Who (or Whom) to Shoot?

Several years ago, after reading some of my writings, an elderly Chinese woman who had lived through both the Japanese occupation and Mao’s regime, told me, “You would have been shot on the second day of the revolution.” I took this as a compliment. Although I am not an important person and therefore not a candidate for execution on the first day, my writings seemed sufficiently interesting and provocative to her to set me in front of a firing squad on the second day. She confirmed this when I asked her, “Are you sure you don’t mean the third day?” And she replied, “Yes. The second day.”

But I also grew uneasy. Communist revolutions were long ago and far away, but we have our own revolution today, called political correctness (P.C.), which people dare not cross. The pride that comes from imagining oneself a martyr of consequence quickly disappears when execution becomes a real possibility. True, P.C.’s victims are not actually shot, but they are ruined in almost every way. If fired from work they find it hard to get another job. Only their closest friends will talk to them. Their accounts are sometimes scrubbed from social media. It is called being “cancelled,” but for all practical purposes they’ve been shot.

The question is, how long will our revolution last? In the past, my answer was ten years, 90 years, or 500 years. Ten years if P.C. was just a fashion. Ninety years if it represented a true political ideology, like Soviet Marxism, which lasted 90 years. Or 500 years if it was the basis for a new civilization, as Catholicism was in the Middle Ages. Because ten years have already passed (P.C. began in the early 1990s), P.C. must be one of the latter two.

P.C. overlaps with much of the Soviet experience. Maxim Gorky, a literary father of the Soviet regime, said, “If the enemy does not surrender, he is wiped out.” P.C. shares this absolutist spirit. People must surrender completely to political correctness or they will be cancelled. Even if they surrender only 99 percent, but still try to hide one percent of their souls from the cause, they are worth destroying. For example, P.C. leaders recently tried to cancel the author J.K. Rowling, a progressive, when she defended a woman who was fired from her job for saying that a man cannot be a woman.

As in Soviet literature, certain ideological codewords are purposely placed throughout P.C. literature to cause readers to nod with approval. Academics, especially, travel the high road of P.C. culture. A recent Hunter College announcement for an art exhibit reads, “We seek a space in the contraction of budgets for generosity and presence. By engaging the ties of a coincidental community, the artists in this show lean into the negotiations of collectivity, production, friendship, and care.” There is not a single living line in this piece of writing, or in other pieces like it. Yet the purpose of such writing is not to enliven thought, but to firm up prescribed attitudes; thus, the writer need only seem to be alive. In the same vein, many academics today attend conferences, deliver long, boring speeches, and from time to time publish ponderous books and articles that no one reads—even the journal editors sometimes don’t bother to read them—for everyone knows in advance that they are bereft of original content and written in exact conformity with P.C. ideology. The writers of these works are zombie writers. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the political point is made.

True, some academics are very fine writers and adapt to the new language requirements to survive, as some Soviet writers did. Some academics simply have no talent for writing; they are the equivalent of Communist Party hacks who wrote tomes as thick as bricks and that no one read. Other academics pretend to have no talent for writing, to avoid trouble. Some pretend so well that they lose their talent forever.

P.C. film operates in the same fashion as Soviet film did. A positive hero is always opposed by a negative figure. In the Soviet case, the negative figure was typically a man with darting eyes and a fake smile who preferred moneymaking to fighting for the Motherland. In P.C. film the figure is usually an insensitive, hyper-masculine white male, lazy from an overabundance of white privilege or, alternatively, aggressive for the same reason.

But in important ways P.C. is not tracking the Soviet experience. All Communist regimes have an arc, just as all fascist regimes probably would have if they had not been destroyed in World War II. An inflection point is reached in a Communist regime’s middle age when the ideology is no longer believed in. People mouth the ideology just to get by. At the peak of the Cultural Revolution, for example, a Red Guard accosted my elderly Chinese friend and told her, “We know you did something wrong, and we know what it was. If you confess we’ll be lenient.” It was a trap. My friend smartly replied, “Yes, I have done something wrong. Can you tell me what it is? Because I want you to teach me how to be better.” The Red Guard was thrown into confusion because, in fact, my friend had done nothing wrong; he had simply been trying to get her to confess to something so he could punish her.

This occurred less than 20 years after the revolution in China, when the fires of zealotry still smoldered. Fifteen years later came the inflection point, and today China believes in capitalism more than in Marxism, although Marxism remains official ideology.

In contrast, in the United States, many zealots still fervently believe in P.C., and with no sign of wavering, 30 years into the revolution. The zealots lay traps for people. They police friends and neighbors—for example, bias response teams at colleges. They punish deviates with hungry conviction.

The case of Stalin is another example of how P.C. ideology has broken with past trends. For the first ten years after the Russian Revolution, Stalin played a major role in killing reactionaries. Twenty years later, after assuming total power, he grew more democratic in his approach, and killed both reactionaries and Communists. Indeed, given that he killed more Communists than reactionaries, he might fairly be called an anti-Communist. But he did his new killing not out of ideology—many of the people he purged were true believing Communists—but to consolidate power, because he enjoyed power for its own sake.

Similarly, P.C. leaders in our revolution’s first decade attacked more Republicans than Democrats. They used P.C. ideology as a partisan weapon—for example, striking Republican Governor George Allen for using the slur “macaca,” although it was unclear whether he even knew what the term meant, while leaving Democrat Jesse Jackson alone, despite his calling NYC “Hymie-town” and knowing full well that “Hymie” was a pejorative term for Jews. Thirty years later, they attack both sides in equal numbers, with Democratic senator Al Franken having been targeted for cancellation because of a boorish joke in which he pretended to grope someone. Other examples of cancellation on the political left include Professor Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College, who was chased away for having protested a one-day campus ban on white people, and Professors Erika and Nicholas Christakis at Yale, for having suggested that students be free to choose their own Halloween costumes rather than let college administrators decide. Rather than use P.C. as a screen to keep power for power’s sake, P.C. leaders “cancel” people across the political spectrum because they believe more than ever in their ideology’s righteousness. That they wipe out everyone today signifies not an inflection point but a ratcheting up of the fanaticism.

Deviations from the Soviet experience continue. Thirty-six years after the Revolution and immediately after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev initiated the “Thaw,” and condemned Stalin’s excesses. In our P.C. world, no “thaw” is even on the horizon. If anything, America’s major institutions, including big business, are doubling down on a P.C. creed that sweeps both the innocent and the guilty into the same net. Khrushchev also began a process of rehabilitation after Stalin. Almost a million Russians, or a third of the politically repressed, were recognized as innocent and called “comrades who became victims of arbitrariness,” in the effort to restore some semblance of justice. Although the same amount of time has passed since our revolution began, no such rehabilitation is under consideration. Some “cancelled” people have tried to make a comeback, such as the comedians Louis C.K. and Roseanne Barr, but they are very much on their own. Nor is there any apparatus to punish those who too aggressively “canceled” people for the most minor ideological infractions. At least in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, some of the vicious attackers were really punished.

No, it looks as if P.C. ideology signifies the dawn of a new civilization after all, one that may last half a millennium. As in the Middle Ages, and for a long time to come, Americans will remain victims to the persecutions of P.C. authority. They will be badgered by angry thought leaders. Some people will be hunted from place to place. Their books will be banned, and even burnt. In the Middle Ages, it was heretical to say that three, rather than four, nails were used to crucify Christ, or that a Roman soldier pierced Christ with a spear on the left side rather than on the right. So will it be that for hundreds of years, otherwise decent Americans will be cancelled, permanently, for, say, absentmindedly and in a moment of unthinking haste, uttering in place of the phrase “people of color” its…contraction.

Indeed, a TV weatherman was recently cancelled for accidentally mispronouncing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last name. The weatherman protested his innocence; he had pronounced Dr. King’s name correctly thousands of times before, he pleaded; he had simply been tongue-tied for a brief moment; the sound that had accidentally emanated from his mouth approximated a slur that he had never intended, he cried. But his plea fell on deaf ears. Now, his one and only life on this earth is ruined.

P.C. is more than just an ideology. It is establishing the basis for a new and permanent system of existence where all political error is sought out, divined, and punished. In all this, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or to shudder. It is like getting shot for wrongly using the word “who” instead of “whom.”

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