The Conservative Attack Machine: “Admit Nothing, Deny Everything, Launch Counterattack”

Abstract

The conservative assault on academic political correctness must be viewed in the context of a continuous series of political and cultural offensives, engineered by the Republican Party and its allies since the 1970s. The Republican strategy of attack and polarization has persisted up to the present, indeed reaching new levels of shrillness since the elections of 2010, as in recent assaults against public employees and their unions, including in education, as well as against government agencies in general, targeted for demolition in the ginned-up panic over deficits and debt ceilings, all in the wake of the recession triggered by the Wall Street crash of 2008. Among the strategies of this offensive has been to scapegoat alleged misdeeds on the academic and cultural left as a distraction from far more pernicious activities on the right and to distort the proportions between the two. The mainstream media, with their present tense fixation, have been remiss in not considering these recent Republican campaigns as reiterations of an historical pattern, so this should be another responsibility of scholars and teachers. The next four chapters develop my earlier references to the deliberate mimicry by conservatives of every line of argument and piece of evidence supporting the left, toward the ultimate aim of obfuscating any possibility of the truth being ascertained, through what I term “right-wing deconstruction.”

The difference between the well-thought-out, unending and no-holds-barred hostility of the left and the acquiescent, friendship-seeking nature of many of my Republican colleagues never ceases to amaze me.

Newt Gingrich, quoted in Ferguson, “What Does Newt Know?” 21

According to Horowitz, conservatives often fail to understand that there is a political war at all, or disapprove of the fact that there may be one. The conservative paradigm is based on individualism, compromise, and partial solutions, and regards politics as a management issue, an effort to impose limits on what government may do. This puts conservatives at a disadvantage in political combat with the left, whose paradigm of oppression inspires missionary zeal and is perfectly suited to aggressive tactics and no-holds-barred combat.

Jamie Glazov, introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions xxxii

In fields ranging from education to art to law, the attack on truth has been accompanied by an assault on standards. The connection is seldom made clear. Indeed, one of the characteristics of postmodern thought is that it is usually asserted rather than argued, reasoned argument having been rejected as one of the tools of the white male elite. … So much that follows from denying the idea of truth is deeply unsettling. We have to worry not only about whether our educational and cultural institutions will pass along an accurate and balanced history to our children, but also about whether they will communicate to them the importance of reason, of trying to overcome bias, of using evidence to arrive at conclusions.

Lynne Cheney, Telling the Truth 18–20