Political Correctness Is More Reasonable Than Jon Chait

Note: this is a re-post from my now-defunct blog contralbum.com. It was my most popular piece, so I thought I might as well preserve it by republishing it here. It was originally published February 5, 2015.

I am more sympathetic to Jonathan Chait than many on the left. The reason for that is straightforward, if unflattering: I am a straight white male progressive, and have thus encountered the irksome and sometimes baffling backlash that relatively innocuous sentiments can provoke online; I can understand (without condoning) why someone like Chait would write this op-ed. I want to be upfront about that before laying out my disagreements with Chait — my ability to relate to his position is enough to make me want to engage the argument in the style he prefers, though my sympathy is not nearly enough to make me agree with it. Also, for sake of clarity, I’m going to go along with Chait and use the term “PC” in the same way he does, although I don’t agree with how broadly he applies the label.

There are many flaws with Chait’s argument, but the easiest to point out is the internal contradiction inherent in saying “I’m not allowed to criticize PC” in an essay criticizing PC for which the author has been paid and published by a prestigious liberal outlet. Chait marshals frightening language and serious charges and marches them down the page, wave after wave: PC leftists want to “crush opposing ideas”; “American culture [has] convulsed into censoriousness”; leftists “[define] opposing views as bigoted” wield “hegemonic control” over media, academia, and activism; PC “has assumed a towering presence”; feminists hurl “terms of abuse” at men; leftists want to obliterate “the rights of the class whose power [they’re] trying to smash.” In the end, Chait reveals the black, Marxist heart of it all — political correctness is “an undemocratic creed” for people who seek to “eliminate [freedom] for their enemies.” What he describes is flatly totalitarian.

The problem is that this is entirely out of proportion to the litany of actual offenses Chait provides as proof of PC’s totalitarian ambition. A student was fired from his college paper, and went on to write for a different college paper. A writer was lampooned by a satirical hashtag. Someone was pushed and their sign was stolen. College students at several universities signed petitions. Inflammatory comments were posted on a Facebook group. This hardly seems like a chronicle of Marxist boots stamping on human faces. It’s a bit surreal to see a writer of Chait’s seasoning offer rude Facebook comments as proof that someone lives by “an undemocratic creed.” Most of what Chait describes is nothing more than harsh criticism — not necessarily well-founded, not necessarily proportional, but light years from totalitarian censorship.

I think the root of Chait’s discomfort — and the discomfort of people like him — lies not in the political power or philosophy of PC criticism, but in the kind of criticism it is. Criticism comes in many varieties, but here I will divide it into two broad groups: (a) criticism that engages with an argument, refuting its content with counter-argument, like this essay does with Chait, or (b) criticism that says an argument is outside the realm of reasonable discourse, its content so flatly unacceptable that it need not be refuted by counter-argument. PC criticism, generally, falls into category (b), and that is what Chait and others find so galling and confuse with totalitarianism.

The Overton Window is a well-known theory in political science which suggests that only a narrow window of ideas are politically acceptable to policy makers at any given time, and ideas too far outside the window are immediately dismissed as unthinkable. Enacting unorthodox policy requires more than converting the audience on a single issue — it requires moving the entire window of acceptable debate to the left or the right. For dealers in centrist ideology like Chait, being outside the acceptable range of the Window is essentially impossible — by definition, a centrist makes it his business to remain within the politically safe area, never diverging too far from current policy. This pays dividends; it helps one get published, get paid, get taken seriously by elites and policy makers, exert influence over public discourse, and gain status. A centrist works and thinks within a relatively narrow range of ideas with the expectation that in return they will be rewarded with respectful engagement, even from those who disagree.

What social media has done to Chait and those like him is upend this entire paradigm. Suddenly, the far left — the very people centrists like Chait have long dismissed and excluded as unacceptably radical — have a platform from which to propound their own version of the Overton Window. Chait, needless to say, often finds himself outside it. I think this explains, to a significant extent, the gap in how center-left liberals like Chait and how leftist activist-types perceive PC language and behavior. Radicals are used to being called unserious or unreasonable. They’re used to having their beliefs dismissed out of hand, used to being exiled from the realm of acceptable ideas. Centrists are not.

This difference demonstrates itself in Chait’s own writing. He presents many of his examples of presumably-outrageous PC ideology without any explanation of why they’re outrageous. Particularly notable, to my mind, was when Chait described the following quote from Brittney Cooper as “extreme” and offered it as proof of leftist extremity.

“The demand to be reasonable is a disingenuous demand. Black folks have been reasoning with white people forever. Racism is unreasonable, and that means reason has limited currency in the fight against it.”

Chait doesn’t treat this as an argument that needs to be refuted with claims and evidence. He treats Cooper’s argument as a piece of evidence in and of itself — evidence of unreasonability. Why is this argument extreme, or unreasonable? Chait doesn’t say. The fact that it lies too far outside his own paradigm for discourse is proof enough — the claim Cooper makes doesn’t need to be investigated, as far as Chait is concerned.

Ironically, Cooper’s is not an especially extreme position, and as I will illustrate later, it’s actually far more supported by current political science research than is Chait’s position on the value of Enlightenment-style debate as a driver of political change. Racism really isn’t reasonable, and by dismissing Cooper, Chait is suggesting that racism actually might be reasonable, if ultimately incorrect. Wrong, but not implausible. That is absurd, and it has dangerous implications.

William Saletan is a centrist like Chait — a centrist Republican, but still a centrist who bemoans Tea Party extremism, argued against the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004, and (like Chait) reversed his initial support of the Iraq war (which, I must point out, is the act of moving from the centrist policy of 2003 to the centrist policy of 2008, without ever leaving the warm safety of the centrist’s Overton Window). He also infamously wrote a column for Slate about the “reasonability” of the idea that black people are genetically much less intelligent than whites. He pointed to studies of IQ, noting that the average measured IQ of African Americans is 85, and suggested this is accurate and likely explained by genetics. Cloaked in the language of Enlightenment reasonability and the status of his position, Saletan expected (and received, from many corners) a good-faith debate on this issue. That is horrifying.

Let me explain what it means to believe that an average IQ of 85 accurately represents the inborn intelligence of the black population of America. It means that 16% of black people — one in seven — are intellectually disabled, or what used to be called “mentally retarded.” It means that one in four African Americans are borderline intellectually disabled. It means that nearly half of Sub-Saharan Africans are intellectually disabled. And it means that this is all the unavoidable genetic destiny of black people. Suddenly, Saletan’s position doesn’t seem so reasonable after all, and one can see how black thinkers like Brittney Cooper or Ta-Nehisi Coates find it impossible and unreasonable. As Coates eloquently put it, it becomes apparent that entertaining this notion as reasonable requires living “in the world of myth” that privilege allows people like Saletan to inhabit. Actually knowing a substantial number of black people on an intimate level (as Coates and Cooper do) would have surely shown Saletan, prior to writing his ill-advised and vile column, that such arguments were flatly nonsensical. One can also see why black thinkers like Coates and Cooper are unwilling to engage such ideas respectfully; that someone could treat such ideas as plausible suggests an irreconcilable gap in fundamental knowledge, values, worldview, and experiences.

So Chait, by arguing that all ideas merit the respect of good-faith Enlightenment discourse, exhibits dishonesty. He, like all human beings, excludes many positions from his notion of what is reasonable, and dismisses them summarily. He even does it within the very piece where he pleads for a democratic ideal of reasoned discourse in which his ideas are never dismissed — and, incredibly, some of the ideas he rejects flippantly are indeed reasonable. Chait shrugs off these ideas perhaps more subtly and in a more tonally-restrained style than the PC discourse he criticizes, but it is no less galling to those being dismissed, and it is no less a tactic of ideological policing. Again, we find that Chait is primarily uncomfortable with being subject to the dismissal that he, as a centrist, assumed he was entitled to dole out and immune from receiving. That assumption is so ingrained that he doesn’t even recognize his own language as the dismissive policing of ideology that it is.

The second great flaw with Chait’s argument is how much of it rests on this premise: “Politics in a democracy is still based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree.” There is, in fact, tremendous evidence that this is not so, whether we look at the modern science of persuasion or at history. Politics, whether in a democracy or otherwise, is rarely, if ever, governed by the rational exchange of ideas and reasonable persuasion. I understand the obvious contradiction of arguing this in an essay that embraces the very style of argument that I am suggesting is futile, but the tone and format of this essay is meant as a token of good-faith to Chait, as a sign of empathy, if not agreement, for those who feel bewildered by the PC mode of discourse. Besides, it may persuade some who have no strong opinion, and hopefully it adds to the discourse among those who share my point of view. Finally, it is my own personal preference for tone and style, whether that is rational or not.

Leaving that aside, the cognitive science on persuasion is fairly clear: changing minds through argumentation is essentially hopeless, at least when people already hold a strong opinion on the issue at question. This is true even for misperceptions of factual information — let alone for more open questions of belief and value. One of the most famous experiments on this subject gave people newspaper articles that confirmed their beliefs, and then showed them retractions from the same paper, correcting the false claims in the original article. The test subjects still believed the original article even after reading the correction. In fact, many became even more certain of the now-shown-to-be-false article. This is how the human mind twists objective fact. Imagine how useless reasonable persuasion is in moving people’s values and opinions.

When people are presented with threatening political information and asked to reason about it, the brain regions which activate are not those associated with cold logic. Instead, the brain relies on emotional and affective systems, and only employs reasoning systems — moral and emotional, not logical, reasoning systems — when asked to reconcile information that contradicts preexisting belief and bias. In other words, when human beings hear pleasing information with strong moral implications, we accept it happily and uncritically — and when we hear contradictory information, we employ motivated/emotional reasoning to explain it away.

Further examples of this phenomenon are endless. Attempts to rationally persuade vaccine-skeptical parents either have no effect or further entrench their irrational beliefs. 42% of Americans still believe we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Two thirds of Americans believe in creationism or intelligent design. 60% of the country does not believe in anthropogenic global warming. Chait’s argument that politics is “still based on getting people to agree with you [by using reason]” seems outlandish if getting people to agree with you is a hopeless task that rarely, if ever, delivers results.

This is not to say that opinions never change. But they change for reasons other than argument — they change because people’s incentives change. The gay rights movement is perhaps the greatest example of this; opinions on homosexuality and same-sex marriage have improved at an astonishing rate in the Western world. Was this due to argumentation? Unlikely, if the overwhelming bulk of the science is any guide. More likely is that the increase in LGBT Americans coming out of the closet tipped the scales — suddenly, millions of straight Americans had a motivation to change their beliefs about gays. They had to choose between their belief in the goodness of their family and friends and their belief that homosexuality makes someone bad. The incentives changed, and many people changed accordingly.

This does not surprise me. When I worked in data management and analytics for political campaigns and organizations on the left, I kept abreast of the persuasion research. I attended conferences where analysts excitedly presented the results of persuasion experiments which had yielded treatment effects of two or three percent — and that was on groups of voters pre-selected for their likelihood to be undecided, uninformed, and open to persuasion. On a personal level, I know that my commitment to anti-racism has been substantially formed and strengthened by relationships with friends and partners who are black. I strongly doubt I’d be as committed to anti-racism as I am if not for having had the opportunity to know and love black individuals. In Chait’s hierarchy, this emotional, un-Enlightened motivation is surely less noble and less pure than a commitment to anti-racism born of pure reason, but it has nevertheless led me to embrace a more aggressively anti-racist position than Chait’s.

What the PC discourse is doing — and what Chait may instinctively understand and fear — is changing people’s incentives. PC backlash incentivizes people to shift their Overton Window significantly to the left, both in order to avoid excoriation and to leverage that outrage in their own favor for accolades. This, again, is simply normal politics. It’s hard to argue there’s anything especially immoral about it, given that we all do it and it’s hard to imagine engaging in politics without filtering what debates we want to engage with. It’s not fundamentally different from the framing and ideological policing activities that centrists like Chait engage in; it’s just aimed at targets who are unfamiliar with being targeted, and who respond with bewilderment and fear.

So, when we revisit Brittney Cooper’s statement that “reason has limited currency in the fight against [racism],” we see that she is on far stronger intellectual foundations than Chait’s contention that progress comes as a result of “confidence in the ultimate power of reason, not coercion.” If the left — liberals and leftists alike — wants to advance the cause of equality for all, it seems that the PC advocates are likely a better bet than Chait’s Enlightenment values, as hard as that may be for some to believe. However, what is palatable is not necessarily what is effective.

In fact, campaign operatives — people who actually make moving the needle their life’s work, instead of speculating on how it occurs without evidence — have put “social pressure” tactics to good use. Recently, candidates and organizations have taken to distributing door-hangers that list a resident’s voting history, and remind them that whether they vote is public information — some even grade people’s turnout history, and some inform voters that there will be a post-election flier revealing whether they voted or not. Many people, understandably, don’t like this. It seems like an invasion of privacy to many voters, or shaming, or condescending. But their feelings have nothing to do with the most important fact: it works. Quite well. Even peer pressure by social media works, which is especially relevant to the discussion of PC, which is so internet-driven. It’s even been found that shaming people for missing an election works better in improving turnout than praising them for voting the last time around. Chait’s ideal of pure reason and civil discourse driving civilization forward may be appealing, but it is wrong. Cooper is right, and Chait is wrong, full stop. The PC contingent is applying social pressure, using shaming, and, yes, even trying to silence some dissenting voices. And that’s more likely to deliver real gains for leftists and liberals alike than is Chait’s fetishism of manners.

Further, we can simply look to our own history for proof of what coercion has accomplished. It ended slavery, most notably. It delivered real gains for African Americans until federal troops ended their occupation of the South — it was the absence of coercion that allowed injustice to flourish after Reconstruction. Ta-Nehisi Coates has already laid out persuasively how coercion played a necessary role in the Civil Rights movement. Jonathan Chait objected to that sentiment despite being wrong then, too. I’m not suggesting that the disagreements within the left merit the application of real coercion — but the historical comparison makes it all the clearer that social pressure is indeed a mild and acceptable political tactic. If some political differences have been so tenacious and vile as to merit real coercion, then it follows that other objectionable views may merit a little public shaming from time to time.

Jonathan Chait is lucky. He’s rarely had to obviously shame his ideological opponents in the way that others must to exert social pressure. Chait, and those like him, have enjoyed a robust system of filters that simply kept radical views out of the respected public discourse that he was admitted into. The social pressure was largely exerted for him. It was exerted in the under-representation of people of color and women in journals like The New Republic. It was exerted in the eye-rolling of the elite white men who occupied editorial boards, keeping radical ideas off the popular op-ed pages. It was exerted in a system of inequality, poverty, and criminalization that kept so many people from even having the chance to be dismissed for their views. Chait didn’t have to do much of the dirty work of making other beliefs unacceptable; it was done long before he published his first article.

But the internet has changed that. First with the rise of blogging, and now even more powerfully with the advent of Twitter and social media. Suddenly the voices that had once been filtered out are finding audiences and clout. And they’re using that clout to dismiss Chait. That must be terrifying, and incomprehensible, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the left as we know it — it doesn’t even mean the end of Chait’s particular brand of liberalism, which is still privileged in policy circles and in the pages of the most prestigious journals.

It does mean that more women and people of color are in the public eye and influencing the discourse than any time in my life. There’s a reason that racist police abuses of power like the deaths of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice are gaining attention only now, despite being the status quo for decades. Cable news didn’t bring Michael Brown to our attention — Twitter did, with nearly a million tweets before CNN’s first primetime story. We now have Senators like Cory Booker talking about reforming the prison industrial complex. Seattle voters approved a $15 minimum wage. It seems that, on the left at least, the window really is shifting.

This is not a pronouncement of inevitable victory for the left — these are small changes, but they are beginning to accumulate in a way that is grounds for optimism. This is also not to say that there aren’t real downsides to PC discourse; while all of us must draw lines around what we consider the acceptable realm of debate, some PC leftists will draw those lines at the slightest disagreement, no matter how apparently trivial or how bold their own claims are. Some will refuse to take seriously any privileged person in discussions of social justice. I don’t deny that discourse like that can be grating, to put it mildly.

But, even if it sometimes makes me or Jonathan Chait uncomfortable, PC has likely played a role in giving us black trans women on cable news, in the revival of serious public discussions about reparations, and in the massive outcry over police abuses. Maybe a little discomfort is a good thing.