Early twentieth-century Marxists pioneered the concept of political correctness, or PC, using it literally and positively to denote the single correct stance, or line of action, on a specific political issue under prevailing conditions. A seminal example is Chinese revolutionary Mao Tse-Tung’s 1927 speech “On the Rectification of Incorrect Ideas in the Party,” which begins by criticizing “various non-proletarian ideas which greatly hinder the carrying out of the Party’s correct line.”
In the 1980s, conservatives in the United States, Europe, and Latin America appropriated the term from the Marxists in an ironic critique of dogmatic tendencies of liberal and leftist groups. Purporting to be open-minded and tolerant, conservatives came to satirizing these groups for claiming to have discovered the single correct view on a wide range of controversial issues, including affirmative action, crime, parenting, multiculturalism, hate speech, feminism, welfare, economic regulation, and environmental protection.
The Essence Of Political Correctness
Conservatives thus deflected longstanding criticism of themselves as rigid and intolerant, invading the traditional liberal turf of reasonableness, flexibility, and tolerance. However, despite its leftish connotations, political correctness is best conceived as an ideological narrowing, intolerance, and silencing of dissent all across the political spectrum. Although conservatives have succeeded in exposing small-mindedness among “progressives,” the latter have countered that conservatives exhibit their own PC.
A telling sign of all PC is its tendency, especially among activists and ideologues, to discourage rather than engage diverse opinions and to proscribe offending topics as off-limits for open and frank discussion. A common example of leftwing PC is depicting critics of affirmative action as necessarily racist or sexist. On the right-wing side, after the 9/11 attacks, PC conservatives portrayed critics of U.S. foreign policy as unpatriotic and even treasonous. Similarly, PC centrists often depict any views that stray from the middle of the road as inherently flawed and “extremist.” In a sense, PC is a thoroughly democratic tool available all across the ideological spectrum, as anyone can use it—or derision of it—to pummel adversaries without requiring any special authorization.
Problems Of Political Correctness
In the 1970s, a smattering of the new left self-critically referred to their own politically correct tendencies—a critique of the left virtually taken over by conservatives a decade later. By the late 1990s, an increasing number of progressives were expressing renewed doubts about left-wing PC among their peers. An awareness grew that PC, while providing clarity and comfort for the like-minded and according respect to the marginalized, could also undermine one’s own cause by limiting one’s field of vision and discouraging self-correction.
For instance, after Republican president Richard Nixon used the racial preferences of the 1969 Philadelphia Plan for affirmative action to divide and conquer the Democrats’s two main allies—labor unions and civil rights groups— liberals’ increasing support for affirmative action in the 1970s and 1980s may have unwittingly promoted the conservative agenda. By stifling dissent about group preferences and their divisive effects, liberal PC possibly played into the hands of supporters of the socioeconomic status quo.
Similarly, conservative PC within George W. Bush’s administration arguably damaged the long-term electoral prospects of the Republican Party by silencing internal critics of the Iraq War (2003–) and of deregulative, supply-side economics, leading to the Republican electoral catastrophe of 2008. More generally, the ideological blinders of PC narrow the alternatives and possibilities under consideration by whoever uses PC to stifle debate and promote political uniformity. This pattern suggests a self-defeating cognitive and behavioral process reflecting Harold Lass well’s psychological formula for political activism: unresolved personal conflicts displaced onto public objects and rationalized in terms of the public good.
This analysis, if accurate, suggests the counterintuitive inference that political groups might do well to tolerate or even encourage the PC proclivities of their opponents while striving to reduce their own. Ironically, Mao’s iconic speech promoting PC within the Communist Party of China offers, perhaps unwittingly, a corrective to the excesses of PC. While anchored in Marxist scientism alleging a single correct conclusion, Mao also criticized dogmatism and urged his comrades to engage in open and vigorous debate within the party—to be followed by strict party discipline in enforcing the view that ultimately prevailed. He explicitly discouraged the currying of favor with one’s political associates by politely taking safe positions in public.
The Price Of Challenging And Enforcing Political Correctness
Throughout history, the politically incorrect have paid a heavy price for their deviation from accepted norms. Socrates, for instance, paid with his life for encouraging Athenian youths to think for themselves in opposition to the thinking of powerful individuals and groups within their society. Since the 1980s, conservative organizations such as Accuracy in Academia have targeted numerous examples of political discrimination against conservatives who spoke or acted “incorrectly.” In 2002, Bill Maher’s network television show Politically Incorrect was canceled after Maher denied on air that group behind the 2001 attacks were cowards. In 2008, Christopher Buckley was fired from the conservative magazine National Review, founded by his father, William F. Buckley, for crossing party lines to endorse liberal Barack Obama for president.
Less often noted is the price paid by those who enforce PC, a point stressed by John Stuart Mill in his 1859 classic, On Liberty. Opinions are seldom completely right or wrong, Mill argued, and open discussion is the only way for partially correct opinions to come nearer to the truth. Even if a particular view happens to be correct, he went on, “if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.” It is the group, or the entire society, that suffers most by shielding itself from a wide and potentially enriching diversity of “correct” and “incorrect” views.
Political Correctness And Related Phenomena
It may be helpful to connect, yet distinguish, political correctness and four related phenomena. First, PC is a historically situated special case of political dogmatism. Second, the culture wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries exhibit a good deal of PC from both the right and the left, but conservative defense of traditional values, like progressive promotion of multicultural ones, can be conducted in either an intolerant and dogmatic, PC, or open-minded and tolerant, non-PC, way. Third, PC constitutes a form of censorship, but unlike official or legal censorship, it works in mostly informal and even unconscious ways, as Lass well, Eric Hoffer, and others have implied in hypothesizing neurotic bases of political zealotry. Finally, many laypersons think of PC as a form of politeness, either appropriate or excessive, that militates against using offensive language or derogatory names, especially regarding groups with history of discrimination against them.
Political Correctness: Thriving But Challenged
As the first decade of the twenty-first century gave way to the second, references to political correctness continued to abound in the mass media. A 2009 Google search yielded millions of current or recent references to political correctness. The most widely read satirical periodical in the United States, The Onion, returned to Mao’s legacy by devoting an entire issue to contemporary Communist Chinese political correctness. The lead article, “China Strong,” reads satirically:
According to all sources, the People’s Republic of China is strong. The nation is united, the military unmatched, the economy vibrant, and the people ever joyful. Similarly correct sources verified that China has always been triumphant. In other news, the Chinese government is fair, all-knowing, and wise, propelled by the strength of two billion loyal hands, all pulling together as one under the Great Celestial Bureaucracy high above. Experts all agreed that there can be no question of this claim, as this claim is the truth.
Despite the partial accuracy of this mock claim, twenty-first–century Communist Chinese authorities have in fact been facing tens of thousands of grassroots rebellions annually all across the country—a warning, perhaps, of the costs of substituting political correctness for political correction.
Bibliography:
- Cummings, Michael S. Beyond Political Correctness. London: Lynne Rienner, 2001.
- Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer. New York: Perennial Library, 1951.
- Lasswell, Harold. Psychopathology and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930.
- Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. New York:W.W. Norton, 1975.
- Skrentny, John. The Ironies of Affirmative Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
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See also:
- How to Write a Political Science Essay
- Political Science Essay Topics
- Political Science Essay Examples
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