Well, I don’t know if it’s really on the wane, but it seems to be a lot less pervasive than most people think. According to a new article in The Atlantic by Yascha Mounk (screenshot below), based on a new study by an organization called More In Common (click on green screenshot below, and see pdf here), fully 80% of Americans think that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” First, though a bit about the author and the study, both of whom seem to be on the liberal side.

Yascha Mounk is described on his own website as “one of the world’s leading experts on the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of populism. The author of three books, he is a Lecturer on Government at Harvard University, a Senior Fellow at New America, a columnist at Slate, and the host of The Good Fight podcast.”

And “More in Common” describes itself like this:

More in Common [is] a new international initiative to build societies and communities that are stronger, more united, and more resilient to the increasing threats of polarization and social division. We work in partnership with a wide range of civil society groups, as well as philanthropy, business, faith, education, media and government to connect people across the lines of division.

Let’s just say I’ll accept the study’s results for the time being, though I’ve only glanced through it (it’s 166 pages long). The Atlantic article gives a decent summary.

Click on green screenshot below to see the study:

The authors divide Americans into seven “tribes”. The figures below are from the study:



You can read the report to see how these figures are derived, and most of the report is devoted to how tribal membership predicts a number of political views and actions that contribute to the polarization of America. The reason several readers sent me the article, however, is because of one small part of the study: the part about how Americans dislike “political correctness” (henceforth “pc”). In fact, the authors don’t really define the term, but it appears to mean, to both them and the respondents, social strictures about saying what you think if what you think isn’t a widely accepted and liberal opinion.

One might think that if 80% of the American populace are concerned by “political correctness,” then they’d be in favor of free speech. And they are. But in fact most Americans of all seven tribes also feel that “hate speech” is a serious problem (“hate speech” isn’t really defined, either, but I take it to mean speech that demonizes minorities or members of groups to which the speaker doesn’t belong). The figure below shows where each group sits on the pc axis vs the “hate speech is bad” axis:





On average, conservatives tend to think that political correctness (henceforth “pc”) is less of a problem, with “progressive activists” largely rejecting that idea. Conservatives, and moderates, as expected, see pc as more problematic. The two extremes are, then, “progressive activists” (8% of the population) and “devoted conservatives” (6%). That leaves 86% of Americans outside these tribes, and among those, 75% or more, including “traditional liberals” and “passive liberals”, see pc as a problem. The conclusion here? Those who assert that political correctness is a canard, with few people thinking it’s problematic, are dead wrong.

As for hate speech, and free speech, most groups are strongly in favor of free speech, but nearly equally in favor of “protecting people from dangerous and hateful speech”, with devoted conservatives having the greatest disparity between the two figures (86% in favor of fully free speech, 43% saying we need protections against hate speech). The more liberal one is, the more protection you want against hate speech.

The figures below are a mystery to me. How can so many American be in favor of free speech—even offensive free speech, and yet want protections against “dangerous and hateful speech”? The two elements both fall under the First Amendment—unless you consider “dangerous speech” to include things like workplace harassment or speech calling for immediate violence. All I can conclude is that Americans either don’t understand the First Amendment, do understand it and disagree with it, or don’t see the manifest contradiction between allowing speech when it offends people and preventing speech that is “dangerous and hateful.” For, as we know, a vast amount of “offensive” speech is considered not just “hateful”, but “dangerous”. Witness the cry that people are actually harmed when offensive speech occurs, like criticism of Islam or the use of the “n-word”. Or when people like Ben Shapiro or Charles Murray speak.

Here are the data from the survey:

A few more counterintuitive findings:

Young people are as wary of political correctness as old ones: 79% of those under 24, for instance, are uncomfortable with pc.

Nonwhites, surprisingly, are often more uncomfortable with pc than are whites: 79% of whites are pc-averse compared to 82% of Asians, 87% of Hispanics, and 88% of Native Americans. However, blacks are 75% pc averse; still a substantial majority, but only 4% less than whites (I would have expected a bigger difference).

The rich are less wary of pc than the poorer: 83% of those earning less than $50,000/year are pc-wary compared to only 70% who make more than $100,000/year.

In general, then, the pro-pcers comprise only the “progressive activists,” who tend to be rich, white, and college educated. These are precisely the people who are running American universities, which explains a lot.

So what does this all mean? The authors, as well as the article below, think it means trouble for much of the Left, for if we ourselves act in a pc way, as many do, you’ll find many of the populace aren’t sympathetic. On the other hand, there is that overwhelming desire for protections against “hate speech”, and I don’t know how to reconcile that with pc-hatred. I’ll let you hear Mounk’s conclusions:

It turns out that while progressive activists tend to think that only hate speech is a problem, and devoted conservatives tend to think that only political correctness is a problem, a clear majority of all Americans holds a more nuanced point of view: They abhor racism. But they don’t think that the way we now practice political correctness represents a promising way to overcome racial injustice. [JAC: this confuses me, because one way we practice political correctness is to call for restrictions on hate speech or dangerous speech—precisely what most people think should be regulated!] The study should also make progressives more self-critical about the way in which speech norms serve as a marker of social distinction. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the affluent and highly educated people who call others out if they use “problematic” terms or perpetrate an act of “cultural appropriation.” But what the vast majority of Americans seem to see—at least according to the research conducted for “Hidden Tribes”—is not so much genuine concern for social justice as the preening display of cultural superiority. [JAC: I’ve often said that Authoritarian Leftism, of which pc is a symptom, can damage the Left, and may well have damaged Clinton and helped Trump in the last election. Clinton’s characterization of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables“, for instance, is a prime example of this, and my guess is that her remark cost her dearly.] . . . The gap between the progressive perception and the reality of public views on this issue could do damage to the institutions that the woke elite collectively run. A publication whose editors think they represent the views of a majority of Americans when they actually speak to a small minority of the country may eventually see its influence wane and its readership decline. And a political candidate who believes she is speaking for half of the population when she is actually voicing the opinions of one-fifth is likely to lose the next election. [JAC: Are you listening, HuffPo and New Yorker?] In a democracy, it is difficult to win fellow citizens over to your own side, or to build public support to remedy injustices that remain all too real, when you fundamentally misunderstand how they see the world.

Finally, the article below, by Tyler Cowen on Bloomberg view, is relevant to the above (h/t: reader Barry), for it suggests that by focusing too intently on identity, the Left is eating itself: a job that Republicans then don’t have to do.





A few quotes:

Of course there is a lot of racism out there, which makes political correctness all the more tempting. Yet polling data suggests that up to 80 percent of Americans are opposed to politically correct thinking in its current manifestations. Latinos and Asian-Americans are among the groups most opposed, and even 61 percent of self-professed liberals do not like political correctness. The PC weapon reared its head again this week when Senator Elizabeth Warren made a big show of her genealogical test showing she is some small part Native American. To someone immersed in the political correctness debates, this obsession with identity might seem entirely natural. But the actual reality is more brutal The reality is that many Americans already think that the Democrats talk too much about identity. Warren would have done better to drop the topic altogether, as both right-wing and left-wing critics agree. Instead, she has kept the identity issue in the limelight, and reminded Americans that elite, mostly Democratic-leaning institutions, such as Harvard, like to pat themselves on the back for their diversity in ways which seem phony to most of the rest of us.

Cowen’s ending:

Here’s another ugly truth. The biggest day-to-day losers from the political correctness movement are other left-of-center people, most of all white moderate Democrats, especially those in universities. If you really believe that “the PC stuff” is irrational and out of control and making institutions dysfunctional, and that universities are full of left-of-center people, well who is going to suffer most of the costs? It will be people in the universities, and in unjust and indiscriminate fashion. That means more liberals than conservatives, if only because the latter are relatively scarce on the ground. Another bout of political correctness is about to dominate the headlines, and that is the lawsuit against Harvard for allegedly discriminating against Asian-Americans in its admissions decisions. Whatever you think Harvard did, or however the court rules, this issue is not a winner for the left. It at least appears to pit the interests of Asian-Americans against those of African-Americans, and thus it fractures what might otherwise be a winning coalition for Democrats. It makes a mockery out of phrases such as “people of color,” because in this case like many others the aggregation obscures some very real and important differences. The lawsuit also will remind Americans that attempts to be more fair to one group will, in practice, involve hypocrisy and unfair treatment toward other groups, in this case the Asian-Americans who found it much harder to get into Harvard because they were not a targeted minority. Every time identity politics is in the headlines — rather than, say, wages or health care — Donald Trump’s re-election chances go up. As Tony Blair said recently: “If you put right-wing populism against left populism, right-wing populism will win.”

Were I Warren, I would have demurred and moved on; I now think that campaign video she issued makes her look a bit ridiculous, even if Trump is far more ridiculous. And the three paragraphs above ring quite true to me. The “people of color” fight mentioned below is especially distressing because it shows the shattering of the Left most clearly. Predictably, the Left is against the Harvard lawsuit with Asians claiming they are discriminated against in college admissions (as I believe they are), but yet Asians are also considered people of color, and are treated as oppressed minorities in other ways. One example is when the New York Times and many of its readers defended the racist lucubrations of technology editor Sarah Jeong because, they claimed, she was simply responding to being attacked as a female person of color. An ethnic group can’t be both oppressed and privileged!

h/t: Grania, Barry