Punishing "thoughtcrime": the reaction to Howard Dean's passing remark about the Confederate Flag offers a sobering illustration of the P.C. commissars at work.

In the former Soviet Union, it was common for subjects to be arrested and sent to the gulag for expressing "anti-Soviet" views. Cuban poet Armando Valladares, author of the memoir Against All Hope, survived more than 20 years in Castro's gulag; Valladares was arrested for making a fleeting remark critical of the Castro regime. During Communist China's Cultural Revolution, bedrooms in government-owned dormitories were equipped with tape recorders to document any anti-government sentiments that might be expressed by people talking in their sleep.

One critical distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes is that the former assert jurisdiction over the minds of their subjects. This was memorably depicted in George Or well's masterpiece 1984, with Big Brother's regime ruthlessly punishing those guilty of "thoughtcrime." A run-of-the-mill dictator isn't interested in micro-managing the tuner lives of his subjects. He may use brutal means to acquire and retain power, but once secure in his reign he will generally leave people alone.

By contrast, totalitarian rulers seek

to re-engineer the lives and opinions of their subjects according to an ideological design. An authoritarian ruler might summarily execute somebody who threatens his power; totalitarians, on the other hand, liquidate people--often entire classes of people who cannot or will not conform to the regime's ideological blueprint.

In the Soviet Union, the regime claimed the power to imprison or liquidate anybody classified as a "'socially dangerous person." According to The Black Book of Communism--a definitive academic study compiled by six French scholars and published in English translation in 1999 -Soviet officials labeled as "'socially dangerous" any statement or gesture constituting "an attack on the political or economic achievements of the revolutionary proletariat." Soviet law, the scholars noted, "not only punished intentional transgressions but also proscribed possible or unintentional acts."

"Politically Correct" Genocide

Some might be tempted to describe this as a particularly severe version of the social malady known as "political correctness." And they would be right. For most Americans, the concept of political correctness appears to be little more than an annoyance largely confined to college campuses. For those unfortunate enough to live tinder Communist rule, the expression has lethal overtones.

By way of illustration, consider a decree issued by the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee on January 24, 1919, designating the Russian Cossacks as "socially dangerous people" impossible to assimilate into the new order: "'In view of the experiences of the civil war against the Cossacks, we must recognize as the only politically correct measure massive terror and a merciless fight against the ... Cossacks, who must be exterminated and physically disposed of, down to the last man."

This is the first documented use of the expression "politically correct"--and it came in the context of a genocidal directive. This background should be kept in mind whenever we collide with the concept of political correctness either in theory or practice.

Which brings us to the subject of Howard Dean, the latest public figure to provoke the ire of the political correctness commissariat by committing "thoughtcrime." Dean's supposed offense was to say in a newspaper interview: "I still want to be the candidate for the guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks," as well as the standard-bearer for the familiar menagerie of Democrat Party constituencies, such as homosexuals, feminists and so on.

Predictably, Dean's rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination assumed postures of theatrical horror and indignation, accusing Dean--the front-runner--of insensitivity and other crimes against public decency.

After initially resisting demands that he apologize, the former Vermont governor was driven to seek absolution from the editorial board of the New York Times'. "The irony of this Confederate flag thing is that there has been nobody who has been more outspoken about race on this campaign trail than me," Dean said at a meeting with Times editors. "I talk about affirmative action.... I talk about institutional racism."

From the Times' perspective, Dean's unabashed leftism and his penitent groveling were welcome, but insufficient. While allowing that Dean is "obviously no racist," the cultural commissars at the Times rebuked him for displaying tolerance for those who hold unsanctioned opinions--in this case those who, for whatever reason, embrace the Confederate flag. "Dr. Dean is going to have to demonstrate that his Confederate flag comment was a one-shot, recoverable gaffe and not a symptom of something more haunting," pronounced the Times in a November 6 house editorial that probably read better in the original Russian.

Dean's offense was not racism, but daring to court the votes of those designated "socially dangerous people" by the custodians of political correctness. Fellow Democrat nominee wanna-be Congressman Richard Gephardt took the politically correct course by piously insisting that he doesn't want such people to vote for him. Others have gone so far as to suggest that much of rural America--not just those who adorn their autos with the colors of the noble Confederacy--teems with socially dangerous people whose votes supposedly taint our political system.

"Yahoo Nation"

In November 2000, as the Bush-Gore election went into extra innings, former Clinton flunky Paul Begala wrote an op-ed column denouncing most of rural America -which overwhelmingly supported Bush -as a region infested with violent bigots. Referring to the post-election map in which the states carried by Bush were displayed in red, and those carried by Gore in blue, Begala wrote:

   You see the state where James Byrd
   was lynch-dragged behind a pickup
   truck until his body came apart--it's
   red. You see the state where Matthew
   Shepard was crucified on a split-rail
   fence for the crime of being gay -it's
   red. You see the state where rightwing
   extremists blew up a federal office
   building and murdered scores of
   federal employees--it's red. The
   state where an Army private who was
   thought to be gay was bludgeoned to
   death with a baseball bat, and the
   state where neo-Nazi skinheads murdered
   two African-Americans because
   of their skin color, and the state
   where Bob Jones University spews its
   anti-Catholic bigotry; they're all red
   too.

Columnist William O'Rourke of the Chicago Sun-Times designated the states that voted against Gore as "Yahoo Nation"--"a large, lopsided horseshoe, a twisted W, made up of primarily the Deep South and the vast, lowly populated upper-far-west states that are filled with vestiges of gun-loving, Ku Klux Klan-sponsoring, formerly lynching-happy, survivalist-minded, hate crime-perpetrating, non-blue-blooded, rugged individualists." "Yahoo Nation," O' Rourke insisted, does not contain "one center of thinking America, the teeming centers of creative and intellectual life." The section of the country that went for AI Gore, by way of contrast, contains what O'Rourke called "America's great cities: New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Seattle."

These vituperative characterizations of mainstream America beg the following question: If so-called "Red State America" is composed of such irredeemably vicious people, why are they allowed any role in our political process? If it's a grave offense against decency for a politician to make an appeal--however oblique--to such people, why are those people even allowed to vote?

At present, America's political class is content with a system characterized by commentator Ron Neff as "polite totalitarianism," in which those deemed socially dangerous are merely ostracized, stigmatized, shouted down, and occasionally subjected to financial ruin. And because we remain, in form if not substance, a representative republic, collectivist politicians like Howard Dean and Bill Clinton--and, for that matter, George W. Bush--find it expedient to pose as defenders of mainstream America.

But the treatment Dean received for violating the canons of political correctness, like the post-election comments by Begala and O'Rourke, reminds us of how our ruling elites really see us--in particular those who support limited government, seek to decentralize political power, defend conventional morality, and harbor other socially dangerous beliefs and intentions.

From the perspective of the politically correct, we'd be little better than fodder for the gulag--if they had the power to work their will on us, which, thankfully, they haven't.