Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

by Jonathan Rauch

Not long ago in America, punishing wrong believers along with wrong beliefs was the specialty of the right wing. That was what McCarthyism was all about. If you were a believer in communism, it was not just your belief, your “ism,” which was bad, but you. You were a “Communist”: not merely wrong in your political opinions but wrong, dangerous, and evil as a whole human being. You were not fit to live in American society. You were required to wear the scarlet letter C. What the right wing did in those years was unforgivable. Now it is the left wing which has taken up where the right wing left off, a fact of which I could not be more ashamed. It is appropriate and entirely right to criticize propositions which we believe are false or immoral. But nowadays what you hear is less often a criticism of the proposition than of the person. We condemn not racism in particular but “racists”—whole human beings. A single offensive statement and you are marked as an evil believer, one whose beliefs can all be sealed together in a box stamped “wicked person”—one who has fallen from grace and who by rights should be turned out of society altogether. Apologize, reform, recant, or lose your job.