Eighty percent of Americans believe political correctness is a problem in the United States. It’s worth unpacking what Americans mean by political correctness, given the range of meanings the phrase takes on in the public discourse.
People sometimes use political correctness to refer to the narrowing of the range of opinions you’re allowed to hold and express in public – preferring fewer immigrants and a generally restrictive national immigration policy, for example, was once considered a legitimate policy preference but is now denounced as a species of bigotry. Others use PC to describe what some now refer to as wokeness – the American Left’s embrace of critical theory and its attendant colonization of language. Still others use PC as a byword for what Stephen Pinker calls the “euphemism treadmill” – the cyclical purging of once-acceptable terms (e.g., “colored person” or “mental retardation”) from common speech.
Each of these phenomena is related to language – the way we’re allowed to describe the world and the political realities we perceive. In his new book, “Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds”, pundit Michael J. Knowles argues that conservatives should abandon content-neutral defenses of free speech if they truly wish to combat political correctness. All societies impose practical limits on the speech and behavior they tolerate, claims Knowles, and conservatives must defend the content of their speech, not merely their right to express it. “If we are to master our political future,” he writes, “we must not merely demand the right to speak; more important, we must have something to say.”
Knowles argues the libertarian posture of the conservative movement is an unfortunate remnant of a postwar conservative coalition that lost most of the important cultural battles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Among the legs of the “three-legged stool” of the postwar conservative movement, Knowles claims that the “priorities of the economic libertarians came to dominate” because “they were least offensive to the other members.” The triumph of libertarian ideas in the conservative movement focused the Right’s attention on tax cuts and entitlement reform to the exclusion of cultural battles like same-sex marriage, abortion, and prayer in public schools.
As for the Left, “Speechless” presents an intellectual genealogy of political correctness, tracing the rise of critical theory from Karl Marx’s class-based analysis to modern progressives’ obsession with race and identity. Knowles identifies Marx’s “ruthless criticism of all that exists” as the operative principle beneath both critical theory and political correctness, the latter of which, Knowles contends, is “an anti-standard standard, a negative device designed to overthrow traditional mores and institutions.”
Knowles argues that proponents of political correctness set a trap for their opponents, which “lies in PC’s dual character as at once a speech code and the antithesis of a moral code.” For example, it is considered politically correct to call a homeless person an “unhoused person” instead of a “bum.” In one sense, this language demonstrates the speaker’s good manners. In another, it implies a moral judgment about the homeless and the proper political response to the problem of homelessness. In abiding by such speech codes for the sake of politeness, Knowles argues that conservatives unwittingly cede the core of their arguments to progressives.
To undermine political correctness, Knowles urges conservatives to move toward a more muscular form of argument capable of accusing the Left of more than mere hypocrisy. “Politically correct radicals have committed a greater offense than hypocrisy,” he writes, “they have redefined vice as virtue and virtue as vice.”
Consider the Right’s response to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s dinner at the French Laundry in violation of his own coronavirus guidelines. Newsom was certainly hypocritical to violate his own lockdown regime, a fact that conservatives were quick to acknowledge. More important than pointing out Newsom’s hypocrisy, however, was stating that the governor’s guidance inflicted untold social and economic misery on the residents of California. The conservatives who focused on Newsom’s hypocrisy to the exclusion of the underlying principle at stake ironically helped to validate the governor’s lockdowns.
Knowles suggests that the conservative reliance on charges of progressive hypocrisy betrays a broader failure of the Right to advance substantive arguments. This tendency is manifest not only in charges of hypocrisy but also in complaints about “cancel culture.”
For example, when Amazon removed conservative author Ryan T. Anderson’s book “When Harry Became Sally” from its website for violating Amazon’s hate-speech guidelines, conservatives rushed to decry the move as cancel culture run rampant. A classical liberal might argue that booksellers betray the principles of free speech when they refuse to sell a book due to disagreement with its contents. This argument evades the central point. The ideas contained in Anderson’s book – that men and women are different, and that children’s bodies should not be mutilated in service of gender ideology – are perfectly defensible on their merits without making abstract complaints about the excesses of cancel culture. Such content-neutral arguments fail to advance conservative priorities or defend the person being canceled
Knowles goes a step further. He argues that cancellations are a positive good – so long as the right ideas and people are being cancelled:
Vague harangues against “cancel culture” miss the mark because they fail to acknowledge the justice of ostracizing certain people and marginalizing certain ideas. All cultures “cancel.” In the 1950s, American society “canceled” Communists; in the 2020s, it “cancels” anti-Communists. If conservatives hope to recover anything akin to traditional standards, they must not only articulate a moral and political vision but also suppress ideologies and organizations that would subvert that vision.
Knowles is a Catholic, and his desire to cancel antisocial and heretical ideas is perfectly orthodox. No society has ever been or should ever be totally open to all opinions. However, the notion of cancelling people – permanently ostracizing and stigmatizing real and imagined transgressors for the sake of preserving the moral order – is more complicated from a Catholic point of view. New Testament figures from Dismas to Paul were worthy of cancellation by virtue of their conduct, but Christ redeemed both without respect to their transgressions. Today’s cancellers may wish to render James Damore permanently unemployable and the cancellers of Knowles’s imagination may wish to do the same to Marc Lamont Hill, but denying either man the possibility of redemption for his real or imagined sins is less defensible – at least from a Catholic perspective.
Knowles’s book is an otherwise compelling sketch of a post-libertarian Right, a movement of conservatives who employ muscular arguments and “ditch the tired slogans that they have parroted for decades.” While his book is focused more on enjoining conservatives “to say something substantive” than “prescribing precisely what we ought to say,” Knowles closes with the following observation:
One wonders whether conservatives’ reluctance to articulate and enforce a political vision of the good derives from their lack of interest in practicing what they would preach. People who do not go to church have little credibility in encouraging others to practice formal religion. People who have never cracked the spine of The Iliad or The Aeneid cannot persuasively recommend a return to the classics. As political thinkers from Aristotle to the Founding Fathers well understood, virtue is a habit, and no conservative can hope to conserve what he does not himself practice.
If Knowles’s readers are moved return to Mass and crack open the “Iliad”, “Speechless” will have done more for the conservative movement than every think-tank luncheon held in the past 30 years.