Dead center: the myth of the middle

National Review, Nov 2, 1992 by Terry Teachout

Now, there certainly are right-wing zealots afoot, but they are mainly interested in such things as abortion, free condoms, and prayer in the schools, not deconstruction, phallocentrism, and clitoral hermeneutics. Pat Buchanan doesn't want Stanley Fish charbroiled at high noon in the quadrangle of Bob Jones University. Indeed, far too many conservative politicians--Jack Kemp is a case in point--seem to take no interest whatsoever in culture.

Why, then, do many liberals barely acknowledge the existence of, much less join forces with, conservative intellectuals who oppose PC? Precisely because they are liberals. Liberals always seek what they believe to be the center of any political conflict. Have you ever known a liberal who didn't think of himself as a moderate? Like all politicians, they reflexively split the difference as a way of restoring consensus. The idea of choosing sides in the culture war makes them intensely uncomfortable.

But the culture war is not just a political conflict. It is also, as Gertrude Himmelfarb says, a "moral divide," a battle in which one side is right, the other profoundly wrong. Liberals are typically at their worst in such battles, where no consensus position exists or can exist. History teaches us that neither classical liberalism, with its radical tolerance of all competing values, nor rationalist liberalism, with its equally radical insistence that opponents of right reason are never evil but merely misinformed, can supply the moral basis for effective resistance to evil. And PC, in its purest forms, is evil-evil of a peculiarly modern kind. Robert Conquest contends that the essence of PC is "the damaging notion that everything is a struggle for power, or being empowered, or hegemony, or oppression; and that all competition is a zero-sum game. This is no more than repetition of Lenin's destructive doctrine."

Anthony Powell has remarked that the liberal failure to come to grips with the realities of Soviet Communism was "surely the true 'Treason of the Intellectuals.'" The "moderate men of all shades of opinion" whom Powell's friend Malcolm Muggeridge learned to despise during his pre-war tour of duty as an editorial writer for the Manchester Guardian proved equally impotent in the face of German expansionism. They knew (or most of them did) that Adolf Hilter was evil, but their resistance to Nazisin was ineffective, in large part because they insisted that it could be opposed from the "center." They sought, in essence, to split the difference between Hitler and Churchill. That today's cultural centrists are making the same mistake about PC is suggested by this dismally squishy paragraph from The Disuniting of America:

I don't want to sound apocalyptic about these developments. Education is always in ferment, and a good thing too. Schools and colleges have always been battlegrounds for debates over beliefs, philosophies, values. The situation in our universities, I am confident, will soon right itself once the great silent majority of professors cry "enough" and challenge what they know to be voguish nonsense.