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The Left Versus the PC Scolds

'Am I the ONLY one here who cares about social justice? COME ON.' (via Flickr user sean dreilinger)
November 12, 2014

I like to imagine New Republic Literary Editor Leon Wieseltier, upon receiving an advance copy of Lena Dunham's memoir, smiling an evil little smile and thinking to himself "Well, what do we have here?" before fingering through his Rolodex—and you just know that Wieseltier has an actual, physical Rolodex, sitting there on a desk cluttered with manuscripts and unread novels—in order to find someone who will not only skewer Not that Kind of Girl but also do so with a bit of mean style while maintaining credibility with the magazine's leftwing readership.

Needless to say, James Wolcott was a fine choice.

JVL highlighted Wolcott's brutal takedown of Dunham's overeager defenders, the sort who say that it's unfair to compare Dunham to Woody Allen or J.D. Salinger—unfair to Dunham, mind you. That section is worth the price of admission alone; it's Round 2 of Apollo Creed-Ivan Drago in book review form. I would like to focus on a different passage, however. It's toward the end, and comes after Wolcott's ritual denunciation of conservative social critics of Dunham, a move that allows him to unload on his real target: the resurgent PC left. Here's Wolcott:

Gender studies / cultural studies grads, who have set up camp on the pop-cult left, can be a prickly lot, ready to pounce on any doctrinal deviation, language-code violation, or reckless disregard of intersectionality. They like their artists and entertainers to be transgressive as long as the transgression swings in the properly prescribed direction. Otherwise: the slightest mistimed or misphrased tweet, ill-chosen remark during a red carpet interview or radio appearance, or comic ploy gone astray can incur the mighty puny wrath of social media’s mosquito squadrons, the hall monitors at Salon and Slate, and Web writers prone to crises of faith in their heroes. (The sly provocations of actor-comedian Patton Oswalt on his Twitter feed triggered a combination cri de coeur and excommunication edict from a disillusioned soul that was titled "Why I Unfollowed Patton Oswalt—and You Should Too.")

Liberal gadfly Freddie deBoer has been making similar points in recent weeks (here and here, for instance), arguing from a leftwing perspective that the left's insistence on policing speech and engaging in holier-than-thou arguments about who is most committed to The Proper Ideals distract Social Justice Warriors from actually, you know, achieving "social justice." The PC scolds are engaged in a wholly performative activity, one that is designed to simply signal how pure and righteous they are.

The worldview that deBoer and Wolcott are pushing back against is one that views every item of the culture through a political lens, one that judges a work not by the standards of art but by the standards of politics, by whether or not it hews to a "correct" view of the world. Whether or not it's diverse enough; whether or not it makes the right points about poverty and war; whether or not it's committed to "justice."

It was that worldview that I was having a bit of fun with in this jokey piece, not-so-subtly titled "What 'Too Many Cooks' Tells Us About 2016 and the Resiliency of the Patriarchy (GIFs)." This, by far, was my favorite response:

Capps comes extremely close to getting the joke. The essay is an absurdity! A complete and utter joke. To anyone not wrapped up in a worldview that demands the politicization of everything, it is an obviously ridiculous bit of silliness. However, with just a few moderations in tone here and there, it could've plausibly run on any number of websites not as parody but as an actual "Take." And in that very plausibility the absurdity reaches grand new heights. Of course, Capps can't admit this. So he falls back on the old standby, decrying my post and my place of business as sexist to ensure that no one would think he thinks the wrong things.

Cuz signalers gotta signal.

Anyway, I'm glad that deBoer and Wolcott and a few others are pushing back on the idea that everything is always political, and that signaling one's superiority for believing in the correct ideals is a rather useless, if not actively pernicious, activity. Let's see if they can drag the rest of the left into the light.