COLUMN LEFT : Bush Finds a Stand-in for Willie Horton : The right, floundering for issues, makes campus ‘political correctness’ its new bogyman.

Earlier on the day last weekend that his heart started to beat faster, President Bush had visited the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to give a commencement address and to attack what he termed “the notion of political correctness,” said notion being the latest toxin supposedly polluting the nation’s bloodstream.

Political correctness, the President explained, “declares certain topics off limits, certain expressions off limits.” And although born from the laudable desire to “sweep away the debris of racism, sexism and hatred,” it had led to climate of intolerance. The man who campaigned on Willie Horton in 1988 had the impudence to declare that “political extremists roam the land, abusing the privilege of free speech, setting citizens against one another on the basis of their class or race.”

Given the imprimatur of presidential citation, “political correctness,” PC for short, has come of age as national bogy after an extensive apprenticeship in the press, including cover stories in Newsweek, the Atlantic Monthly and New York (twice). Not a bad showing for something that is largely imaginary, though in the minds of its foes it is all-pervasive (like that other product of fin de siecle American paranoia, child abuse in day-care centers).

What exactly is PC? The nearest thing to a clear idea of it in most people’s minds is of students inhibited by college regulations from speaking their minds freely, as the young long to do, as I heard the other day in Syracuse, where some youths were wearing T-shirts with “Club Faggots, Not Seals” written on them. In February, Brown University expelled a student, Douglas Hann, under “hate speech” provisions, after he shouted out a window, “What are you, a faggot? . . . (Expletive) Jew” and told a black woman, “my parents own you people.” He’d been in trouble for such activity before.

Many universities have such “hate speech” codes, among them Stanford and Wisconsin, which installed one after a fraternity “slave auction.” Critics of PC who scoff at its concern for minority rights tend to underplay just how violently racist many of these campus episodes have been. In December, 1987, a group of Asian-Americans at the University of Connecticut was spat upon by football players shouting “Oriental faggots.” At the University of Massachusetts in 1986, a white mob of 3,000 chased and beat anyone who was black. More recently, at the University of Arizona, 15 white fraternity brothers beat three black men in front of a large crowd; police blamed “hot weather.”

In fact, the more one examines the hysteria about PC, the more the issue boils down to race, which is no doubt why George Bush, on the edge of the 1992 campaign, is turning his attention to the matter, with Horton’s equivalent in ’92 being the extremists, advocates of PC who are eroding core Western values with their incendiary slogans about affirmative action, multiculturalism and the folly of the Great Books curriculum.

As in other scares, PC becomes shorthand for many anxieties. We are nearing the point in the cyclical pattern of academic appointments when about one-third of American professors will retire. Many of these, themselves tenured in the political chill of the 1950s, see their values threatened by the younger 1960s cohort moving up in seniority. What could be simpler, therefore, than to detect and denounce the insidious menace of PC, just as their forebears denounced the Red Menace 40 years ago. The PC horror is good sound-bite politics, conflating every leftist cause imaginable, from Palestinian self-determination to vegetable rights, and justifying counterterror by the academic right, whose members swarmed through the bookstore at Duke University, calling for the removal of books with Marx in the title.

There’s an element of career opportunism too. The younger right-wing high-steppers, looking for preferment at the Heritage Foundation or on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, lack issues. Communism is pretty much dead and supply-side economics in a shambles. The answer, as one such high-stepper, Dinesh D’Souza, has found, is race, where the many and kindred foes of PC can whack away at affirmative action, racial justice and civil rights, while claiming--as the President did last Saturday--that they are speaking in the name of tolerance and free speech.

And of course their target sometimes lives up to their denunciations. PC can lead to priggishness and unappetizing intellectual and moral fervor. But in the end, the PC mind-set is one that opposes racism and sexism in a society that still embodies the substantive triumph of both, as witness the enthusiasm with which much of the press, and now the President, have seized on PC as the target of opportunity.