The American Right has sneered at liberal ideas and ideals as silly shows of Political Correctness. We are wrong to copy them
Race in Britain Will Hutton Sunday December 16, 2001 The Observer
Ideas and words matter. Get them right and you can capture the world. Politicians worth their salt have always known that, which is why those who are truly effective invest so much time and energy working at language. It is certainly true of the most effective political movement in the world of the past 25 years - American conservatism.
The rise of the American Right since the mid 1970s has not only transformed American politics and society, its impact has resounded around the globe. If you're a British rail commuter experiencing rail travel whose reliability is now worse than during the Second World War, your fate is linked by a golden thread to the ascendancy of conservative ideas originating in the US.
For what stymies the Government's otherwise well-thought-through idea for a non-profit-making, public-interest trust to run the railways is that it will not go the critical last half-mile. It has refused to buy Railtrack's shares, which would give it the vital ownership it needs to engage with the problem quickly, because to do so would be represented by its critics as nationalisation. Although intellectually and practically this is self-evidently the right thing to do, there is a political and cultural prohibition on any such act. There is no longer any faith in public initiative.
This has been the consistent view of the Treasury throughout the last century and so we tend to believe our incapacity is homegrown. But even Treasury scepticism can be challenged, if the climate of ideas is right. The trouble is that the climate of ideas remains overwhelmingly conservative, because the American authors of the conservative ascendancy have done their job very well. Their impact on us is still barely understood.
Enter political correctness, last week's hot phrase, as David Blunkett waded into the debate over race, immigration and loyalty oaths in the wake of the Cantle report into inner-city racism. Blunkett wants to reclaim territory he thinks has been lost to the Left. If Labour politicians can't openly say that there are problems with the behaviour of some of the immigrant community - 'norms of acceptability' as he describes them - that need to be addressed as much as the racism of the host community, then the centre and centre-Left is lost. The behaviour of stone-throwing National Front sympathisers is deplorable, but so are practices such as female circumcision or arranged marriage. Blunkett rails at the political correctness that allows him to speak out against one while prohibiting him from speaking on the other.
It is a trap. Political correctness is one of the brilliant tools that the American Right developed in the mid-1980s as part of its demolition of American liberalism. The core of the conservative proposition is that moral individuals are the basis for a just society and dynamic capitalism, a head-to-head confrontation with the 'liberal' view that individuals are social animals and that fair societies require universal rules asserting justice in its widest sense. Justice does not come from coercive rules, argue conservatives; it comes from moral individuals. The whole fabric of taxation, welfare, regulation, anti-discrimination legislation and public initiative is a coercive web which undermines freedom and morality. It must be fought to the last.
What the sharpest thinkers on the American Right saw quickly was that by declaring war on the cultural manifestations of liberalism - by levelling the charge of political correctness against its exponents - they could discredit the whole political project. Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing talk-show host, talking about 'feminazis', is part of the same movement as Allan Bloom, whose seminal book, The Closing of the American Mind , argues that political correctness has infected the US's capacity to think. This is the populist battering-ram behind which the Right makes the case for tax cuts for the wealthy and welfare minimalism for the poor.
The difficulty has been that American liberalism, itself split between whether it is a coalition of minorities - all of whose rights have to be respected by meticulous linguistic descriptions - or whether it represents a set of universal moral propositions about justice, has offered it many targets. By ridiculing liberalism's 'politically correct' nostrums, conservatives are able to ridicule the whole liberal enterprise. Thus, any tiny faculty of a university that maintains that Shakespeare is racist, any honest-to-god guy involved in a sexual harassment case, or any environmentalist seeking to protect unspoiled land can all be portrayed as victims or exponents of irrational political correctness. Plain-talking conservatives who want to get 'issues out into the open and debated' would never fall prey to such liberal idiocies.
It was always likely that political correctness would spill over into Britain - and it has been seized upon by conservatives and fogeys for all the same reasons. A single incident managed unwisely - says the Government allegedly considering a Minister for men, an edict from the Commission of Racial Equality over golliwogs or a council worrying about the teaching of homosexuality - will lead to a storm of mocking copy about political correctness, and for one end - it discredits the liberal cause.
Yet it matters profoundly what we say. It is an advance that it is no longer possible to call blacks n-words and that sexist banter in the workplace is understood to be oppressive and abusive. It is right that the groups in society that used to be written off as mentally retarded are recognised as having special needs. And it is right that TV and radio take care how they describe terrorists and the al-Qaeda network in the middle of this 'war' against terrorism. Murdoch's Fox TV news in the US habitually refers to Taliban fighters as 'diabolical', dismissing all critics who call for impartiality in their reporting as 'politically correct'.
So which side of this argument do you want to be on? I believe in liberal ideas of justice and public intervention. White politicians have to be careful how they talk about racial minorities in a society as racially polarised as Cantle describes; elements in the white majority are looking for any validation of their prejudices.
The political universe that wants the state to underwrite and even own public transport is the same one that asserts it matters how we talk about each other - within sane limits. Conservatives are right; the language and the politics do all hang together. It's just that they are on the wrong side of the argument.