Is it Rude to Think?
January 8, 2011
LAWRENCE AUSTER writes here:
Americans, like the British, seem to consider it bad taste, a form of incivility, to reason rigorously and logically. As a result, American conservatives are unable to identify the nature of the leftist dynamic that is steadily destroying our society, or to propose a counter-principle to it. All they can do, in the face of each new leftist victory, is to mutter, “political correctness, political correctness, political correctness…”
The amazing fact is that “political correctness” is, and has been for a long time, conservatives’ principal term for describing leftist phenomena, yet this term lacks any substantive or conceptual content. It conveys zero information about the leftist phenomena to which it refers. Conservatives thus find themselves in the midst of one of the greatest social revolutions in history, the Revolution of Non-Discrimination, and they are unable to understand it, because they’ve made no effort to understand it, because they complacently think that their pat but empty phrase “political correctness” is a sufficient description of it.
