Monday, January 19, 2009

remember 1988?


1988. Hard to remember how deeply into the PC (Political Correctness) wars we had fallen. Very deeply. This was of course moments before the Soviet bloc fell and yet anticommunism was still very much an animating force behind attacks on multiculturalists and scholars of race/class/gender.

"[E]ven though we are nowadays closer to the naivete of the 30's that saw Communism as '20th-century Americanism' than to the 50's view of it as absolute evil, there is still a taboo against mentioning [ties between a liberal and a radical]."

So complained Peter Collier and David Horowitz in an essay for Commentary in the January 1988 issue of that conservative magazine on McCarthyism as "the last refuge of the left."

Get struck, and struck hard again and again - only to find oneself accused of striking out in the first place. By 1988, McCarthyism is the last refuge of the left. Ponder it.