As the crisis widens ideological divisions, how are you reacting? Are you trying to judge arguments on their merits, in as far as any of us can? Or do you now have the soul of a secret policeman? Do you automatically praise novels or dramas that confirm your biases and damn anything that deviates from your party line?
I ask because I have slogged my way through Alan Judd's Uncommon Enemy, like a hiker trudging across a rain-swept bog. For a mystery, it suffers from the disadvantage that you can guess the identity of the villain within 50 pages and know it within 100. He is about to become head of a fictional MI6. The hero, a former spy, knows that he once betrayed British secrets to the Europhile French. The villain knows he knows it. He decides to destroy the hero in case the hero destroys his career.
Judd delivers a thriller without thrills in the stilted prose of the southern English middle class. The villain has the hero arrested on a false charge of leaking official secrets. "You knew Rebecca Ashdown," says the detective, "with whom you stayed the night in Durham, from your time together in the old MI6, where she was a secretary?" I have never heard a police officer use "whom" instead of "who" or watched as he lined up clauses in a sentence, one after another, as if he were shunting wagons on to a freight train.
If I were reviewing Uncommon Enemy, I would have more to say. But I would accept that many readers will enjoy it. From Agatha Christie to PD James and Midsomer Murders, the most popular British crime fiction is suffused with gentility. Judd's book may do well. A part of me hopes it does. I do not wish him ill.
Charles Moore is another matter. He appears an amiable and civilised chap and unlike most rightwing writers – and most leftwing writers for that matter – you do not know what he will say on any given subject in advance. He recommended Judd. "Fair enough," I thought, "I'll buy a copy." It was only when my tired eyes reached the end that I realised that Moore had given the book a rave review because he saw the villain as a "Euro fanatic" – a representative of the "capitulation of the British elites to EU demands".
In fact, the villain is motivated as much by sexual jealousy of the hero as a treacherous desire to build a European superstate. But Judd appears to endorse Euroscepticism in a few passages and for Moore that was enough to make his novel a good book. If Judd's villain had been a Eurosceptic, then it would have been a bad book. That's all Moore knows and all he needs to know.
I don't believe that anyone can admire a work of art that is dedicated to promoting a cause he finds repellent. But the secret policeman does not confine himself to condemning outright propaganda from the other side. He sniffs the air like a ferret searching for rabbits, his nostrils primed to catch the faintest whiff of a political motive.
It is long past time that we accepted that what we once called political correctness now afflicts the right more than the left. The urge to censor has not died among British "liberals", unfortunately. Radio 4 and the publicly subsidised arts still operate effective blacklists. As one comic said of Radio 4's refusal to broadcast a single rightwing comedian: "The BBC believes in balance. It balances far-left comedians with centre-left comedians." But in America, once the home of leftish witch-finders, Republicans now have the inquisitorial glares and pursed lips that once disfigured the faces of their enemies.
The party of Lincoln will not nominate candidates unless they believe the following truths to be self-evident: that the financial crisis was caused by the overbearing state forcing bankers to lend to the poor; that abortion must be illegal in all circumstances; that global warming is the invention of a vast conspiracy of leftwing scientists; that Barack Obama is a certain socialist and probable Kenyan; that all Mexicans in the US illegally must be driven back across the border; and that Americans have no one to blame but themselves if they fall sick and cannot afford treatment.
The US right resembles the old liberal-left in its insistence that you cannot rub along with some of its beliefs but must buy them all as a job lot. It cannot stay still either, but restlessly adds more "thou shalt nots" to its commandments. Until this month, for instance, who would have imagined that a political party in a mature democracy would fight a 21st-century election on an anti-rubber johnny platform? Yet at last week's Republican debate, contraception was the right's new enemy.
Mitt Romney said Obama's plans to require religious employers to include birth control in health insurance packages for their employees were an attack on religious freedom. Rick Santorum warned of the "dangers of contraception". Meanwhile, Ron Paul, hero to the isolationist right and clueless left, extemporised on the Republican theme of "guns don't kill people, criminals do". For the sake of consistency, the right should not blame the pill, cap or coil, he said, but the sluts who used them ("Pills can't be blamed for the immorality of our society... the immorality creates the problem").
Like the poor, dogmatism is always with us. Far from freeing us from its dead hand, as its boosters promised, the web encourages conformism. The afflicted move from the doctrinaire old media (the politicised press in Britain, politicised broadcasting of the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh/Jon Stewart variety in the States) to websites that preach to the converted. They are caught in a loop and hear opposing views only when their propagandists subject them to ridicule.
To help you escape from political correctness in all its guises, here are my two rules for navigating the new media.
If an article, blogpost or broadcast solely tells you what you want to hear, and reinforces your biases by assuring you that your opponents are not just self-interested or mistaken but actually wicked, then, dear reader, it is a lie.
If a critic judges any work of art other than agitprop on its politics alone, he is telling you nothing about the work and everything about himself.