Australians, said Peter Dutton this week, are “sick of the political correctness”.

Last year, Dutton urged us to “rise up” against political correctness, a phenomenon he blamed for stifling the enjoyment of Christmas music.

But his December revolution must have misfired somewhere. In 2017, he’s still lamenting the PC scourge, in a discussion of marriage equality in which he urged CEOs to “stick to their knitting” rather than opine about government policy.

What is this all-powerful doctrine that deters Peter Dutton from his carolling? What, precisely, does “political correctness” mean? The short answer is: almost nothing, and thus pretty much anything you like. The long answer entails a detour through recent cultural history.

As the journalist Richard Cooke recently noted on Twitter, for most of the 20th century, conservatives maintained a pretty unequivocal position on censorship: they supported it.

Until quite recently, the Australian state was notorious for banning books, films, plays and anything much else that transgressed against traditional Christian morality. In 1941, the Postmaster-General described James Joyce’s Ulysses as “a filthy book that should not only be banned but burnt”. As late as 1972, Australia prohibited novels by William S Burroughs, Jean Genet, Henry Miller and Gore Vidal.

Today, conservatives decry “political correctness” for imposing a gag on ordinary people on behalf of a cultural elite. Yet that was pretty much exactly the logic of the old censorship regime that they backed: wealthy connoisseurs could ogle “artistic” nudes, while police ruthlessly suppressed racy magazines aimed at a mass audience.

It took extensive direct action by leftists to smash the old system: think of Wendy Bacon and the libertarians at Tharunka setting out to shock the establishment with their provocations, even at the risk of prison. Yes, Virginia, people went to jail in Australia (real jail, that is: not the make-believe jail Andrew Bolt seems to think he faces) for publishing stuff that conservatives didn’t like.

Until the late 80s, the term “political correctness” was almost never used in the mainstream media. Insofar as the phrase circulated, it did so on the left – but not in the way you might think.

“Political correctness” was not a terminology devised by the Frankfurt School for the nefarious program of cultural Marxists. Rather, it was a joke, a gag employed by anti-censorious lefties in the US.

As Moira Weigel argues:

‘Politically correct’ became a kind of in-joke among American leftists – something you called a fellow leftist when you thought he or she was being self-righteous … Until the late 1980s, ‘political correctness’ was used exclusively within the left, and almost always ironically as a critique of excessive orthodoxy.

Jesse Walker makes the same point, noting that American radicals used “’politically correct’ [as] an unkind term for leftists who acted as though good politics were simply a matter of mastering the right jargon.” The phrase only entered the mainstream during the so-called American campus wars of the late 80s and the early 90s.

In October 1990, Richard Bernstein of the New York Times published a piece entitled The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct, in which he decried a censorious regime enforcing “a cluster of opinions about race, ecology, feminism, culture and foreign policy [that] defines a kind of ‘correct’ attitude toward the problems of the world …”

Over the next few months, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, New York Magazine and Time chimed in with similar articles. The phrase spread across the world, including to Australia – and has remained a stock term in the arsenal of rightwing populism ever since.

But how were conservatives able to present themselves so quickly as opponents of censorship, given their long history of opposition to free speech?

The articles that popularised “political correctness” as a phrase and as an idea came on the heels of several books decrying the influence of the campus left. In 1987, Allan Bloom published his remarkable bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. In 1990, Roger Kimball followed him with Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. In 1991, Dinesh D’Souza chimed in with Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus.

As Weigal says, the first crop of anti-PC articles built upon these texts, which, without necessarily using the words “political correctness”, popularised a perception of American universities as hotbeds of subversion, intolerance and bien pensant gibberish.

Yet, in other respects, the arguments made by Bloom et al were very different from those mouthed by anti-PC warriors today. The Closing of the American Mind offered a spirited defence of the traditional university. For Bloom and Kimball, campus leftists, feminists and deconstructionists undermined the western canon with a relativism that declared Bugs Bunny the cultural equal of Shakespeare.

In that sense, the early anti-PC push came from men who were unabashedly elitist.

Kimball quotes Cardinal Newman’s description of a university as dedicated to “a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid equitable dispassionate mind” and so on.

It’s a passage likely to provoke a bitter laugh from anyone associated with today’s degree factories. These days, your liberal education gets delivered by underpaid postgrads on short-term contracts, young men and women far too concerned with paying their rent to cultivate delicate tastes. The old fashioned university has largely disappeared – destroyed by the right’s enthusiasm for the market, not by the machination of radical academics.

In any case, the rhetoric once used to defend high culture against leftist barbarians now studs the speeches of men who have never read a book in their life. Think of Donald Trump: when he decries political correctness, he’s not urging a return to Plato but defending calling women “dogs” and “pigs”.

Roger Kimball helped establish the notion of the modern university awash with sneering, politically correct professors. But Kimball blamed the “tenured radicals” for what he called “the degraded pop culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog”.

Fast forward to 2017, and opposition to political correctness means characters like Milo Yiannopoulos, who built his journalistic “reputation” by arguing about video games. Bloom sought to protect universities from vulgarity; Milo tells students their teachers are “cunts”.

Yet that fairly significant shift in the argument hasn’t dinted the popularity of anti-PC rhetoric in the slightest. How is that possible?

Amanda Taub notes that the term “political correctness” almost never gets allocated any specific meaning. “What defines it,” she says, “is not what it describes but how it’s used: as a way to dismiss a concern or demand as a frivolous grievance rather than a real issue.”

When you label someone “politically correct”, you’re saying that they’re innately ridiculous

You can see what she means if you re-read the foundational articles from 1990 and 1991. If, in some ways, they describe a vanished world, the voice in which they do so remains instantly familiar: all of them written in a lightly ironic or overtly sarcastic register, with the author presented as a common sense outsider wryly bemused by the preposterous antics thus chronicled.

While every piece contains multiple instances of liberal censoriousness, the specifics aren’t really the point. Indeed, they’re often wrong.

For instance, Are you politically correct? – John Taylor’s influential piece for New York Magazine – opens with a chilling account of PC students hounding Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom:

‘Racist’ ‘Racist!’ ‘The man is a racist!’ Such denunciations, hissed in tones of self-righteousness and contempt, vicious and vengeful, furious, smoking with hatred – such denunciations haunted Stephen Thernstrom for weeks … It was hellish, this persecution. Thernstrom couldn’t sleep. His nerves were frayed, his temper raw.

Scary stuff.

Yet, as Erica Hellerstein and Judd Legum explain, the account was fictionalised, with Thernstrom himself admitting that “nothing like that ever happened”. Yes, he was criticised by his students – and then he simply decided not to offer that particular course any more.

Similarly, Newsweek eventually amended its equally significant 1990 article Taking Offense. The correction reads:

In our cover story about politically correct thought on campus … Newsweek stated that ‘at Sarah Lawrence and a few other places the PC spelling is “womyn,” without the “men”.’ Though some individuals at the college may follow this practice, the school does not, in fact, endorse the alternative spelling of “women”. Newsweek regrets the mistake and any embarrassment it may have caused the college.

Everyone makes errors. But these blunders neatly illustrate Taub’s point: writers attacking “political correctness” need neither definitions nor facts since they never embark on a good faith engagement with their subject.

You can argue about the merits or otherwise of alternative feminist spellings. You can critique deconstruction and Marxism and anything else you like. But when you label someone “politically correct”, you’re saying that they’re innately ridiculous and not worth taking seriously.

That’s the point of the term – and that’s why it’s become so ubiquitous.

When CEOs wrote to Malcolm Turnbull about marriage equality, Peter Dutton’s denunciation of “political correctness” was simply a rhetorical tic: a way of swatting away a problem that he didn’t want to confront.

Marriage equality enjoys overwhelming support from the Australian public and has done so for a long time. The most recent polls show that, even in conservative electorates, the majority of people want the question resolved in the affirmative.

The opponents of equal marriage, on the other hand, are a small group of zealots, committed to imposing their cultural and moral values on the rest of us. No obfuscation changes that.