Preface
By Douglas Kellner
Valerie Scatamburlo's Soldiers of Misfortune: The New Right's Culture War and the Politics of Political Correctness provides the first systematic account of the linkage between the right-wing attack on political correctness and its assault on education as part of a conservative offensive in the culture wars that have been raging since the 1960s. During the 1960s, a wide array of progressives challenged every aspect of North American societies from education to military policy. As a response to these struggles, conservative forces launched a counterattack against what they perceived to be the "excesses" of that decade. Through the amalgamation of various right-wing groups and the benevolence of big business, the New Right was born. With vast financial resources at its disposal, it was able to engage in a series of culture wars over everything from the family and abortion to the educational curricula and policy.
Scatamburlo traces the trajectory of the New Right from its earliest roots in the 1950s and 1960s to the early 1990s and analyzes the events, circumstances and social conditions which spawned its formation. She provides a detailed account of the corporate sponsorship undergirding the culture wars and the right-wing attack on the so-called "politically correct" zealots who the Right claim are attempting to impose the edicts of correctness" on unassuming students and thus "politicize" the academy and allegedly curtail freedom of speech and inquiry due to a zealous attempt to legislate "correct" thought and language.
According to Scatamburlo, the war on "political correctness" must be understood contextually as part of the much broader, systematic attempt to roll back the progressive changes wrought by the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Her analysis suggests that the rightist assault on P.C. is partly ironic and partly hypocritical since it has traditionally been the Right that has attacked the thought and speech of its opponents and critics. Indeed, during the Cold War McCarthy era, thousands of radicals were purged from the universities for their alleged "communist" ideas or affiliations. Scatamburlo shows that, more recently, a number of right-wing groups have engaged in attempts to target professors with "left-leaning" or "subversive" tendencies and are thus themselves practicing a new form of McCarthyism.
Scatamburlo also provides a genealogy of the phrase "political correctness" and points to the fact that it was once used ironically among leftists to designate those who showed excessive concern for verbal and symbolic purity. In the hands of the New Right, however, P.C. has been turned on its head, stripped of its good-natured humor and denuded of its original context. As a result, it has become a label for allegedly intolerant and oppressive attempts to squelch sexist, racist, homophobic, and other offensive forms of thought and behavior.
While one could happily welcome a genuine defense of academic freedom by our conservative colleagues, I fear that their attacks on P.C. exhibit a large dose of political hypocrisy and that the whole issue is a smokescreen for an attack on critical multiculturalism and other progressive initiatives which would expand and reform the academic curricula and bring in voices and cultures excluded in standard curricula, thus providing access to ideas and material that conservatives oppose. Therefore, I think that rightwing "Political Hypocrisy" (P.H.) is what we should really be on the watch for, rather than the P.C. that our conservative colleagues malign.
Putting the campaign against P.C. in its historical and social context, Scatamburlo provides a detailed study of the media, academic, and political campaigns to undermine progressive ideals and initiatives both inside and outside of the academy. In her study, she engages some of major texts made popular in the new Right's culture war by ideologues such as Allan Bloom, Dinesh D'Souza, Roger Kimball, Camille Paglia, and others, and provides an ideological critique of their underlying presuppositions and biases. Scatamburlo also depicts the mainstream media's complicity in promulgating anti-P.C. discourse and analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed by the media in their coverage of P.C.
While Scatamburlo looks at the role of the Right in creating the "myth" that a campaign to repressively impose an agenda of political correctness is endangering academic freedom and education, she also critiques the P.C. ethos, which while over exaggerated by the Right for rhetorical effect, has nonetheless permeated some Left constituencies and led to overzealous attacks on "politically incorrect" discourse and behavior, which in turn have been endlessly propagated and exaggerated by the Right and in the media.
Scatamburlo locates the P.C. phenomenon both theoretically and politically between the linguistic turn in social theory and the rise of identity politics. In doing so, she is able to discern many of the current problems that plague leftist thought and politics in general -- problems and contradictions which have made the right-wing vision of contemporary campus politics all the more palatable to the general public. She argues that in many instance, the discursive skirmishes over P.C. language and the representational purism of identity politics amount, in the end, to a form of ludic politics, in that so much of P.C. has been concerned solely with language and gestures, while ignoring more substantive issues. For Scatamburlo, P.C. politics are critiqued not for being too radical, but for not being radical enough, for being in some sense a form of pseudo-radicalism, that restricts politics to the linguistic and/or textual domains.
Thus, Scatamburlo critiques both the rightwing campaign against P.C. as well as the leftwing tendencies that generated and made plausible some forms of rightist criticism. She takes a critical look at dominant trends in leftist theory and politics with the intent of moving beyond political correctness, identity politics, and the postmodern descent into discourse and liberal forms of multiculturalism in order to preserve what she sees as more emancipatory and progressive theoretical and political perspectives. Since the struggle over P.C. continues unabated and because one expects that the culture wars will continue well into the next millennium, this is an extremely timely and provocative study that addresses an issue of utmost importance. For those who want to know what the P.C. controversy is all about, this is the book.