Muzzled by Juan Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

political correctness “the offspring of Marxist dialectics.”
    After liberal Democratic president Jimmy Carter was rejected in favor of the Republican conservative Ronald Reagan, who had fought political correctness on California’s collegecampuses as governor, the right wing became outspoken in rejecting liberals as an angry minority tearing down American institutions and traditions. With the help of Christian conservative groups like the Moral Majority, the Right convinced people that Christianity, by far the most popular religion in the United States, was under siege by a minority of liberal secularists in the name of political correctness. Even though it had its own rules setting limits on any criticism of Christianity, the right wing positioned itself as anti–political correctness. The conservatives became holy warriors with a mission to protect the faith from the secular PC attack machine. The strategy at work for conservatives was to give political correctness a bad name and, by extension, give liberalism a bad name. To conservatives, political correctness embodied everything that was wrong and evil about liberalism. They hung this idea around their opponents’ necks like an albatross and watched with relish as it dragged liberalism into disrepute and damaged left-wing politics.
    The intense racial tensions of the era became part of the jousting. The idea of forced racial equality—specifically quotas—became part of the conversation as evidence that political correctness included giving jobs to unqualified people in the name of equal rights. Playing to residual racism in the postintegration South, conservatives convinced a large segment of white voters, the majority in the region, that they were being threatened by liberal Democrats, who represented Northerners, Jews, immigrants, and racial minorities, especially black people. This was the premise of Jesse Helms’s famous television advertisement in his North Carolina Senate campaign against Harvey Gantt. A pair of white hands crumplesup a job rejection letter as a narrator says, “You needed that job. You were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.” Even black radio talk show host Larry Elder picked up on the angst of whites when he questioned why the phrase “white trash” was acceptable when it was forbidden to talk that way about blacks, Hispanics, or Asians. The argument that whites have never been an enslaved and despised minority in the country failed to halt the slide in political correctness, because the counterargument undermined the heart of the argument for political correctness—equality for all. In addition, Jews, Irish, Italians, and other white ethnicities had their stories of discrimination and oppression. The serious message being loudly heard across American culture by the 1990s was that political correctness was not just an instance of fun and games among the intellectual class. To conservative white men and some white women, political correctness, affirmative action, and even talk of reparations for slavery were a very threatening reality that made it harder to get a job and get their children into college. It generally made them feel as if they had slipped under the thumb of an intellectual regime alien to their upbringing, their traditions, and their pride in America as the leading force for right in the world.
    During Reagan’s tenure in the White House, the Republican Party had found it could make huge political gains by playing to the so-called culture wars, in which conservatives became victims of liberal attacks on traditions and institutions central to American life. The most salient examples of the culture wars were incidents of excessive political correctness—such as calls not to have schools teach great books becausethey were written by “dead white men.” But they extended into so-called political wedge issues, such as abortion, gun rights, and gay rights, which gave