The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [18]
Yet by the mid-1990s groups like MADD were finding it difficult to be heard in the media over the noise about road rage and other trendy issues. In the years that followed the fatality rate stopped declining. Polls taken on the eastern seaboard during the late 1990s found people more concerned about road rage than drunk driving. Who could blame them when they read in their local paper, “It’s not drunken or elderly or inexperienced drivers who are wreaking havoc. Instead, scores of people are severely injured or killed every day by stressed-out drivers who have abandoned civil roadway behavior” (Philadelphia Daily News).17
The Power of Calling Something “P.C.”
If the first of those two sentences by Don Russell of the Daily News inverted the truth about dangerous drivers, the second misled more broadly still. Russell is one of several writers on road rage who alluded to the issue of civility. Reporters variously raised the matter themselves or quoted police officers declaring that “people have forgotten how to be civil to each other” (USA Today). In so doing they exemplified another unfortunate hallmark of fear mongering: the tendency to trivialize legitimate concerns even while aggrandizing questionable ones.18
Worries about Americans acting uncivilly toward one another date back at least to frontier days, and in our present era bad behavior behind the wheel is far from the most significant or pressing form of incivility. At a time when a disabled black man in Texas was beaten by racists then chained to a truck and dragged down a road to his death and a gay college student in Wyoming was tied to a fence, pistol-whipped, and left to die, we would do well to focus our sights on big-time incivilities such as racism and homophobia. Instead we are diverted by willy-nilly references in stories about road rage, or worse, by fear mongers who intentionally set out to confuse matters. 19
One of the most effective scare campaigns of the late twentieth century—political correctness on college campuses—was undertaken for the express purpose of changing the terms of debate about civility. The people who generated the scare did not phrase it in those terms, mind you; they couched their alarmism in First Amendment language. In the late 1980s conservative commentators began warning of what they described as “the greatest threat to the First Amendment in our history” (Rush Limbaugh), “the equivalent of the Nazi brownshirt thought-control movement” (Walter Williams), and “an ideological virus as deadly as AIDS” (David Horowitz).20
President George Bush, in a commencement address at the University of Michigan in 1991, put the matter somewhat more soberly when he decried those who would “declare certain topics off-limits, certain expressions off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits.” Some professors and students were indeed urging that certain categories of statements and gestures be eradicated from university life. Specifically, they sought to do away with racist, sexist, and homophobic behavior. If anything qualifies as uncivil in a diverse society, they argued, it is precisely these sorts of acts.21
People who got chastised as PC were trying to create a more respectful and inclusive environment on campuses for groups that largely had been excluded—a goal that conservatives could not attack head-on lest they lose the already limited support they had in minority communities. Besides, far from being First Amendment absolutists themselves, many conservatives eagerly support restraints on a range of behaviors, from flag burning to the display of homoerotic art. So rather than engage in honest debate with campus liberals and progressives, conservatives labeled them “politically correct.” Much the way their forebears had used the epithet “Communist” a few decades earlier, conservatives of the 1990s accused their enemies of being PC. Primarily by means of anecdotes retold time and again in political speeches,