The reason people don't understand why PC becomes so entrenched is because "political correctness" is itself a phrase that obscures the institutional rationale for things. PC is nothing more or less than advanced, institutionalized liberalism. I have come to dislike the phrase "political correctness run amok" very strongly. It suggests that just a little bit of PC would be sensible, or that PC is just an extreme version of something basically rational, which it's not. You can't identify and combat "political correctness run amok," because it's a meaningless way to describe the phenomenon.
The phenomenon is liberalism, and the reason Western society is in the death grip of political correctness is because PC is an expression of the death grip that liberalism has on all our institutions--the media, the military, the universities, the mainline churches, etc. All of them are PC because all of them have, in ways unique to the character or charism of each, adopted the essentials of liberalism. In particular, the belief that erasing distinctions--and particularly categories as they apply to human beings--is the highest possible calling in life, somehow residing at the core of the institution's mission, is the liberal ideal to which all We3stern institutions now subscribe.
What Larry Auster sometimes calls the non-discrimination principle, that is, the notion that discrimination is the single greatest possible evil and that all goods are tertiary to the good of advancing the liberal ideal of non-discrimination, really is the ruling principle of our society. Recognizing this fact makes every single instance of PC madness fully comprehensible. It also explains why everyone knows by instinct the seemingly byzantine demands of PC, even when they aren't written down anywhere. Being based on such a simple principle, people are able to instantly and without reflection apply it to any given situation at all. Finally, recognizing this fact also explains why people are so hopelessly confused by it all--they accept the basic premises of liberalism, and they largely know precisely when and how to cringe before its demands ("Not that there's anything wrong with that!"), but they nonetheless are baffled when they see institutions behaving in accordance with the raw, anti-rational radicalism of the non-discrimination principle. They fail to identify liberalism as such as the source of the problem, being basically liberals themselves, so they blame it on some hazy thing called "political correctness." Moreover, they realize that this is an expression of something that they basically accept, and cannot repudiate utterly, so they say that it is somehow "run amok."
If people would simply call it what it is, that is institutionalized liberalism, we could at least have a debate on the real causes of such insanity and decide whether we really do think the sacrifice worth it.
The degree to which liberal principles have been accepted in the United States is generally understated. The primary disagreement between what we call conservatives and liberals is only a matter of how far they should go, with conservatives playing the role of liberal skeptics who tend to assume that the realm of politics should be the general limit. The idea, for example, that sexual activity between consenting adults in the privacy of their own home should be between them is mainstream among conservatives, a fact that liberals rarely acknowledge. Prior to the "liberal era" in the West, the very notion of "private sexual activity," or sexual activity that exists outside the realm of accountability to society, and even the concept of a "private life" outside of that realm, would have been alien; such private-public life is itself a liberal social construct, and one of many that are tacitly and quietly accepted by the majority. Other concepts from "individual autonomy," to a general belief that authority rests on the consent of those which it affects are equally liberal and mainstream. Again, in that case, the disagreement between conservatives is not, for example, whether "government derives its authority from the consent of the government" is true or not, but whether or not that applies just to the state or can be applied socially to all institutions from employers, to families.
In more modern times, probably around the turn of the twentieth century, liberalism split into what we call progressivism (modern liberalism) and libertarianism today. At their core, they both hold the same values of equality and personal autonomy combined with a positivist view of all authority. Where they differ is that libertarianism rejected the statism that was in vogue during that time while progressivism is a statist liberalism that aggressively uses the state to pare inequalities in all spheres of life and to try to create an environment in which each individual is an autonomous being within a greater community. That rejection of radical statist social intervention was why the political right and libertarians were able to make common cause during the Cold War, despite the many disagreements between a number of conservative factions and libertarians.Of course, these are generalizations as there are at least two competing forms of libertarianism, one approaching it from the right as a conservative rejection of statism to achieve conservative goals and the other from the left to achieve liberal goals without radical statism. It is perfectly fair to say that both modern liberals, libertarians and even mainstream conservatism are all heirs of liberalism, though that applies far more to the first two. Unfortunately, we are like students of romance languages who don't acknowledge the common origin in Latin of our respective fields of study. That blindness that verges on willful ignorance is no small part of why our political debates today are so often meaningless.
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