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symploke 13.1/2 (2006) 134-143



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Civility and Liberal Pluralism

California State University, Northridge

One

Capitalist relations frequently are explained and justified in the language of "free enterprise" and "choice." In liberal democracies, free enterprise is translated into cultural realms as doctrines of free speech, objectivity, and academic freedom, advertised with the rhetoric of pluralism. Cultural and political activities, often including those that represent themselves as inimical to the many manifestations of social inequity in the US, do the work of increasing capitalism's moral hegemony by framing themselves within the same discourse. Shopping malls, advertisements of all kinds, television news, candidates in election campaigns, and schools, all seek support by invoking pluralism. Look how many choices we offer, supermarkets announce. We welcome opposing opinions from qualified individuals, news commentators tells us. So many stores to choose from. So many TV channels to turn to. The same stories on each news program. The same layout in every department store.

This conception of pluralism is frequently deployed by anti-censorship feminists, pro-choice campaigners, defenders of lesbian sadomasochism, activists calling for the abolition of anti-sodomy statutes, and "dissident" academics as well. What people do in the privacy of their bedrooms is their own business, liberals are wont to announce. You don't have to like it or even agree with it, but you have no right to impose your opinion on others. (As long as they don't shove it in our faces.) I personally might not like the idea of abortion, might never have an abortion myself, but this doesn't mean that I can deny others the right to choose. (After all, it is the law.) I'm against degrading representations of women, but I won't support censorship. Everyone has the right to free speech. Just as sadomasochists don't seek to prohibit your sexual expression, why should you want to outlaw us? We have the right to present our views in the academy alongside a variety of other political viewpoints. It's important that students be [End Page 134] exposed to a wide spectrum of opinions, so that they can make informed choices regarding their own positions.

The lack of true diversity and choice in the institutionalized liberal pluralism of the U.S. is evidenced by the historically narrowly defined parameters of official political oppositionality. Noam Chomsky's research on U.S. intellectuals has shown, for instance, that the celebrated academic protest of the US's war against Vietnam was founded largely on pragmatic rather than moral grounds (1984, 129), as was the opposition of House Democrats to Contra aid in the 1980s—most did not argue that Contra aid was an imperialistic collaboration with right-wing oligarchs, but rather that it was impractical, since the Contras were unlikely to "win" the war (Chomsky 1988). Similarly, some opponents of the US's war against Iraq in 1991 were motivated more by concerns for the potential of U.S. lives being lost or of exorbitant military spending than distaste for U.S. racism and expansionism. Whenever the U.S. "presence" in the "Persian Gulf" was discussed on commercial television's news programs, questions were framed within the assumption that the U.S. presence in the Gulf was morally warranted: opinion polls asked if the U.S. should instigate war, or whether respondents thought that war was inevitable or not, and not whether U.S. troops were justifiably in Saudi Arabia in the first place. The questions asked predetermined what kinds of answers and discussions of these answers would follow. Innocuously presented television news programs exhorting viewers to write to "the men and women" in the Gulf, advising viewers to send early Christmas parcels to their "loved ones" in the desert, or creating video postcards to and from troops in the Gulf, took for granted the self evidence of the righteousness of the U.S. presence in the Gulf. Corporate sponsorship of this imperialist saber rattling supported the war effort of the supposedly liberal media—AT&T, for instance, offered "free" phone-calls "home" on Thanksgiving to troops in the Gulf...

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