There’s good PC and bad PC. The good PC says you should not go around calling Mexicans “rapists and murders”. The bad PC is harder to explain, but I tried in this Econlog post. The real problem is not so much the idea of political correctness, but rather that it is used as a weapon in an ideological war. More specifically, it’s used by the left to shame the right. Viewed from this perspective, you could say that if the PC advocates are correct about the need for PC, then it’s actually used far to little. It also needs to be used against the left. Here’s Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry in The Week:
If there are saints in the church of secular progressivism, the Hollywood Ten are surely among them. These are the individuals who worked in Hollywood and were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to answer the question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” — thus becoming political martyrs.
In its popular form, the story of the Hollywood blacklist has been distorted somewhat. While the fear of Communist agitators — a fear not wholly removed from fact — working in Hollywood was used by Sen. Joe McCarthy for opportunistic political motives, the movement was originally launched by private individuals genuinely interested in removing Communist influence from Hollywood, and they did this through peaceful, “non-coercive” means: naming and shaming, boycotts, and threats of boycotts.
Several members of the Hollywood Ten actually were members of the Communist Party and had remained members of the Communist Party even after the Stalinist Purges of the 1930s that removed that party’s credibility in America. That is to say, whatever their other beliefs or intentions, they endorsed the end of liberal democracy and the advent of a global totalitarian government ruled by Joseph Stalin or someone like him. And yet, the idea that such people should be blacklisted is regarded as anathema by the contemporary left. So they are seen as progressive saints.
The problem actually goes far beyond the Hollywood Ten. Much of the 20th century left is morally tainted by being soft on communism (just as much of the right was tainted by being soft on fascism). Even today, many 20th century artists are revered on the left for being “politically conscious”, when in fact they knowingly supported genocidal communist regimes. Sorry, but that’s not OK.
I point this out because you may have heard that the renowned Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, a man whom it is seemingly impossible to refer to without using the word “contrarian,” is a supporter of Donald Trump. After Thiel recently decided to donate $1.25 million to Trump’s campaign, the group Project Include, led by former venture capitalist Ellen Pao, has decided to sever ties, not even with Thiel himself, but with Y Combinator, a renowned Silicon Valley incubator that has named Thiel as a part-time partner.
It seems that on the progressive left, blacklists are only bad when they target a certain group of people.
This helps to explain part of the appeal of Donald Trump. His supporters see how PCism is used as a cudgel against them, and how large groups of Americans (on the left) are completely exempt from criticism by the cultural elites. Their resentment pushes them to unfortunate extremes, supporting someone who engages in both the morally justified and morally unacceptable types of political incorrectness. But it’s entirely predictable that you’d get this sort of backlash.
If the left wants to be taken seriously on political correctness, they need to write an entirely new history of the 20th century. In this new history, many of their most revered artists will become Leni Riefenstahls. I don’t think there is anyone on the left that is willing to look history in the eye, in quite that way. I hope I’m wrong.
PS. Here’s an example, if you don’t know what I’m talking about. The 1930 Soviet (Ukrainian) film “Earth” is a fine film on pure aesthetic grounds. (But then the same could be said of Riefenstahl’s films.) It also has a very sinister subtext, as it portrays kulaks as villains. Recall that Stalin demonized and murdered them by the millions, just as Hitler demonized and murdered the Jews. Now let’s consider a typical film review of Earth, this one from “Senses of Cinema” (but you could find another dozen similar ones):
Seen today as the final work in a loose trilogy that also comprises Zvenigora (1928) and Arsenal (1929), Earth is Dovzhenko’s ultimate paean to nature, the land and those who toil on it and whose lives are inextricably bound up with it. The film is literally teeming with grandiose images of the natural world: such as the opening shots of a vast sky and rolling fields, of sunflowers and apples. The farmers collective relationship to this world and its order is immediately established through the juxtaposition of an old man dying (the end of life, of a cycle) and young children (the beginning); the fact that they are eating the apples that lie strewn on the grass further crystallises the sense of a constant, natural cycle of birth, growth and death (as does the justly famous shot of a woman and a sunflower, in which the composition makes them almost graphically contiguous across the frame).
It goes on and on in these glowing terms, with no reference to the sinister implications. (Imagine the critical response to a typical Nazi-era German film that mocked Jews.) The humanities in most countries are heavily tainted by their ambiguous relationship with communism. Lots of people assume that the problem has gone away, now that the Cold War is over. Not so, it’s as bad as it ever was–indeed getting worse. Support for communism among millennials is rising fast, with 37% having a favorable view of Che Guevara. That’s more than for Trump! You can find posters of Guevara on the walls of faculty offices in many colleges across the country. Indeed 18% even have a favorable view of Mao. And liberals can’t imagine how 40% of Americans plan to vote for Trump (some with an unfavorable view of him).
PPS. My daughter’s high school has a picture of Mao on one of its wall murals. No picture of Hitler, however. Seems they don’t care about the feelings of those students whose parents fled communist China. Maybe Newton, Massachusetts needs a bit more political correctness.