Generals are often accused of fighting the last war, of confronting every foe through the prism of earlier battles. Political polemicists, no less than military leaders, run the risk of conflating the past and present. Over the past few months, some of our sharpest liberal writers have been warning of a resurgent identity politics, a new political correctness that evokes earlier clashes. Many of these writers have been shaped by the political correctness fights of the 1990s—a tangle of arguments about the literary canon, speech codes, and multiculturalism. Indeed, many of the complaints about the new political correctness foreground ’90s campus conflagrations in which they played some small part—giving their writing a peculiarly antique tinge for arguments that are ostensibly about a twenty-first century perversion of popular culture.

In their description of the new political correctness, these writers point to what they see as a novel and pernicious development: notably, the spread of trigger warnings (advisory labels on syllabi and course outlines alerting students of material that might provoke painful memories) and safe spaces (specially designated locations for rape survivors or LGBT people, for example, to find comfort and community). On an immediate level, the critics raise the question of efficacy. “Trigger warnings aren’t much help in actually overcoming trauma,” Jonathan Chait rightly notes in his essay “Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say,” published earlier this year in New York magazine. “An analysis by the Institute of Medicine has found that the best approach is controlled exposure to it, and experts say avoidance can reinforce suffering.” Safe spaces and the larger trend toward hypersensitivity encourage students to “self-infantilize” and become more “insular,” writes Judith Shulevitz in a piece for The New York Times titled “In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas.”

But more pressingly, these writers argue, such insulations amount to a kind of willful ignorance more than a tolerant openness. By Chait’s definition, “Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate.” As Shulevitz writes, “People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision. Shield them from unfamiliar ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as other people see it.” By this view, political correctness is inherently illiberal, a form of thought control inimical to the open debates that should be promoted by education.

Trigger warnings, as anyone who has witnessed the clueless Hannah Horvath issuing them in her Iowa seminar on the most recent season of “Girls” can attest, are a fair target for criticism. When the reporter Jenny Jarvie, writing for The New Republic, brought widespread attention to their prevalence last year, she also pointed out their excesses. Jarvie quoted a Rutgers student who wanted The Great Gatsby to come with this advisory: “suicide, domestic abuse and graphic violence.” Since all narrative is conflict-driven, it would be hard to imagine a work of fiction that isn’t triggering. And many trigger warnings read like a parody of over-protective skittishness, like the Oberlin document warning that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart may “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more.” Safe spaces, too, seem like an abandonment of the traditional role of higher education as a passage into maturity. In her description of a safe space for rape survivors at Brown University, Shulevitz calls attention to the childish décor: “cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies.”

But are trigger warnings and safe spaces really examples of a new form of political correctness? Chait menacingly describes the new P.C. as “the language police.” Critics pose the argument that, through threats of lawsuits and overzealous parental interference, the timidity of the self-infantilized will cast a shadow on academic culture as a whole. Yet surely people who need trigger warnings and safe spaces are less scary than they are scared. If students are “self-infantilized,” how can they also threaten the free speech of the broader campus? And if universities are so quick to surrender to these ostensible threats of retribution, so unwilling to make arguments against veritable babies, then there could hardly be a robust free speech culture on campus to begin with. There is a disjunction in these accounts: The new P.C. proponents are self-evidently ludicrous, and they also wield an outsized power over academic life. (These accounts also fail to show how, exactly, such outlandish ideas so quickly gain a foothold in major institutions full of the most educated members of society.) Perhaps it’s possible to see trigger warnings and safe spaces as less a cause than a symptom of a stifled intellectual culture on university campuses.