By James Kwak

In an article about political correctness in contemporary politics, Amanda Hess of the Times writes:

“Politically correct” was born as a lefty in-joke, an insidery nod to the smugness of holier-than-thou liberals. As Gloria Steinem put it: “ ‘Politically correct’ was invented by people in social-justice movements to make fun of ourselves.”

As far as I can tell from publicly available sources, Amanda Hess went to college during the George W. Bush administration, so I take it she is working from sources (like Gloria Steinem) here. But she’s not far off the mark.

I went to college in the late 1980s, which is when the concept of political correctness was spreading. My first recollection of political correctness is of a friend saying, “That’s so PC,” talking about someone else who was always sure to participate in the left-wing cause of the day. “Politically correct” absolutely was a phrase that lefties came up with to make fun of themselves. And it did not have the connotation of criticizing other (politically incorrect) people that it has today. If you were PC, that just meant that you were against the Nicaraguan contras, in favor of divesting from companies that invested in South Africa, against discrimination against people with AIDS, in favor of a nuclear freeze, and so on. Those were the issues–not the vocabulary used by rich white frat boys.

In other words, being politically correct meant adopting the appropriately subversive position on every issue. It was a faintly derogatory term because it implied that you didn’t think about issues independently; you just lined up on whatever side the left was supposed to line up on. “Politically correct” was a way to describe the herding behavior of left-wing people–not a way to criticize right-wing people.

Today, political correctness has become one of the favored bogeymen of the Trump campaign and of conservatives in general. People of my generation could genuinely be either baffled or aghast: It was a JOKE! Don’t you get it? But etymology is not destiny, of course. Conservatives have changed political correctness into something it wasn’t back in the old days, and that’s just the way it is.

But in its original meaning–the idea that you have to toe the party line, to be the hardest of the hard core–it is among conservatives that political correctness reigns supreme. On virtually every issue–taxes, Obamacare, abortion, Medicaid block grants, Dodd-Frank, guns, climate change, even the theological status of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton–every Republican falls in line for fear of offending the omnipotent Base. Do you really think that every Republican member of the House and Senate honestly believes that human activity has not had an impact on the climate? Do they honestly believe that allowing anyone to carry a gun makes the world a safer place? But they have to pretend that they are as stupid as they sound for fear of offending Exxon Mobil, the NRA, and the conservative activists who really do believe that climate change is a fantasy concocted by intellectuals and that the best solution to crime is more guns.

So yes, political correctness is a problem. It’s a problem among Republicans. As for Democrats, who can’t even figure out if we are for or against the TPP, we can’t even get our act together enough for political correctness to be an issue.

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