Have You Read Jonathan Chait's Newest Entry in the White Male Victimology Olympics?

Jonathan Chait wrote this laughably unreflective and dim series of sentences in New York magazine:

Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate. Two decades ago, the only communities where the left could exert such hegemonic control lay within academia, which gave it an influence on intellectual life far out of proportion to its numeric size. 

Today’s political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new cultural reach. And since social media is also now the milieu that hosts most political debate, the new p.c. has attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old. 

It also makes money. Every media company knows that stories about race and gender bias draw huge audiences, making identity politics a reliable profit center in a media industry beset by insecurity.

His "left" can easily be replaced with "right" or "conservative"...and resonate with more bass and timbre.

Several years ago, a young man wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan "straight rights" was supposedly waylaid and beaten upon in the streets of New York.

His effort at resistance via "truth-telling" was met with the most direct and transparent type of political action--a swift punch in the nose and a return to a state of affairs in which life is nasty, brutish, and short...except for the fact that he was not dispatched from this corporeal existence.

Of course, I do not support violence as a means of resolving disagreements over political speech.

Political speech is a call to action, an effort to channel emotion, and a type of claim on the nature of reality that is often both descriptive (how the speaker sees and understands reality) as well as normative (how the world ought to be).

Those claims and assumptions can be explicit or implied.


In contemporary Western society, white men, heterosexuals, the "able-bodied", Christians, the middle and upper classes--and of course the plutocrats--constitute the "in-group". This is not an exhaustive list; it is complicated by the fact that being a member of the in-group is often contingent, relational, and circumstantial (see for example: white women are privileged by virtue of race but are disadvantaged because of their gender. However, white women are still advantaged relative to women of color).

The in-group, by definition, is not oppressed. Their complaints and cries of disadvantage are often just hostility towards how how their unearned advantages--the very definition of privilege--are spoken against or marginally limited by the Other and the consensus bargains made by elites in a multicultural, somewhat "liberal" in its cosmopolitan values, corporate, neoliberal, democracy.

As is my standard response to libertarians who happen to be white, male, and class privileged, their "right" to act in a manner, one for example not limited by civil rights laws, does not trump my inalienable human right(s) to life, liberty, safety, security, happiness, and positive (or negative) freedom.

After his defeat last year in a feud with the Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, New York magazine's Jonathan Chait has pinned another boo-hoo white male victimology essay.

Chait's (recent) writings about race and the colorline are wholly bereft of value and critical insight--except as examples of aggrieved Whiteness. They are instructive but ultimately empty.

Have you read Chait's "Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say"?

Does Chait, as a member of the white grievance and victimology industry actually believe what he is writing in "Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say"?

Or is that essay (and the others in Chait's white victimology oeuvre) just a way to bait folks into giving him the spotlight in an American media and political game that is closest in form and substance to professional wrestling?