Political correctness

Political correctness (adjectivally: politically correct; commonly abbreviated PC) is a term used by proponents, usually on the political left, to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended to avoid offense to particular groups in society that are deemed to be the objects of discrimination.

Since the late 1980s, advocates of the term use it to describe a preference for inclusive language and avoidance of language or behavior that can be seen as excluding, marginalizing, or insulting to groups of people disadvantaged or discriminated against, particularly groups defined by ethnicity, race, gender, or sexual orientation. In public discourse and the media, the term is frequently used as a pejorative with an implication that these policies are excessive or unwarranted.

History

The phrase politically correct first appeared in the 1930s, when it was used to describe strict adherence to ideology in authoritarian regimes, especially Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Marxist circles

The term political correctness first appeared in Marxist-Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was used to describe strict adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. According to Marxist doctrine, especially the later Marxist theory of "scientific socialism," they were on the correct side of history and thus the policies of the Communist Party were said to be "objectively correct."

Later, in the United States, the phrase came to be associated with accusations of dogmatism in debates between American Communists and American Socialists. According to American educator Herbert Kohl, writing about debates in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Socialists saw the Communists as always believing they had the " politically correct" position on all political matters.

The term "politically correct" was used disparagingly, to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion, and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in egalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance.

Nazism

With the rise of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century, the phrase politically correct was used to describe absolute allegiance to ideological orthodoxies within politics. In 1934, The New York Times reported that Nazi Germany was granting reporting permits "only to pure 'Aryans' whose opinions are politically correct."

The New Left

In the 1970s, the American New Left began using the term politically correct. In the essay The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970), Toni Cade Bambara said that "a man cannot be politically correct and a [male] chauvinist, too." William Safire records this as the first use in the typical modern sense.

There is broad consensus that during the 1970s and 1980s the term was often used as self-critical satire. "Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left, feminists, and progressives... used their term 'politically correct' ironically, as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts." It was considered an in-joke among leftists used to satirize those who were too rigid in their adherence to political orthodoxy.

According to one version, political correctness actually began as an in-joke on the left: radical students on American campuses acting out an ironic replay of the Bad Old Days BS (Before the Sixties) when every revolutionary groupuscule had a party line about everything. They would address some glaring examples of sexist or racist behaviour by their fellow students in imitation of the tone of voice of the Red Guards or Cultural Revolution Commissar: "Not very 'politically correct', Comrade!"

In "Toward a feminist Revolution" (1992) feminist Ellen Willis provides a feminist variation on the term: "In the early eighties, when feminists used the term 'political correctness', it was used to refer sarcastically to the anti-pornography movement's efforts to define a 'feminist sexuality'."

The Bloom controversy

The modern pejorative usage of the term emerged from conservative criticism of the New Left in the late twentieth century, with many describing it as a form of censorship. The flashpoint was publication of Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind which heralded a debate about "political correctness" in American higher education in the 1980s and 1990s. Bloom's book prompted immediate criticism from liberal and activist academics in the United States. Professor of English literary and cultural studies at CMU Jeffrey J. Williams argued that the assault on ... political correctness that simmered through the Reagan years, gained bestsellerdom with Bloom's Closing of the American Mind." Many believed that Bloom's book "attacked the faculty for 'political correctness'." Symposia and conferences were organized on many colleges campuses to denounce and ridicule Bloom's work.

The 1990s

In the wake of this controversy, an October 1990 New York Times article by Richard Bernstein is credited with popularizing the term to a general audience. The term had previously been used primarily within academia: "Across the country the term p.c., as it is commonly abbreviated, is being heard more and more in debates over what should be taught at the universities." Nexis citations in "arcnews/curnews" reveal only seventy total citations in articles to "political correctness" for 1990. One year later, Nexis records 1,532 citations, with a steady increase to more than 7,000 citations by 1994. In May 1991, The New York Times had a follow-up article, noting that the term was increasingly used in a wider public arena:

What has come to be called "political correctness," a term that began to gain currency at the start of the academic year last fall, has spread in recent months and has become the focus of an angry national debate, mainly on campuses, but also in the larger arenas of American life.

The previously obscure far-left term became common currency in the lexicon of the conservative social and political critiques of progressive teaching methods and curriculum changes in the secondary schools and universities of the U.S. Policies, behavior, and speech codes that the speaker or the writer regarded as the imposition of a liberal orthodoxy, were described and criticized as "politically correct." In May 1991, at a commencement ceremony for a graduating class of the University of Michigan, then U.S. President George H. W. Bush used the term in his speech:

The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits."

Conservative backlash

The pejorative usage of the term was popularized by a number of articles in The New York Times and other media outlets throughout the 1990s.Widely used in the debate surrounding Allan Bloom's 1987 book,the term gained further currency in response to Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals (1990), and conservative author Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 book Illiberal Education. Supporters of politically correct language were pejoratively referred to as the "language police."

After 1991, concern over the policing of language extended beyond academia. Two articles on the topic in late 1990 in Forbes and Newsweek both used the Orwellian term "thought police" in their headlines, exemplifying the tone of the new usage. Similar critical terminology was used by D'Souza for a range of policies in academia around victimization, multiculturalism, hate speech, and revising the curriculum (sometimes called "canon busting.")In The New York Times newspaper article "The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct", the reporter Richard Bernstein stated:

The term "politically correct", with its suggestion of Stalinist orthodoxy, is spoken more with irony and disapproval than with reverence. But, across the country the term "P.C.", as it is commonly abbreviated, is being heard more and more in debates over what should be taught at the universities.

During the 1990s, conservative politicians, think tanks, and speakers adopted the phrase as a pejorative descriptor of their ideological opponents – especially in the context of the Culture Wars about language and the content of public-school curricula. These trends were at least in part a response to the demands of multiculturalism and the rise of identity politics, with movements such as feminism, gay rights and ethnic minority movements advocating for the alteration of language and more generally for a reshaping of the curriculum away from the "DEWM's," or Dead White European Males. Roger Kimball, in Tenured Radicals, endorsed Frederick Crews's view that PC is best described as "Left Eclecticism," a term defined by Kimball as "any of a wide variety of anti-establishment modes of thought from structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction, and Lacanian analysis to feminist, homosexual, black, and other patently political forms of criticism."

Liberal response

Commentators on the political left in the United States contend that conservatives use the concept of political correctness to downplay and divert attention from substantively discriminatory behavior against disadvantaged groups. They also argue that the political right enforces its own forms of political correctness to suppress criticism of its favored constituencies and ideologies. In the United States, the term has played a major role in the "culture war" between liberals and conservatives.

Herbert Kohl, in 1992, commented that a number of neoconservatives who promoted the use of the term "politically correct" in the early 1990s were former Communist Party members, and, as a result, familiar with the Marxist use of the phrase. He argued that in doing so, they intended "to insinuate that egalitarian democratic ideas are actually authoritarian, orthodox, and Communist-influenced, when they oppose the right of people to be racist, sexist, and homophobic."

Liberal commentators have argued that the conservatives who used the term did so in an effort to divert political discussion away from the substantive matters of resolving societal discrimination – such as racial, social class, gender, and legal inequality – against people whom conservatives do not consider part of the social mainstream.

Limits of Political Correctness

Glenn Loury explained in 1994 that to address the subject of "political correctness" when power and authority within the academic community is being contested by parties on either side of that issue, is to invite scrutiny of one's arguments by would-be "friends" and "enemies." Combatants from the left and the right will try to assess whether a writer is "for them" or "against them."

Geoffrey Hughes suggested that debate over political correctness concerns whether changing language actually solves political and social problems, with critics viewing it less about solving problems than imposing censorship, intellectual intimidation and demonstrating the moral purity of those who practice it. Hughes also argues that political correctness tends to be pushed by a minority rather than an organic form of language change.

Legacy

The debate over political correctness seemed to diminish in the twenty-first century, or shifted to other discussions about microaggressions, safe spaces, and cancel culture. Still, there are lingering impacts of political correctness in education, media, and science, among others.

Education

Conservative critiques of liberal bias in academia and education, focus on their criticism that the higher education staff in the United States is more liberal than the general population, and that this contributes to an atmosphere of political correctness. William Deresiewicz defines political correctness as an attempt to silence "unwelcome beliefs and ideas," arguing that it is largely the result of for-profit education, as campus faculty and staff are wary of angering students upon whose fees they depend.

Preliminary research published in 2020 indicated that students at a large U.S. public university generally felt instructors were open-minded and encouraged free expression of diverse viewpoints; nonetheless, most students worried about the consequences of voicing their political opinions, with "[a]nxieties about expressing political views and self-censorship ... more prevalent among students who identify as conservative."

Media

In the U.S. the term has been widely used in books and journals, but in Britain, usage has been confined mainly to the popular press. Many such authors and popular-media figures, particularly on the right, have used the term to criticize what they see as bias in the media. William McGowan argues that journalists get stories wrong or ignore stories worthy of coverage, because of what McGowan perceives to be their liberal ideologies and their fear of offending minority groups. Robert Novak, in his essay "Political Correctness Has No Place in the Newsroom," used the term to blame newspapers for adopting language use policies that he thinks tend to excessively avoid the appearance of bias. He argued that political correctness in language not only destroys meaning but also demeans the people who are meant to be protected.

Authors David Sloan and Emily Hoff claim that in the U.S. journalists shrug off concerns about political correctness in the newsroom, equating the political correctness criticisms with the old "liberal media bias" label. According to author John Wilson, left-wing forces of "political correctness" have been blamed for unrelated censorship, with Time citing campaigns against violence on network television in the U.S. as contributing to a "mainstream culture [that] has become cautious, sanitized, scared of its own shadow" because of "the watchful eye of the p.c. police," protests and advertiser boycotts targeting TV shows are generally organized by right-wing religious groups campaigning against violence, sex, and depictions of homosexuality on television.

Science

Groups who oppose the idea that certain scientific theories are "settled," and that dissension from prevailing scientific orthodoxies represents "denial" have adopted the notion of political correctness as part of their response. A series of books with the title "The Politically Incorrect Guide to ...." have been published. Titles such as Jonathan Wells' The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design and Tom Bethell's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science have been published by Regnery, a conservative publishing house.

See also

• Freedom of Speech
• Censorship
• Cancel culture
• Newspeak

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

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• Browne, Anthony. The Retreat of Reason: Political Correctness and the Corruption of Public Debate in Modern Britain. London, UK: Civitas, 2006. ISBN 1903386500
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Further Reading

• Bernstein, David E. You Can't Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscrimination Laws. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2003. ISBN 1930865538
• Hentoff, Nat. Free Speech for Me – But Not for Thee. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1992. ISBN 006019006X.
• Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society revised edition. New York, NY W.W. Norton, 1998. ISBN 0393318540

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