Both sides lose in culture war name games

There’s lots to laugh at in the Pentagon’s political correctness run amok. If the Enola Gay — the B-29 Superfortress that carried the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 — is suspect, can these people really be serious? 

If the previous administration had flagged the bomb, which was code-named Little Boy, as being inappropriately gendered, or its counterpart, Fat Man, as potential body shaming, it wouldn’t have been any more ridiculous.

We can give the military the benefit of the doubt that images of the historic plane, like photos of the Tuskagee Airmen or the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots corps, were inadvertently caught in a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) keyword dragnet and will be preserved. But we can also be quite sure that the era of the thought police is still very much with us.

Consider the letter the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia sent to Georgetown Law School notifying the dean that “no applicant for our fellows program, our summer internship, or employment in our office who is a student or affiliated with a law school or university that continues to teach and utilize DEI will be considered.” 

A threat letter from a government law enforcement agency telling a school to change its ideological viewpoint or its students and graduates will be punished tells us that these may not be serious ideas, but their proponents are serious about implementing them. (And any Republicans who’d point out that Georgetown is a recipient of federal grant money should consider what their reaction would be if a Democratic administration warned a Catholic university about anti-abortion teaching in its curriculum.) 

Indeed, what Republicans are doing now is different directionally but not methodologically from what Democrats were doing before. Get a load of what a right-wing group got out of a public information lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It’s a hellscape of pronoun policies and genderless bathroom initiatives with enhanced “education” programs for employees who resisted. 

If you’re opposed to, or even just skeptical of left-wing speech policing, you probably feel some satisfaction at seeing the MAGA scythe cut through the federal diversity bureaucracy. A culture in which EPA field workers who complained about unisex locker rooms or where office drones who failed to use “Mx.” instead of “Ms.” got dragged in for reeducation looks like a ripe target for housecleaning.

And, of course, that recent discovery of the cultural kommissariat at the Biden EPA is just a drop in a river of similar efforts from the two previous Democratic administrations. By the end of the Obama administration, the outgoing president himself was cautioning his fellow progressives about the dangers of enforcing “political correctness.”

What happened in the time between Obama’s warning in exit interview and today’s right-skewed thought policing could fill 10 columns, but the crux of that period was in the spring and summer of five years ago. 

After George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, protests and then riots quickly spread from that city across the country. That was the summer when the statues were toppled, a Seattle neighborhood declared itself an “autonomous zone” and mainstream Democrats gave serious thought to the idea of defunding police departments.

But the crossroads of that cultural moment was right here in Washington, D.C., at the intersection of I and 16th Street Northwest. That was the spot, just across Lafayette Park from the White House, that became the rallying point for the Black Lives Matter protests in the nation’s capital. That was where peaceful demonstrations by day turned into violence and looting at night. It was the place for curfews and tear gas, hurled bricks and arson. It was also where President Donald Trump strode across the park to St. John’s Episcopal Church to hold a Bible aloft for what would be the defining photo-op of his first term.

After the violence ended and police cleared the space, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser needed a way to keep the peace. Members of her own city council and activists were furious. Bowser needed to get federal police forces out of the streets, end the curfew, and try to get the city back on something like a normal footing. Her decision was to rebrand the crackdown. 

Just four days after Trump had brandished the Bible, Bowser sent city crews down to the intersection to paint the words “BLACK LIVES MATTER” in yellow letters 35 feet tall on I Street and renamed the two-block stretch Black Lives Matter Plaza. The next year, Bowser had the blocks turned into a “permanent art installation” that celebrated a message she had laid out so “that Donald Trump couldn’t avoid it” when he was still in the White House. She even bragged that she had the plaza lit at night so Trump “dreams about” it.  

Now, Trump is back in the White House and he will soon enough not have to have his dreams disturbed. One day after a House Republican threatened to cut off funding for the district if the message was not covered up and the blocks renamed “Liberty Plaza,” Bowser announced that the street mural was going away. It may not have been the funding threat so much as the overall move among GOPers these days to end the home rule that the district has enjoyed (and sometimes not enjoyed) since 1973.  

Whatever the reasons, Bowser is definitely pandering in a different direction from the one she was five years ago. This is no doubt very satisfying to the Republicans Bowser was trolling back then. Making her bend the knee no doubt feels good. But just as painting a street didn’t make any material difference to the lives of the residents of a city that has known more than its share of troubles, painting it over will make one side of the culture war feel smug and the other side resentful — and eager for revenge when political fortunes are reversed.