The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (21 page)

Obviously, if Hillary Clinton had been elected president in 2008 instead of Barack Obama and crammed the same policies through Congress, no remotely serious person would expect the opponents of ObamaCare to say about HillaryCare 2.0, “Oh, well. It would be a huge problem if a black man was pushing these policies. But, you know, since Hillary
is white, it’s okay.” But just because something is ludicrous on its face doesn’t mean it won’t gain popularity if it confirms or reinforces the existing biases of the Left.

When they can, liberals use patriotism as a sword and indignation over having their patriotism questioned as a shield. When used in combination, it’s a formidable tactic intended to conceal the fact that they love their country when it’s left, but not when it’s right.

11

SOCIAL JUSTICE

I
n that classic of American cinema,
Caddyshack
, Danny—the protagonist—desperately wants to win the annual Bushwood Country Club scholarship set aside for impressive young caddies. He meets with Judge Smails, who is charged with awarding the scholarship. He has the young caddy’s future in his hands (which is awkward, because Danny was recently caught in flagrante delicto with the judge’s niece).

Smails, eager to demonstrate that he’s as fair a judge of character as he is of greens, explains his thinking:

You know, despite what happened, I’m still convinced that you have many fine qualities. I think you can still become a gentleman someday if you understand and abide by the rules of decent society. There’s a lot of… well, badness
in the world today. I see it in court every day. I’ve sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber. I didn’t want to do it—felt I
owed
it to them. The most important decision you can make right now is what you stand for—goodness… or badness.

Danny, eager for a scholarship, chooses “goodness.”

I mention this scene because it captures the essence of what most people mean when they invoke the idea of social justice. A cry for social justice is usually little more than an assertion “for goodness.” “Progressive” has become a euphemism for “all good things.” But sometimes the p-word is too vague. So if you press a self-declared progressive—“What does that mean?”—they’ll respond, eventually, with something like. “It means fighting for social justice.” If you ask, “What does social justice mean?” you are likely to get an exasperated eye roll,
because you just don’t get it.

Social justice simply
is
goodness, and if you can’t see that, man, you’re either unintentionally “part of the problem” or, well, you’re for “badness.”

I once met an ex-cop getting a master’s degree in a criminology program at a major university. He explained to me that he had a hard time fitting into the culture of the program because the faculty seemed so concerned with do-goodery instead of stopping the forces of do-baddery. The chair of the department explained that they teach criminal justice but they consider their true mission “social justice.”

Not only is social justice good, it’s heroic. After the horrific and senseless Norwegian massacre by Anders Behring Breivik in July 2011, Jalees Rehman, MD, took to the
Huffington Post
to claim that Breivik targeted the teenagers on Utoeya Island in Norway because they promoted “values such as tolerance, social justice and peace. Their participation was a sign of their commitment to further improve our society, and in this sense, they are heroes similar to the firefighters and policeman [
sic
] who died during the September 11, 2001, attacks in the line of duty.”
¹

Social justice is one of those phrases that no mission statement—at least no mission statement of a certain type—can do without. One simply cannot be in the do-goodery business without making reference to the fact that you’re fighting for social justice.

Here’s the AFL-CIO: “The mission of the AFL-CIO is to improve the lives of working families—to bring economic justice to the workplace and social justice to our nation. To accomplish this mission we will
build
and
change
the American labor movement.”
²
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—a labor union two million members strong that enjoys close relations with President Obama and his administration (former SEIU president Andrew Stern was the most frequent visitor to the White House during the first six months of the Obama presidency, which no doubt is why his presidency got off to such a great start)— asserts: “We believe we have a special mission to bring economic and social justice to those most exploited in our community—especially to women and workers of color.” In case that’s unclear, they go on: “We must build political power to ensure that workers’ voices are heard at every level of government to create economic opportunity and foster social justice.”
³

We expect as much from labor unions, and no less from academia. A recent
Harvard Crimson
editorial explains that you should give the college money because “it largely succeeds as a mechanism for social justice.”
⁴
Well, okay then, where’s my checkbook?

Just type “social justice” into a search engine alongside almost any institution’s name and you’ll find such twaddle. The Ford Foundation gave the Newseum a grant “for a Web site incorporating videos, interactive games and primary resources in a curriculum-based structure for classroom use and to organize a forum on journalism and social justice.”
⁵
In 2010 the Smithsonian held a conference on “A Deeper Diversity, the Nation’s Health: Renewing Social Justice and Human Well-Being in Our Time.”
⁶
The Muslim American Society, the organization founded by and through which the Muslim Brotherhood operates in the United States, declares on its Web site that it “hopes to contribute to the promotion of peace and social justice.”
⁷
Even the American Nazi Party, not wanting to be left out of all the fun, identifies “[s]ocial justice for White Working Class people throughout our land” as one of their two main tenets.
⁸

All these organizations (and by no means only these) claim that social justice sits at the center of their mission, and yet rarely does any organization go on to explain what they mean by it, other than connoting some sort of implied goodness. This is from the home page of the Yale Social
Justice Network: “The Social Justice Network at Yale is a coalition of organizations and individuals working for social justice and social change at Yale, in New Haven, and beyond. SJN is dedicated to building a community among and reaching out to those who identify themselves as working for social justice, while helping activists develop skills necessary to acheive [
sic
] this change.”
⁹
Got it?

Beyond simply being a placeholder for goodness, progressively defined, what does social justice mean specifically? What are the action items of social justice? Securing gay rights, gay marriage in particular, has to be near the top of that list. After the New York State Legislature passed a bill legalizing civil marriages for same-sex couples in June 2011, Governor Andrew Cuomo took the podium to alert the masses that the Empire State had “reached a new level of social justice” and that “this state, when at its finest, is a beacon for social justice.” New York is for goodness.

This raises one of the really neat things about social justice. Once you become a poster child for it, you also become an expert on it. Indeed, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement considers itself to be such an authority on questions of social justice that they often feel compelled, nay obliged, to weigh in on all sorts of issues beyond what some not fully fluent in social justice issues might think outside their bailiwick. Invoking the “longstanding commitment to all forms of social justice of the LGBT community,” the presidents of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLADD) and the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC) sent a letter to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in May 2011 urging it to support “President Obama’s vision of an America in which everyone has high-speed access” by allowing the merger between AT&T and T-Mobile.
¹⁰

I remain a bit hazy on how, exactly, high-speed Internet access is a requirement of social justice, or for that matter of specific concern for gays. Perhaps the merger between AT&T and T-Mobile will mean that no one will ever again have to say, “Can you hear me now?” when they come out of the closet?

But this does help illustrate the problem with social justice. It becomes like The Force in
Star Wars
. Who are Jedis? They are good people who are
strong with The Force. What is The Force? It is what Jedis are strong with. The social justice syllogism goes something like this: 1) We are liberals. 2) Liberals believe it is imperative that social justice be advanced wherever we find it. 3) Therefore, whatever we believe to be imperative
is
social justice. And there’s the corollary: If you oppose liberals in advancing what they want, you are against not just liberals but social justice itself.

Fortunately, some folks are willing to offer some specifics about what full-spectrum social justice looks like. The Green Party, for example, lists social justice as one of the four main pillars of their platform. They even provide a handy list of all the different themes and policies that count toward advancing it, including such broad topics as women’s rights, labor, education and the arts, environmental justice, universal health care, and “a commitment to ending poverty” through “welfare.” Each of these is then explained at some length, as you might expect. But there are also the more granular offenses to the advanced conscience, such as justice for the native Kanaka Maoli of Hawaii, including the need for “open dialogue among all residents of Hawai’i on the sovereignty option of full independence” (that would mean “secession,” if you’re not reading too closely) to remedy the “illegal annexation” of Hawaii—er, sorry Hawai’i—in 1898.

It’s quite a grab bag, really. If you believe in social justice, according to the Greens, you should support “[e]liminating all laws that seek to restrict or censor artistic expression, including the withholding of government funds for political or moral content” (this will be hailed as fantastic news for the more artsy members of the Ku Klux Klan); the promotion of “new traditions and images of men becoming fully involved in all aspects of the family planning process”; that “[y]oung people should have input into the direction and pace of their own education, including input into the operation of their educational institutions”; and that “[a]ll people have a right to food, housing, medical care, jobs that pay a living wage, education, and support in times of hardship.”

What hardship could there be, one wonders, what with all the free food, housing, medical care, education, and well-paying jobs?

Now you may object that this is the agenda of the Green Party, which is of course going to be pretty out there ideologically. Perhaps. But a reasonable response
is that because the Green Party is out there, it can actually afford to explain what social
justice means. In other words, they can let everyone out of the clown car of social justice and let them stretch their legs a bit. Moreover, it’s not like there are a lot of competing and more reasonable definitions out there. Rather, the closer to the mainstream an organization gets, the less it will
explain
what social justice
is,
and the more they’ll just let those in the know interpret the code for themselves.

Regardless, even members of the Green Party understand that Rome wasn’t ruined in a day. An agenda like this takes time and effort over lifetimes. That’s why it is so important to
teach
social justice to future generations, so they can carry the torch that will one day burn Western civilization to the ground. And you cannot teach social justice without first training the teachers to teach it.

This was the idea in 2000 when the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, which accredits about half of the colleges of education in the country, introduced a new set of standards for accrediting schools that incorporated the latest trend of “disposition evaluation.” According to the NCATE, the dispositions of the teacher candidates should be measured in order to determine which candidates are most likely to be successful as teachers. But which dispositions ought to be evaluated? Surely not the disposition to take a nip out of that bottle of peppermint schnapps in your desk drawer during recess.

Well, according to the NCATE, the dispositions to be measured are those that are “guided by beliefs and attitudes related to values such as caring, fairness, honesty, responsibility, and social justice.” How, exactly, one can measure a “disposition for social justice” remains unclear. And while the NCATE dropped these “disposition standards” in 2006 when they fell out of vogue, many education colleges still apply these standards in their student, teacher, and new hire evaluations.

Sparked by an incident at his own Brooklyn College School of Education, where a student was penalized for not demonstrating a sufficient “disposition for social justice,” Professor KC Johnson has done yeoman’s work documenting education programs across the country that include “social justice dispositions” in their evaluation of soon-to-be-molders-of-young-minds. Among the most aggressive with its requirements for the social justice disposition is Brooklyn College, which identifies—like the Green Party—social justice as one of the four pillars of their conceptual framework. They explain: “We educate teacher candidates and other school personnel about issues of social injustice such as institutionalized racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism (Fine et al, 1996; Nussbaum, 1999); and invite them to develop strategies and practices that challenge [such] biases.”