Mr. Judd;

Doesn't the "political correctness" effort fit precisely in to this anti-heresy paradigm? Is it not aimed at suppressing and punishing statements that are considered outside of the concensus of society and that are dangerous to that concensus? Are you now endorsing that? Or are there really no higher principles and it's just a matter of which gang gets its hands on the dictionary of society?

AOG:

That was a shrewd polemical point, but it is pretty clear that political correctness is emphatically NOT a manifestation of the "deliberate sense" of the community, as Kendall liked to put it, but rather of the malcontents of the elite. It is not a concensus at all, but an usurpation.

AOG:

Yes, I support speech codes and organizations being able to discriminate.

AOG is right, the left is engaged in a sort of Inquisition. It's not just political correctness, it's visible in labeling conservative judicial and executive branch nominees as "extremist" and "out of the mainstream" and refusing to confirm them for office; it's visible in excluding conservative professors from tenure. All of these are efforts to establish liberal-left norms as the community standards and to treat conservatives and Christians as second-class citizens, ineligible to hold influential positions.

So AOG's concern is not just a "shrewd polemical point," but gets to a real issue -- the issue that inspired the creation of the liberal tradition in the first place. I think the resolution requires distinguishing between coercive pressure and moral pressure, and endorsing the latter while opposing the former except in instances of violence or subversion of the lawful order (not just subversion of moral norms).

pj:

So should those of us who believe in the principles of the Founding acquiesce if elites try to turn the country into Europe? Must we let them make us France so long as it's done peacefully? Are means more important than ends when the culture is at stake?

I am hesitant to endorse consequentialism. I think those of us who are classical liberal democrats ought to be satisfied with knowing that true liberal democracy will survive somewhere on the planet, even as it collapses in America under the weight of affluence and acedia.

I say this based on my understanding of biblical ethics. It seems to have been a major point of Christ's ministry that overmuch hope not be held out for "the culture", although it remains the duty of the individual to be salt and light in that culture.

The problem with reformations is that means tend to become their own ends. Fallenness tends to assert itself aggressively in mob situations. Therefore I can envision even the most evenhanded conservative revolution getting out of hand. Those wolves masquerading as conservatives will tend to hide themselves until it is too late.

However, it is the conservative duty to ask these questions because no one else will. The meaning of community and the responsibility inherent in enfranchisement are things which the mass of people are ignorant of and take for granted.

PJ:

The Left may indeed be engaging in a low-level Inquisition, but it is not at the behest of a population indignant about conservative influence or subversion. That is to say, the arguments articulated here by Lee Harris and Willmoore Kendall do not apply to political correctness because the PC elite do not represent the community's settled judgments about reasonable opinion; in fact they represent rather an aggressive method of suppressing those judgments.

One can endorse the idea that a society to be able to protect itself from internal subversion without endorsing a structure designed by subversives to protect the subversion itself.

Judd:

Those are the reasons we need not be over-mournful about changing means to achieve our ends (if democracy is no longer promoting virtue), but can we remain a decent people and allow the ends to change?

Paul - What if society is evenly split, 50-50, and each side thinks that the other is the subversive side?

That's more or less the state the U.S. is in, I think. And though conservative views may have been much stronger at the time of the nation's founding, it's not clear how relevant that is to deciding who is subversive. The Democrats can argue in response that from 1930 to 1970, their ideas were stronger.

PJ:

And a House divided against itself can not stand.

Judd does a good job of reiterating my point. The primary element of political correctness was that it harnessed the power of the state to enforce its will. OJ, you make an excellent point that PC was elite and not concensus driven, but this strengthens my point because PC would have been a dusty, forgotten footnote had it not been able to use coercion and laws to enforce its orthodoxy. It is precisely to separate the wheat from the chaff that the persecution of heresy must not be done by the State. It all comes down to what you mean by "not tolerating", but the examples you give are uses of State power.

The internment of the Japanese-Americans is a particularly horrible example to refer to.

They were not expressing any values contrary to the US norm, but they were robbed, beaten, imprisoned and, in some cases, murdered.

But that's what always happens in heresy hunts. There has never been an honest or moral one.

I conclude there cannot be.

The point being that it was your demigod FDR who did it and not a soul objected.

Harry:

No one disputes that there will be abuse. There will always be abuse in any project undertaken by societies of fallen men. But your objection does not, I don't think, touch the question of principle here: do societies have a right to protect themselves from internal subversion?

The options for the subversive can be presented quite humanely, as they were for Socrates: compliance, exile or death.

PJ:

I am not endorsing pure majortarianism here. If it is really true that each half of the country regards the other half as irretrievably subversive, then OJ is right and civil war is near. But I don't think things are even approaching that level of discontent and rancor. We are talking here about the edges, so to say, of each half of the country. We are talking about Communists and Islamists and neo-Nazis, not run of the mill lefties and paleoconservatives.

Willmoore Kendall wrote in his one of his books about the remarkable prevalence of loyalty oaths in early America. It seems that our ancestors, in fleshing out the ideals of an American Republic, hardly batted an eye at the notion that citizens ought to be required to state their loyalty in explicit terms to the nation which nutures and protects them.

Well, Orrin is absolutely certain that he knows and speaks for "society."

Then he turns around and picks the Japanese-Americans as an example and society's enemies.

He has to be wrong about one of those.

Harry:

No. I actually don't mind that society gets it wrong sometimes. We get lots of stuff wrong. The things we get wrong while defending our existence are the least troublesome.