Liberals and conservatives may never agree on whether or how deeply bigotry infects American conservatism. They don’t need to. What America needs is a conservatism whose devotees feel less stigmatized, and who earn that lack of stigma by trying harder to disentangle their support of small government and traditional morality from America’s history of bigotry. To make that possible, liberals and conservatives each need something from the other.

Conservatives need liberals to stop abusing their cultural power. Although conservatives dominate America’s elected offices, liberals wield the greater power to stigmatize. In the 1950s, conservatives could exile liberals from polite company by calling them Communists. Being called anti-American can still sting; ask the NFL players who kneel when the national anthem is played. But in most elite institutions, being accused of bigotry is now more dangerous than being accused of insufficient patriotism. In 2014, Brendan Eich was forced out as the head of the tech company Mozilla for having donated to an anti-gay-marriage initiative. He probably would not have been forced out for donating to, say, a campaign to eliminate the Pledge of Allegiance from California’s schools.

Conservatives feel their cultural vulnerability acutely. In 2011, researchers at Tufts University observed that conservatives consume more “outrage-based” political radio and television than liberals do. One reason, they suggested in a follow-up paper, is that conservatives are more fearful than liberals of discussing politics with people with whom they disagree, because they dread being called a bigot. “When asked how they feel about talking politics,” the researchers noted, “every single conservative respondent raised the issue of being called racist.” Liberals expressed no comparable fear. As a result, they felt less need to take refuge in the “safe political environs provided by outrage-based programs.”

Obviously, political correctness did not create white supremacy, patriarchy, or homophobia. But as the Tufts researchers showed, shaming people for their views can backfire. In a 2011 study, three social psychologists then based at the University of Toronto gave college students two different pamphlets meant to combat prejudice. The first emphasized the value of nondiscrimination (“It’s fun to meet people from other cultures”). The second emphasized social norms that discourage discrimination (“People in my social circle disapprove of prejudice”). The second pamphlet was not only less effective than the first in reducing bigotry; it actually led manifestations of bigotry to spike. The scholars concluded that pressuring people to accept a nonbigoted belief can engender resentment that leads them to express more bigotry than they did before.

Liberals would be wise to recognize this vicious cycle, and to use the nuclear epithet more sparingly. Yes, Fox News and company will likely describe political correctness as a menace to white, straight, Christian men no matter what. But liberals can make Sean Hannity’s work harder by resisting the temptation to deploy the label bigoted, or one of its synonyms, when describing an idea they consider stupid or immoral.