Recently we have seen the revival of the idea that some faction of the political left (liberal, progressive, or radical) is silencing debate through “political correctness,” as retold, for example,by Jonathan Chait.Similarly,there is a push by those reviving the 1965 Moynihan Report (neo-Moynihanists?) to advance anarrative in which venomous race police attacked Moynihan with such force that liberal social scientists were scared off the topic of “cultural explanations” (especially about marriage) for Black poverty and inequality.
This Moynihan chilling effect narrative got a recent boost from Nicholas Kristof in theNew York Times.As Kristof tells it, “The taboo on careful research on family structure and poverty was broken by William Julius Wilson, an eminent black sociologist.”Kristof lifted that descriptionfromthis recent article by McLanahan and Jencks(which he cites elsewhere in the column). They wrote:
For the next two decades [after 1965] few scholars chose to investigate…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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