During my lifetime, I watched “political correctness” go from a niche term to a staple of the culture wars between those who identify themselves as politically Right and those on the Left (vague as those terms are, especially in the USA). Nowadays, it’s been replaced by “woke” and “DEI” and the like.
I read some key texts to trace its evolution from something arguably benign and focused to a signal that everything they do is wrong, because they hate us. It’s also a story of concern about bad ideas becoming concern about (definitionally) bad people, plus increasingly heated rhetoric and demonstrable dishonesty.
Think of these as a series of book reviews with an overarching theme.
From the 1930s to the 1980s, and the 1984 Bennett Report
From the 1930s to the 1980s, “politically correct” evolved from a term of praise used by fascists and communists to refer to themselves into a phrase used by some self-identified leftists to criticize other self-identified leftists. That history is mostly irrelevant, but I sketch it.
The bulk of the post is about William Bennett’s “To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education.” In this report, the purpose of teaching the humanities is to build better humans and perpetuate Western culture. Which it is no longer doing. The report assigns blame to students, who only care about getting jobs, and to the post-WWII shift in the job of a professor, which stopped being to “profess” – to teach what is known – and became about discovering new knowledge.
This report is mild by later standards.
1987: The Closing of the American Mind
Allen Bloom’s book became a surprise best seller, heated the rhetoric, and introduced some tropes we’ll keep seeing.
His gripe is essentially the same as Bennett’s, though he really leans on how the classical Greeks got it right. (Other cultures aren’t just different, they’re wrong.) A main shift is in who’s to blame: the Enlightenment, consumerist capitalism, ease of divorce, rock music, feminism, sexual liberation, radio and television, perfidious German philosophy (starting with Nietzsche and Heidegger), and nostalgia for Weimar Germany.
1990: Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education
In a sense, both Bennett and Bloom were insiders complaining about other insiders. This author, Roger Kimball, is explicitly a non-academic attacking academia from the outside, so the us vs. them battle lines are sharper. The “us” is decent Americans (and men); the “them” is specifically professors who were in college in “the Sixties” (and especially feminists).
Everything is heightened – the stakes, the villainy of the opposition, the immediacy of the crisis, and so on. He introduces and uses heavily particular rhetorical techniques that I think are frankly and intentionally dishonest.
1991: Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus
The term “political correctness” was fairly obscure until 1990, when it went mainstream. Dinesh D’Souza’s book Illiberal Education was a big part of that.
D’Souza decisively finished the ongoing shift in rhetoric. Bennett and Bloom mostly attacked bad ideas. Kimball cared about ideas, but the focus was on bad people. D’Souza gestures toward the by-now-old standard issues, but the book is nearly entirely about people and power.
Namely, bad professors have allied with Black and feminist students and feckless administrators to intimidate and destroy students and other professors who fail to submit. The resulting racial conflict is bound to spill out into society at large.
The book is stunningly dishonest, in a well-crafted way that slipped right past most reviewers. So much so that I dissected his rhetorical moves in a series titled “How not to be a sucker.”