The Good Old Days

Mark Kleiman has an interesting post on things that had once been considered acceptable, but that are now not.  He comes up with:

1. Spitting on the sidewalk.
2. Drunk driving.
3. Wife-beating.
4. Most indoor smoking.
5. Ethnic denigration.
6. Not cleaning up after your dog.
7. Not wearing seatbelts or bike/motorcycle helmets.
8. Coming back to work drunk after lunch.
9. Taking sexual advantage of workplace and classroom power.
10. Purchasing sexual services.

One of his commenters observed that many of these could have been ripped straight from Tea Party-Republican-Limbaughian talking points.  Considering how much progressivism is about social change, and conservatism is about the opposite, it's a profound insight.

I imagined the right-wing list would be things that are not now acceptable because of wimpy political correctness, and that should be acceptable again.

It made the list a little easier:

1. Treating women as mere sex objects.
2. Defining masculinity by how “tough” a man is.
3. Acknowledging that there are many valuable non-European cultures in America.
4. Treating gays as decent human beings.
5. Accepting that atheists or non-believers, or God-forbid… Muslims(!), can be moral, decent people.
6. Caring for and respecting the environment.
7. Recognizing that foreign citizens have human rights.
8. Making accommodations for the disabled.
9. Acknowledging that might does not make right, and that expressing one’s feelings is often the clearest path to peace.
10. Peace.
11. The idea of the unconscious.
12. The concept that tradition isn’t an argument by itself.

This could go on for quite a while.  An item surely to be included on the list ought to be corporal punishment, something the right has been pining to return to for decades, and upon the lack of which it blames all manner of ills.