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 example of sexist or racist behavior by their fellow students in an imitation of the tone of voice of the Red Guards or Cultural Revolution Commissar: “Not very ‘politically correct,’ Comrade!” Marx (commenting on how the revolutionaries of one age frequently appeared in the disguise of those of a previous age) once famously remarked that “History happens twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” He forgot to add that, the third time, the joke would almost certainly turn round and bite you.

In fact, the first time I actually encountered the term “political correctness” was when I was giving a talk at an American university in the mid-1980s. I was warned by the organizers of a conference that I should be careful about what I said because, in the new climate of the times following the Reagan election, the right had established campus committees to monitor speakers and take notes on everything said in lectures which could be interpreted as undermining the American Constitution or sapping the moral fiber of the nation’s brightest and best. Here, PC was clearly part and parcel of the 1980s backlash against the 1960s. It was the right and the Moral Majority who were trying to prescribe what could and could not be thought and said in academic classrooms. The experience of the “thought police” in operation at close quarters was sufficiently unpleasant for me to have, at best, highly ambiguous feelings when political correctness started to be implemented by what one may loosely call “our side” in defense of what, in most cases, I take to be “our issues.”

Some extremely odd reversals seemed to be going on here. Strategies associated with the radical right, the security state or the authoritarian left were being appropriated by the inheritors of the free-speech, libertarian radicalism of the 1960s. The only arguments against it seemed to belong to the most feeble of the classical liberal cop-outs. Meanwhile, as a tactic, PC seemed to be empowering small groups of militants in the classrooms and in academic debate about curricula, etc, while leaving them increasingly isolated in the wider political arena. What seemed most characteristic of the PC issue was the way it cut across the traditional left/right divide, and divided some sections of the left from others. In all these ways, PC was and remains prototypical of the kinds of issues which have come to characterize the rapidly shifting political landscape of the 1990s, and thus to be symptomatic of certain broader historical trends. It therefore seems useful, even at this late stage, to place PC in a broader historical context before trying to chart a path through its contradictions.

First, there is the question of its “Americanness.” My own view is that when people dismiss PC as “really an American phenomenon,” they are thinking about PC in too narrow a way, as well as hoping that labelling it will make it go away. I want to argue that, as a political strategy — even more, as a political style — PC was an active presence in British politics in the early 1980s, even though at the time it was known by a different name. What’s more, its so-called “Americanness” tells us something significant about how all post-industrial societies are changing and what is happening to the politics of liberal democratic countries everywhere.

PC seems to me to reflect the fragmentation of the political landscape into separate issues; and the break-up of social constituencies, or at least their refusal to cohere any longer within some broader collective identity or “master category” like that of “class” or “labor.” In fact, PC seems to be typical of those societies where there has been an erosion of the mass party as a political form, a decline in active participation in mass political movements and a weakening in the influence and power of the “old” social movements of the working class and industrial labor. It has taken hold in places where the political initiative has passed to the “new social movements,” which is of course the soil in which PC has been nurtured. It therefore reflects a seismic shift in the political topography.

In the old days, class and economic exploitation were what the left considered the “principal contradiction” of social life. All the major social conflicts seemed to flow from and lead back to them. The era of PC is marked by the proliferation of the sites of social conflict to include conflicts around questions of race, gender, sexuality, the family, ethnicity and cultural difference, as well as issues around class and inequality. Issues like family life, marriage and sexual relations, or food, which used to be considered “non-political,” have become politicized. PC is also characteristic of the rise of “identity politics,” where shared social identity (as woman, Black, gay or lesbian), not material interest or collective disadvantage, is the mobilizing factor. It reflects the spread of “the political” from the public to the private arena, the sphere of informal social interaction and the scenarios of everyday life. The feminist slogan, “The personal is political,” captures these shifts perfectly.

On another dimension PC is a product of what we might call “the culturing of politics” — an approach which is based on the recognition that our relationship to “reality” is always mediated in and through language and that language and discourse are central to the operations of power. It is politics “after cultural studies,” in the sense that it has absorbed many of the theoretical developments in cultural theory and philosophy of recent decades. It may not know much economics, but it sure understands that things — including the movements of the economy — only make sense and become the objects of political struggle because of how they are represented. In other words, they have a cultural or discursive dimension. In this sense, we may say that PC arises in an intellectual culture which has undergone what the philosophers call “the linguistic turn.”

Taken together, these things go some way to explaining the particular style of PC: its confrontational, in-your-face mode of address. It consciously intrudes a stance and tone of voice which seem more appropriate to public contestation into so-called “private” space. Many have commented on the intellectualist or “academic” nature of PC politics. I think they not only mean that PC often seems to be contained within academia. They are also referring to what some philosophers would call its extreme “nominalism,” that is to say, its apparent belief that if things are called by a different name they will cease to exist. It has a highly individualist notion of politics — politics as the lone, embattled individual “witnessing to the the Truth.” PC gives the impression of a small but dedicated band who are determined to stand up and be counted. That isn’t the only sense in which PCers remind one of latter-day Puritans like the Saints of the seventeenth century. A strong strain of moral self-righteousness has often been PC’s most characteristic “voice.”

The rise of political correctness seems to be intimately connected with the fact that, in the US until recently and in the UK still, the 1980s and 1990s have been marked by the dominance of the political new right. The Reagan-Bush and Thatcher regimes commanded the political stage. But they also set the parameters of political action and moral debate. They redefined the contours of public thinking with their virulently free-market social philosophy and set in motion a powerful, new, anti-welfare consensus. Their ascendancy was built not only on their command of the whole state apparatus of government but also on their mastery of the ideological terrain — their willingness to address ideological questions like morality, sexuality parenting, education, authority in the classroom, traditional standards of learning, the organization of knowledge in the curriculum — with the seriousness which they deserved. They successfully fashioned a seductive appeal to selfishness, greed and possessive individualism, striking a sort of populist alliance across the lines of traditional class alignments and introducing the gospel that “market forces must prevail” into the very heart of the left’s traditional support. They exploited ordinary people’s basic fears of crime, race, “otherness,” of change itself. They fished in the murky waters of a narrow and reactionary cultural nationalism and rallied around their sexual and cultural agenda a highly vocal and well-organized “silent” Moral Majority. Paradoxically, though PC is its sworn adversary, the New Right shares with PC an understanding that the political game is often won or lost on the terrain of these moral and cultural issues, apparently far removed from the Westminster (or for that matter, Labour’s) conception of “politics.”