Muzzled (7 page)

As noted, ABC got Bill Maher’s scalp a few years back, but he’s not done fighting for political incorrectness. He now hosts a lively, uncensored show on HBO and continues to rail against our fear of speaking out. The week after I was fired from NPR, Maher noted on his show that the most popular name for babies born in the United Kingdom last year was “Mohammed” and said he was “alarmed” because he did not want the Western world to be taken over by Islam. “Am I a racist to feel alarmed by that, because I am. And it is not because of the race, it’s because of the religion. I don’t have to apologize, do I?”

Like George Carlin and Richard Pryor before them, comedians like Maher are uniquely positioned to challenge the PC culture when it’s used by the Left and the Right to cut off debates they don’t want others to hear. Many examples of PC are ripe to be skewered with ridicule. While some of the send-ups of PC behavior are funny, it’s important to recognize that it’s really gallows humor. The substance is very serious, and the injury to people’s reputations and livelihoods can be very real. As someone who was at the center of one of these
PC media feeding frenzies, I can assure you there was nothing funny about it at the time.

At its core, political correctness relies on tribalism, an “us versus them” mentality. It is about cultivating identity groups and placing people into convenient boxes where they think and act and speak in predictable ways. In recent years, people and groups from all points on the political spectrum have used this fragmentation to their advantage. They use it to attain and expand their political power, whether it’s by generating media attention or raising money. They use it to insulate and protect their constituents so that whenever a controversy comes along, they can go to the appropriate box and produce victims who will echo their sense of outrage.

The tremendous growth of media, with cable TV and the Internet offering niche outlets to fit any specific political taste—thereby atomizing the idea of a big-tent, mainstream media where everyone can tell their story and hear the other side—and decades of greater class divisions and political polarization have brought us to this point. There is no clear incentive for anyone involved to change the tone and the nature of the conversation. Politicians who utilize PC tactics regularly win at the ballot box. Lobbyists and special-interest advocacy groups are more influential and better funded than ever before. Their favorite weapon is to charge any opposing camp with being insensitive and even offensive—in other words, politically incorrect. Television ratings and Web traffic numbers are shattering records and soaring with any report about politically insensitive statements, such as the burst of online hits after Ann Coulter labeled the 9/11 widows “witches” and “harpies” or Tucker Carlson pronounced himself a Christian
who nonetheless thought football player Michael Vick should have been “executed” for staging dogfights. This problem did not happen overnight, and it will not be fixed overnight.

The goal of these political tactics is changing America to fit one’s preferred vision—making sure one’s ideas come out on top. The genius of America is that reactionary groups rarely achieve progress. But good arguments, persistence, and appeals to conscience that challenge the majority at critical junctures—see the civil rights movement and particularly Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—actually
change
the majority and become “mainstream.” This dynamic was first expressed by James Madison in Federalist No. 10. The idea is that only the best ideas and movements will survive and have the wide-scale appeal to rise and withstand exposure to vigorous national debate.

Yet as the country has grown more diverse, as women have gained a larger voice in picking winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas, and as Hispanics, Asians, and blacks also have their say in politics and culture, we find ourselves looking across a broken, factionalized landscape. In this new reality, many Americans feel they have lost power, and an increasing number are worried they are in the minority. The best and obvious example is older, blue-collar white males who can easily recall when leadership, decision making, and good taste were largely up to them. The big changes in twentieth-century America—aside from the atomic bomb and technology—have been about social movements for equal rights for women and minorities. They have left much of the nation, including women and minorities, with an identity crisis, a new hunger for some scrap of common identity, and heightened competition
for influence over the country’s future as we Americans safeguard identities, both for individuals and groups. We are all adopting the vocabulary of the aggrieved, and it comes at the expense of some notion that we all share a common cause. The rising tide has been replaced by zero-sum. The conversation is now a hostile negotiation.

I believe the charged atmosphere of our conversation with one another has taken a wrong turn. And I think it went seriously wrong over the course of the last thirty years—in the midst of the culture war between the Right and the Left.

If the intent of PC was to encourage a culture in which people in power had to be careful of the sensitivities of others, the reality of it was that it inhibited frank conversations. It became nearly impossible to have direct dialogue between any two groups, or even a class discussion about history, without running the risk of offending somebody. As a result, the most important conversations, in which people try to understand one another and solve problems, became more trouble than they were worth. With caution as the wise course of action, many political leaders, professors, and media people on radio and TV began seeking refuge in a polite middle where hard truths are muzzled. Meanwhile, hard-liners on both sides migrated to the political fringes, where honest, potentially fruitful debates are secondary to reaffirming the party line and pushing one another to become more rigid, orthodox, intolerant, and politically correct in their thinking.

It may feel like a flashback to the bad old days of politically correct speech codes and wedge issues. But the truth is this is just a new vintage of the same politically correct wine. In this new age of politically correct thinking, Left and Right
continue limiting debate, controlling the media, rousing the base of their most partisan supporters, and hitting hard and fast when lines of group propriety and identity are crossed. The prime targets are anyone who thinks differently and, as was evident in NPR’s handling of me, anyone within one’s own group who is guilty of straying to talk to the other side and finding points of agreement with what is viewed as the enemy.

Lines have been drawn, trenches dug, bubbles sealed.

If we try to discuss security in the context of Islamic fascism, we are called “racist.” If political leaders talk about reining in the unsustainable cost of health entitlements, they are derided for talking about “death panels” and “rationing.” If there is a debate about adding troops to a war that is going badly, the people in support of the increased military presence attack critics for not supporting the troops and for being “unpatriotic.” If the topic is the rights of gays, supporters are dismissed as lacking religious faith and being “secular.” We fall back on labels, labels, labels—speech codes to distract from the true issues at hand that deserve to be discussed and debated.

In a sense, the PC movement hasn’t done anything other than make itself more diffuse across pockets of American culture. Hypersensitivity and supercharged responses to the slightest of perceived transgressions are now the norm. What Jefferson Morley wrote in the
Washington Post
in 1995 in assessing the PC movement is an apt description for almost any subclass of Americans who see on the horizon the destruction of their own brand of American-ness by whatever version of heathen they imagine: “Among the less attractive results is the emergence of America’s newest victim class: the P.C.
Wounded. Their aggrieved insistence that the injustice done to them is more recent, more unfair, more un-American than that suffered by other groups is just another one of those exercises in comparative victimization that are so common a feature of fruitless political debates.”

This remains the case even if it’s hard to keep track of who is claiming to be the victim in the latest attempt to stifle free speech. A prime example of how the tables can turn is provided by Mark C. Taylor, a professor at Williams College. In 2006, writing in the
New York Times
, he described how a revival of religious groups on his campus, more than at any time since the 1960s, seemed to signal a reversal of the liberal, politically correct insistence that intellectuals wear suspicion of all religion, especially evangelical Christianity, as a badge of honor. Conservatives have long been critical of hostility toward organized religion at top colleges as part of their defense of values and traditions. But what looked like an end to the politically correct embrace of a campus free of people talking about their faith was a new, dangerous phenomenon that amounted, Taylor wrote, to “the latest version of political correctness.” Under the new rules, Taylor said, “the more religious students become, the less willing they are to engage in critical reflection about faith.”

Taylor recounted how an administrator at the college insisted he apologize to a student after the student complained that Professor Taylor had “attacked his faith because [he] had urged him to consider whether Nietzsche’s analysis of religion undermines belief in absolutes.” Taylor refused to apologize. “My experience was not unique,” he wrote. “Today, professors invite harassment or worse by including ‘unacceptable’ books
on their syllabuses or by studying religious ideas and practices in ways deemed improper by religiously correct students. Distinguished scholars at several major universities in the United States have been condemned, even subjected to death threats, for proposing psychological, sociological or anthropological interpretations of religious texts in their classes and published writings. In the most egregious cases, defenders of the faith insist that only true believers are qualified to teach their religious tradition.”

It is generally accepted that the liberal PC movement and the anti-PC backlash in the eighties and nineties, as well as the conservative wedge issues that emerged in the early 2000s, are all now safely in the rearview mirror as elements of what we remember as the culture wars. But what is clear—from Taylor’s case at Williams to my firing at NPR—is that the tactics first used by the Left to impose political correctness and by the Right to emphasize divisive wedge issues are the very same tactics that remain at play in nearly every debate in America. Those tactics are now pushing too many of us to be silent, to play the part of the smiling bartender or risk losing tips. The rules are not nailed to the wall, but everyone seems to know voicing an honest opinion, even expressing a feeling, comes with the danger of being fired, being shunned, having our reputations ruined, and being excommunicated from the church of other true believers—all for simply telling the truth.

A
S PRESIDENT BUSH AND I WALKED out of the Oval Office, he suddenly pulled on my arm. He wanted to stop and talk for a moment before entering the Roosevelt Room, which was full of White House staff, producers, and technicians waiting for me to interview him.

“You know I can’t say anything about your book,” he said, referring to
Enough
, a book I had written about the failure to address the nation’s growing culture of out-of-wedlock births, high school dropouts, and acceptance of illegal drug use—especially among poor black Americans. He had sent me a personal letter a few months earlier telling me that he had read it, praising key points. But the president never mentioned the book in public—the kind of coveted, one-of-a-kind endorsement that is sure to draw attention to any book.

Speaking softly, President Bush said he felt if he gave the book his stamp of approval it might cause people who stood to benefit most from the book—the poor, people fighting poverty, churches, philanthropies, and civil rights groups—to
dismiss it because they generally disagreed with his Republican politics. His silence wasn’t about the book but about the charged nature of the issues. It was a topic he realized he had to approach with extreme caution.

About two years later, at a White House lunch with President Obama and other Washington columnists, I had a similar encounter with the nation’s first black president. As the group discussed the recession’s impact on working-class men, the president turned to me, the only black journalist in the room. He said I knew what an economic slump can do to a community—fewer men graduating from high school, fewer men marrying, and more men going to jail—because of my writing about the social breakdown in the black community during previous recessions. Like President Bush, President Obama was familiar with
Enough
and, more important, with the ideas it dealt with, but he too never pushed hard for a direct discussion of those ideas, I believe for fear of antagonizing his liberal political base.

How could that be? Let me share a brief story with you.

When Barack Obama, as a presidential candidate, in a rare venture into this territory, spoke to a black church about the high percentage of black men failing to be fathers to their children, he found himself immediately targeted as an Uncle Tom by the former presidential candidate Reverend Jesse Jackson. Acting as the enforcer of politically correct speech for liberal politicians, Jackson damned him for “talking down to black people.” Seething under his breath as he prepared to do a TV interview, Jackson was caught on microphone telling another guest that Obama’s violation of politically correct speech made him want to castrate the younger man—“cut his nuts off.”

With that kind of threat, that kind of retaliating response from one’s own party, it is easy to understand why, at every point on the political compass, from the political right wing to the political left wing, from President Bush to President Obama, politicians agree to keep silent on major debates in today’s political atmosphere. Both men were aware of the severe price to be paid—scorn, vilification, and being shunned by one’s own party, if not converted to a political eunuch—by any leader who plunges into a charged national debate on a particularly sensitive topic.