By David French
Thursday, February 19, 2015
In the late summer of 1991, I think I might have been the
most insecure person alive. I was driving a Ryder van from Georgetown, Ky., (my
hometown), to Cambridge, Mass., to start my first year at Harvard Law School.
I was pretty sure the admissions committee had made a
mistake, or — at the very least — I’d just squeaked in on some kind of redneck
affirmative-action plan. I’d done well in school, but I was hardly an imposing
academic specimen, graduating from a public high school in rural Kentucky and
then a small Christian college largely unknown (at the time, at least) outside
the Southeast. I spoke no foreign languages. Aside from a short-term mission
trip to Honduras, I’d spent virtually no time outside the United States. I
hadn’t started any nonprofits, had done nothing much to “change the world,” and
my athletic accomplishments were limited to a mediocre intramural sports
career. In short, I felt like I was a pretty ordinary person going to an
extraordinary place, shortly to be surrounded by extraordinary people.
To prepare for what I thought would be the intellectual
challenge of a lifetime, I devoured book after book in the summer before law
school — books on Christian apologetics (I figured I’d have lots of
conversations about my faith), books about the law-school experience itself,
and books on the history and development of the law. Without the Internet, my
research about the Ivy League experience was limited. If a story wasn’t in the
Lexington Herald-Leader or in my weekly Newsweek, chances are I didn’t know about
it. So, truth be told, when I presumed I was facing a primarily intellectual
challenge, I had no idea what I was walking into.
In the academy, the early Nineties represented the first
peak of political correctness, with routine shout-downs, speaker disruptions,
and the growth of an unapologetic speech-code movement. But I wasn’t aware.
Today, we take for granted how quickly we can research any new environment,
prepping ourselves at least for a version of reality. Not long ago, if we
happened to miss a news article or a news broadcast, we just missed it. And I
had missed 99 percent of the reporting on the world of PC.
My first few days of law school, I focused on making
friends, and I found out that virtually everyone was intimidated by the
prospect of the Socratic method. I was surrounded by the most leftist people
I’d ever encountered, but it was all civil. For a short time, politics took a
back seat to academics. We were all scared together.
Then I opened my big mouth.
A few weeks into my first year, I drafted a letter on
behalf of a small number of pro-life law students. We notified the student body
that even though Harvard health fees covered elective abortions, students with
conscientious objections to funding abortion could request a partial refund of
their fees. It wasn’t much money, but the principle was important. So we
drafted a short letter and stuffed it into every student’s mailbox (The campus
mailbox was a forum for student engagement, featuring near-daily activist
messages). I had asked respondents to fill out a form and drop it into my
mailbox, so the next day I checked my mail and was pleasantly surprised to see
it stuffed with forms. Still naïve, I thought, “I just tapped into the latent
pro-life movement at Harvard Law School.”
How foolish. The first form I looked at simply said, “Go
die, you fascist.” The next said something like, “Go die, you f***ing fascist.”
Multiple messages were variations on the same theme: A death aspiration (not a
true threat — they wanted me to die but weren’t willing to do the deed),
profanity, an accusation of fascism, or some combination of all three. There
were a few genuine responses — from pro-life students — but the hate dominated.
From that point forward — in class after class — I had a
simple choice: be silent or face the strong probability of insults,
shout-downs, cat-calls, and other lame efforts at intimidation. In extreme
instances, conservative students had their faces pasted on gay porn and posted
in the halls. Other students endured activists calling future employers and
demanding their termination. While I didn’t face the full wrath of campus
activists, I endured more than my share of intensely personal backlash. The
shout-downs were routine, so were the insults.
And the entire experience made me a better, wiser person.
I felt at the time that I’d faced and passed a test —
that I’d proven to myself that my convictions were worth more to me than social
acceptance. Looking back, I realize now how minor and trifling that test was.
Shouts and insults are nothing compared with the trials of real life after law
school, but at the time it mattered, a lot. In a strange way, I was ultimately
happy for the scorn. After the initial shock, it was oddly affirming,
confirming that I was pressing the other side exactly where it didn’t want to
be pressed.
Political correctness demystified the Left. I saw amongst
the radical students a herd mentality more rigid and unthinking than I’d ever
seen in an entire life growing up in a fundamentalist church (yes, fundamentalist
— our little sect believed only its members merited eternal life). The herd
conventional wisdom hardened virtually overnight, debate was minimal to
nonexistent, and condescension and anger substituted for reason and thought.
Activists raged at Christians for being intolerant, yet they exhibited less
tolerance and open-mindedness than any angry pastor or minister I’d ever heard
— and I’d listened to lots of anger from the pulpit. I often met liberals who’d
literally never heard a coherent conservative argument and never met a
conservative Evangelical. Especially in pre-Internet days, the liberal cocoon
of elite education, urban liberalism, and radical readings could be virtually
hermetically sealed. Even now — with an entire Internet of information about
alternative ideas — Leftists often “learn” about conservatives by clicking on
links with headlines like “Jon Stewart DEMOLISHES Sean Hannity” or “Right Wing
Wingnuts Still Hate Science.”
PC taught me how radicals influence the larger,
non-radical Left. Jonathan Chait’s now-infamous (at least in radical circles)
recent essay against PC intolerance has its antecedent in countless
conversations amongst thoughtful liberals dismayed at being called bigots for
not being sufficiently supportive of any given radical reform or radical
argument. As quickly as conventional wisdom hardens, even mild dissent has to
be suppressed, and the easiest targets are those who see themselves as broadly
supportive of the Left. It’s easier to force a more moderately liberal
professor to bend to radical will than it is to force Rush Limbaugh to vote
Democrat. Stephen Hayward’s outstanding National Review cover story shows how
radical campus activists routinely dominate liberal campus educators —
especially when the educators have no stomach for a fight that will see them
labeled as racists, homophobes, or sexists.
In the intolerance, I also saw hope. During one
particularly memorable day, when radicals started shrieking when I questioned
why our professor referred to an unborn child as a mere “clump of cells,” I
remember speaking to a small group of students after class. They told me they
were questioning some of their pro-choice views. “Why?” I asked. Because, they
responded, if the leading pro-choice activists couldn’t debate the issue
without shout-downs, then perhaps their positions weren’t as intellectually
coherent as they led us to believe. Intolerance and intimidation do not breed
affection and loyalty. Reasoned arguments and basic kindness have their own
appeal, and often the barrier to greater influence lies more in the inability
to speak (or to be heard) than in the perceived inadequacy of the ideas.
In the early 1990s, some of my less-combative
conservative friends were intimidated (or annoyed) into silence. They just
didn’t want to deal with the nonsense, and they didn’t want to deal with the
backlash. So they kept quiet, kept their heads down, and left school with their
conservatism more or less intact. But after speaking to thousands of
contemporary conservatives on dozens of campuses across the nation, it seems to
me that political correctness has lost even that modest power over the right.
We’re over it. We don’t care.
But that doesn’t mean it’s impotent. Far from it. As
Gordon College’s ordeal shows (or Brendan Eich’s or dozens of examples of
on-campus repression), when radicals have real power, then PC has real teeth.
At the same time, it maintains influence over not just the more moderate
liberals (who fear negative labels) but also the larger mass of the more
politically apathetic or ill-informed. In the absence of strong convictions,
people will often take the path of least resistance, and the forces of PC do
their best to make non-conformance costly, even if the “cost” is mainly
annoyance. Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias is fond of saying that in the
battle of ideas, stigma tends to defeat dogma, and stigma is particularly
powerful when a person is unprepared to be stigmatized.
Our nation is increasingly polarized, and PC bears
significant blame. There exists a great mass of conservatives who are now
utterly immune to the stigma and name-calling, a vocal mass of radicals who
tolerate no dissent, and a shrinking apathetic middle that is subject to
intimidation but also annoyed by ideological hectoring. There are still
thoughtful liberals and conservatives who hash out differences with reason and
respect, but I fear the space for that dialogue is shrinking. PC doesn’t so
much liberalize our nation as divide it, and the divisions will only widen the
louder and angrier the forces of political correctness become. The Pew Center’s
research on political division shows this growing divide — tracking from 1994
(my last year of law school) to 2014 — the results are sobering.
I don’t pretend to believe that PC is the sole reason for
national division, but political correctness is changing America, and not
always in the direction that the Left desires. I’m living proof — and so are
the conservatives across the country who’ve faced political correctness and
emerged more convinced, not less, in the rightness of their cause.
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