Proto Political Correctness

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


New Yorker, February 25, 2008 (not available online). Brahmin New Yorker and novelist Louis Auchincloss writing to his mother in 1945 (itals mine):

“Of course, like so many cynical jews, he believed that all people were like him except less smart. And that, don’t you think, is their most trying characteristic: the unwillingness to concede any ethical approach in others higher than their own, the ‘oh-ho I know you‘ attitude with which they sneer at a world that is bad enough to prove them right more than half the time. All of which, I suppose, would brand me as a hopeless anti-Semite, Nazi, etc., but one simply can’t be bothered with labels any more

Anti-semitism: just a ‘label’, an ipso facto slur and act of intellectual fascism since no decent white person like him could actually be guilty of that failing. It wasn’t his fault the jews are so inferior but it was his duty to point it out. How he suffers under the white man’s burden of saying what so obviously must be said. Gifted writer though he is, he didn’t think to come up with the concept of ‘political correctness’. So he could denounce it.

I love happening upon this kind of thing because it’s so drearily amusing to hear whites go on today about how no one can speak “the truth” without running afoul of political correctness. “There used to be a time…” No, there hasn’t been, not for a long time now.

Before the ink was dry on Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, whites were baying about how blacks (though they used a slightly different term) were getting all of society’s bennies and a poor white man didn’t stand a chance, couldn’t speak his mind. Kid you not. (The books I need are elsewhere, and we’re snowed in up here in the north country, but I’ll track them down.) Reconstruction didn’t derail itself; whites had to get themselves good and rage-filled over their oppression at the hands of their newly freed slaves first. They weren’t bigoted, anti-democratic barbarians after all. When the Radical Republicans called them on their racism and violence, guess what? They couldn’t be bothered with “labels” either. They had a duty to perform, they had a country to take back from the freedmen who were oppressing them.

Writing in 1945 with the world torn apart after having grown up in wealthy Whartonian, exclusive New York, Auchincloss was acutely feeling the loss of his privilege to be chauffeur-driven around his own psyche. What with all the dark/poor peoples of the world rising up and Rosie the Riveter freed from her kitchen, it’s only human that he felt besieged, deprived of goodies he’d thought his birthright (like not having jews criticize whites). I’m not playing gotcha! with history; it’s far too facile to collect chestnuts like this one and think you know who that person is today. It matters only in showing that the change isn’t that conservatives can’t speak their minds “anymore”. The change is that we little people get to answer back, finally. Entrenched power just never gets used to that.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate