Talking Right and Doing Wrong

Geoffrey Nunberg has written an enthralling but depressing book called Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show. He does a terrific job of describing the problem, though Rodney Dangerfield could have done it almost as well with four words: We (liberals) don’t get no respect.

When I was a girl, my mother taught me that the way to insure fairness in dividing a scarce or disputed resource was for one person to cut the cake (for instance) and the other to choose the first piece. Experts in game theory have refined this procedure so that it works equally well for multiple players. But in dogmatic disputes, the trick is to be able to cut the cake and choose the first piece. That is, first you divide the universe into (say) Coke and Pepsi drinkers, assigning to the former all the most desirable traits, and to the latter everything else, and then you define yourself and your buddies as Coke drinkers. It’s not that different from the way sixth-graders do things: boys are big and tough and do fun things, and girls are whiny and weak and have cooties. (Or, for that matter, girls are smart and sensible and neat, and boys are nasty and gross and stupid and have cooties.) Which is exactly what the Right in the United States has done, Nunberg shows us. The constellation of preferences, behaviors, and beliefs they have adopted for themselves don’t have much of any logical interconnection; but they can be and have been sold to the American public as (a) good things, and (b) what the Right espouses. Which leaves all the other stuff (an even more disconnected farrago of mannerisms and beliefs, such as those listed in the book’s subtitle, which have in common mainly that they can be made to appear bad things) for the liberals, who can thus be made to appear bad people. The fact that nobody could possibly be simultaneously as wily and weak and stupid and dangerous as the Right describes the liberals is utterly irrelevant to the marketing process.

Nunberg eventually says there isn’t much the Left can do about this situation, except wait for time to do its work and the pendulum to swing back, and in the meantime maybe jump on the really egregious occasions of Rightspeak quickly and hard, without wasting energy on the small stuff. Which is perhaps nothing but a sophisticated way of saying (as we often advised sixth-graders) “sticks and stones can break my bones but names will never hurt me.” That was nonsense in the sixth grade, and hasn’t improved since then. Names can hurt, very badly. (“Give a dog a bad name and you might as well shoot him,” as our grandparents used to say.) But objecting to Rightspeak puts us on the sinister side of “political correctness.”

So it is time to start defending political correctness. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when someone says he is about to say something politically incorrect (usually with a snigger) he means he is about to say something mean-spirited and both factually and morally insupportable. This is the same spirit in which bad drivers honk before going through a stop sign or a red light. It is a way of saying, “I know our mothers don’t like us talking this way, but playing the dozens is fun.” It’s hard to tell whether the fun lies primarily in defying maternal etiquette or in offending other people and risking a fight. Either way, you know you are dealing with someone who believes he has a divine right to act and talk like a jerk. “Political correctness” means not being a jerk. It is not cowardly or namby-pamby, or even un-masculine. It is, essentially, the Golden Rule, which presumes that other people have the same sensitivities and needs and rights that we do. But what do you do when dealing with someone who won’t accept that presumption? That is the problem Nunberg is really facing, and like the rest of us, he’s short on useful answers.