forms of anti-Semitism is outlawed represents the other extreme and was also wrong.

Where African Americans and other minorities in the US are concerned, the right-wingers who mock criticisms of racist speech and policies in the US today as 'political correctness' are essentially saying what postwar German conservatives did. Thus, according to right-wing speak, now that segregation is over we are neither racists nor anti-racists, we can deny and forget about racial discrimination, except, of course, in order to criticize those who continue to fight racism as advocating a 'double standard' when it comes to minorities.

There are many other examples of political correctness in actual practice (for instance, calling the Bush administration's modern day version of the Alien and Sedition Act, the PATRIOT Act, and calling kidnapping and torture 'rendition,' not to mention the CIA's classic description of murder by assassination as 'termination with extreme prejudice'). These are all versions of political correctness in action, because they twist language to define in positive terms the harmful policies of governmental agencies with real political power.

When the right uses wildly propagandistic distortions of language to caricature its critics and then, in a Freudian way, projects, through use of the term “political correctness,” what it is itself doing onto its critics, it is time for the left to actively expose all the right-wing distortions and outright lies that permeate the mass media, identify their origins and political purposes, and move to the offensive in the political battle of ideas.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.