Artists, Political Correctness and the New Left

I wrote yesterday about an Anita Sarkeesian Twitter thread I found troubling. Stewing over it and seeing the blinkered reactions on Twitter (and other outlets) has caused me to consider, again, the question of political correctness and the responsibility of the artist. As a would-be artist, I have always been interested in this question and tend to think it’s an important one to the larger culture. This is because I believe artists are of fundamental importance to a society and I have specific opinions about the best practices for allowing them to do their work.

There is a concept called the “Overton window”—which refers to the range of socially acceptable political discourse at a given moment in history. It’s the range from extreme left to right, passing through a political center. “Moving the window” is what happens over time in any culture, as norms change and political progress (or regress) occurs. An example would be that, in the current climate in the US, it has become politically acceptable on the right to advocate for the disruption of traditional democratic norms around voting, such as politicizing the putatively non-partisan bureaucracies charged with officially counting and certifying votes, and the insistence that there is widespread voter fraud, when there is absolutely zero evidence for that. Even that simple factual statement is seen as a partisan position. This is “moving the window” because even twenty years ago what’s happening now would have been out of bounds.

And on the left, it has become fashionable and acceptable to openly embrace socialism, so called, whereas that was much less acceptable twenty or thirty years ago. Or, another example would be that it has become politically acceptable to advocate for gay rights, including same-sex marriage, over the last few decades, in a way that would have been utterly unthinkable in the public sphere only a few decades before that. The window can move in both positive and negative directions—of course those designations, too, depend on your personal views.

I began wondering yesterday if there is another term, similar to the Overton window concept, that addresses the wholesale flipping of a political position from right to left or vice versa. My example here is the thinking around free speech and censorship. When I was a young adult, advocating for broad free speech protections and norms, and against most kinds of censorship, was still considered primarily a left-wing position. Such advocacy is now a right-wing position, plain and simple. It’s not that the left necessarily openly advocates for censorship; but it is far more critical of the free speech, anti-censorship ethic than even a couple decades ago. What is this kind of near 180 degree political flip called? Through the Looking Glass? Into the Spiderverse?

I find this flip personally distressing—the window, or mirror, or whateverthefuck—because my identity as a “liberal” has long been built upon my fundamental belief in free expression. In my mind, it has always been the right—particularly the religious right—that has wanted to solve problems in society by restricting expression. Indeed, in some arenas—such as the teaching of the factual history of mainstream American racist oppression—the right is even more censorious than ever. All year, right wingers have been passing laws to disallow the teaching of that factual history so as not to upset white kids. But I’m also thinking of the philosophy that thinks book-burning is ever appropriate or that “good authors don’t need to use bad words,” or a whole range of major and minor restrictions, for the purpose of social engineering. (A couple of lefty geniuses on Twitter tried to tell me that “social engineering” is “eugenics” yesterday. So there’s also plenty of ignorance and disdain for looking up the meaning of words to muddy the waters, too.)

For example, instead of giving teenagers the biological facts of sex and sexuality as they exist in the world in the most straightforward and honest way possible, as some might think would be helpful to society, the right has for years and years worked diligently to thwart this education based on facts. Instead, it has often substituted opinion based on religion and other systems of moral control, such as “abstinence-only” approaches, that not only fail students by omission but don’t even result in the nominal goals of the right wing—such as reduced teen pregnancy, STD transmission and an improved sense of personal dignity. This is an attempt at social engineering through the public schools to meet the at-root religious goals of a few sects, rather than anything objectively valuable.

On the left, of course, the goals are different. Whereas some on the far right seem to want to deny the humanity of non-white people, women and the LGBTQ communities, the far left seems to want to affirm the humanity of these groups to the extent that to not explicitly do so, by adhering to prescribed language and approved expressions, is seen as de facto denying the humanity of these groups. Whatever you might actually believe, to fail to use the correct language or framing is, for some, the equivalent of being racist or homophobic or etc. So we get Sarkeesian’s “talking points” (to use to lecture your friends after seeing a certain movie together) that require a belief that artists must call out any statements that deviate from these new norms as explicitly wrong.

So you have a character in a movie set in the 1970s in L.A. speaking in a racist way; according to Sarkeesian and her ilk on the new left, this is only acceptable, if it ever is, when the artist openly condemns that behavior. If an artist fails to make this critique completely explicit, they are themselves racist and perpetuating racism. Yesterday, I wrote that this conclusion is a logical fallacy; I suggested that perhaps the goal is to challenge logic itself, as conventionally understood, in favor of social engineering to create anti-racist structures in the arts. That seems like a worthy goal, in and of itself.

But what I believe about art and artists is that they must not be beholden to anything other than the muse. I’m not suggesting artists get a blank check to be criminals, or assholes. I’m referring to the work itself, not their behavior among other humans. Regarding the work itself, it is hard enough to produce anything even approaching good art, let alone to do so while attempting to offend no one. If you’re creating a work for hire, there may be constraints. That’s fine. But as much as possible, even in that situation, artists must create what they feel moved to create. It’s not possible to be completely inoffensive, even if you’re making work for children. A lot of art of all kinds has historically been deeply offensive to some people. We would not have those works had the artist attempted—or been pressured—to offend no one.

This isn’t really about “offending no one,” though. It’s about political correctness. One way of explaining that concept is that there are some people it’s not a problem to offend and there are other people it is a problem to offend. Which group is which changes over time, and it also depends on context, current cultural trends, and political power. It also depends on how those groups choose to interpret the work. In the case of the Licorice Pizza “discourse,” no one can say a character’s racism is unrealistic. It would be realistic today, let alone in the 1970s setting. But the question of whether or not the racism is plausible is not what’s at issue here.

What’s really at issue is a larger philosophical point, in my view. In this way, this is similar to some of the "so-called “cancel culture” discourse. Those on the left insist that “cancel culture does not exist.” Instead, they say, it’s merely the chickens coming home to roost for bad people, finally. This is certainly true in some cases arising from the #MeToo movement—I don’t know if Harvey Weinstein was “cancelled” as much as “punished for his criminal conduct.” For those who, for one reason or another, can’t or won’t be prosecuted for their alleged bad actions—such as Louis C.K. or Woody Allen—there’s a social, cultural and financial price to pay as they’re called out, to some extent. There may be cases where there’s a kind of mob mentality about it but, in some of those, it’s simply a repercussion for behavior that has disgusted or pissed off fans but hasn’t resulted in criminal punishment.

What’s similar between these concepts—the artist’s supposed responsibility to explicitly call out bad behavior as bad in fiction and the notion that the public can and should punish people it feels have done wrong—are some shared principles. For example, as Sarkeesian states, intention does not matter. Context, also, does not matter. Facts, or the lack thereof, do not matter. In some cases, the responses of the supposedly maligned person or persons doesn’t even matter. What matters is perception, feeling and, to an unfortunate extent, the identities of the the culprit and the victims.

Earlier this fall, there was a brouhaha about Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix comedy special. Many people felt some of his statements were transphobic. Some trans people thought the special was fucking hilarious. I spoke to a trans person on Twitter who loved the special and told me that, in their opinion, non trans people were caping—meaning, stepping up to be superheroes, outraged on trans people’s behalf, without actually considering or being aware of the community’s reactions. The thing is, surely there were some trans viewers who were offended.

Who gets to decide what’s offensive? Who gets to decide which ideas must be explicitly refuted? Who gets to decide what art is allowed to do? If art ought to be politically correct—if it must make it clear what’s right and wrong—whose politics are we talking about? How is what Sarkeesian and others seem to be asking for different from the old Production Code, or any other censorship framework? Is censorship the appropriate way to right social wrongs?