A majority of people polled in the US, Canada and Britain say political correctness is a problem. And no wonder. Today mainstream politicians, parties, think tanks and bureaucrats tie themselves in knots to avoid soundbites that could be portrayed as racist, sexist or homophobic. Corporations recall shoes with the American flag on the back at the whim of woke athletes. Literature, theatre and art is evaluated on its politics, not its beauty or authenticity. Nations seeking to defend themselves from rapid ethnic change or the loss of power to supranational bodies are assailed as ‘reactionary’ by ‘progressives’.
The terms ‘reactionary’ and ‘progressive’ were staples of communist doctrine, Polish professor Ryszard Legutko reminds us in his edgy and thought-provoking new book. He should know. Growing up in Poland after the war, he took great risks to produce a dissident Samizdat anti-communist magazine, ‘Arka’. In The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, Legutko points to the eerie similarity between 20th-century communist and contemporary liberal societies, providing western readers with an important new vantage point on problems of our current moment.
Having experienced the communist regime first-hand, he is well-placed to spot the symptoms of ideological tyranny today. Anything which stood in the way of the forward march of socialism was labelled by communists as ‘reactionary’, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘idealist’. Like today’s progressives, he says, they believed that familial, ethnic, national and religious traditions were obstacles to the revolution – atavisms to be overcome and ultimately dismantled.
Numerous artists and intellectuals jumped aboard the express, eagerly suppressing their rational faculties. Alongside the party apparatchiks, these ‘lumpen intellectuals’ constituted the shock troops of the socialist movement. Average citizens stepped into line to avoid harassment and intimidation.
Arguments no longer revolved around truth, but were judged by their fidelity to the tenets of the secular religion. You were either with the movement or against it – those who tried to straddle the middle ground were denounced by socialists as ‘bourgeois’. The dishonest ‘slippery slope’ charge was repeatedly laid by communists to indict moderate opponents seeking some form of compromise between competing positions. Those on the opposite side of the debate were deemed ‘dangerous’ rather than incorrect.
History, the socialists believed, was moving inexorably in the direction of ‘progress’, and the role of the vanguard was to vanquish those standing in its way. Sound familiar? Anyone exposed to the power of the cultural Left in today’s liberal institutions, where ‘because it’s 2019’ is a killer argument, will recognise this. In communist Poland, the millenarian vision was the worker’s paradise.
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SubscribeAs someone who has been in a truly communist country, “reactionary” is a disgusting word to me. The only memories that come close to this word are the Cultural Revolution and ignorance, the dark ages of China in the 1950s and 1960s. The word has now become a joke in China, used to make fun of the propaganda of that era.
But I am utterly shocked that the Western “progressive” today is ignorantly using it as some kind of stuff that had moral superiority.
I have changed my profile picture in reponse to Edinburgh University renaming its Hume Tower.
Old commies wanted economical progress, socially they were right wing. Exact opposite from todays woke asses. Today woke asses are mostly economical right wing, socially left. Exact opposite of old good commies