…with Stalin’s words, “Fascism is the military organization of the bourgeoisie which leans upon the Social Democracy for active support. The Social Democracy, objectively speaking, is the moderate wing of fascism.” Objectively speaking, it is a habit with Stalin, when he attempts to generalize, to contradict the first phrase by the second and to conclude in the second what doesn’t at all follow from the first There is no debating that the bourgeoisie leans on the Social Democracy, and that fascism is a military organization of the bourgeoisie; and this has been remarked upon a long time ago. The only conclusion which follows from this is that the Social Democracy as well as fascism are the tools of the big bourgeoisie. How the Social Democracy becomes thereby also a “wing” of fascism is incomprehensible. Equally profound is another observation by the same author: fascism and Social Democracy are not enemies, they are twins. Now twins may be the bitterest enemies; while on the other hand, allies need not be born necessarily on one and the same day and from identical parents. Stalin’s constructions lack even formal logic, to say nothing of dialectics. Their strength lies in the fact that none dares challenge them.

I mean, Nor for that matter, more currently, is any authority conferred on peers with so little intellectual heft or awareness of interpersonal politics that they feel free to presume to condescend to know and disrespect the ‘philosophy’ on which a paragraph I penned must in your view ‘depend’ (without doing the responsible, readerly work of examining that text from a range of angles).? What’s this flurry of wrist-slaps, rich?

That’s another example, by the way, rich, of the ‘bedwetting’ gambit I was experimenting with. It may work quite well if it prompts conservatives to claim that no opinion can be correct in politics. If they tie themselves in knots over the basis of that claim – whether it’s a matter of definition, or guaranteed by the wording of certain US constitutional documents, or derived from the constitutive norms of politics, or true in virtue of the prevalence of disagreement, or derived from the purpose of free expression (according to some correct though contestable doctrine), so much the better. Having said that, if they hold that opinions on what the Constitution says can be correct, it won’t have worked so well, since most things can probably be pegged on the Constitution in one way or another.

Still, rich, repudiation of the metaphors of power (trumps that don’t, thrones with no monarchy, policing without power) is a good sign that the tactic could have some impact, and could conceivably be used to prompt the right-wing ideologues to backtrack on their ‘fascism’ allusions. As you say, ordinary means should be enough – so the retort to “that’s racist (which is un-PC)” is “no, it’s fine”, rather than “Don’t police me with your enthroned trump cards, you dogmatist! The likes of you have no right to scrutinise my utterances!”, still less “you are presuming to tell me what is a thinkable thought”. Of course you were hardly the ideal guinea-pig since you seem relatively reasonable, and the right-wing ideologues are anything but.

Just a quick clarification, though, rich. You said: I don’t believe I said ‘PC’ was something other than “a move in the battle for primacy”. Sorry, rich, I must have misinterpreted the import of: any political position has to battle it out for primacy— not be granted an ideological throne. I had it down as drawing a contrast between ‘battling it out’ and ‘being granted a throne’, and the latter as characterising the way ‘PC’ operates.

In the end I suppose there was a certain degree of cross-talk since I’m referring to the substantive content of ‘PC’ as currently imputed, and as it need not be repudiated, viz. as being basically right and defensible (as JQ put it, “if ‘PC’ means not being racist, I’m PC.”). On this view, ‘PC’ is not really about the evaluation of political positions, but about identifying the political content of various supposedly innocent locutions. Once that is done, the political matters in question are, as a matter of fact, relatively uncontroversial at least at the level of lip-service. Maybe they rest on the bedrock of constitutional principle? I was also treating your criticisms as if emanating from political opponents, rather than from allies protesting a failure of intra-movement dialogue, which makes some difference, though if anything it makes the objection to the very idea of a correct position (rather than to, say, overly rigid fixation on trivial manifesto details) rather harder to sustain, I’d have thought.

Returning to your initial query:
me: It’s [used as] a rhetorical trump card. But…any political position has to battle it out for primacy—- not be granted an ideological throne….

Tim: How does the rule ‘PCs are trumps’ gain its unfair (boo hoo, widdle piddle) authority over those who don’t agree?

I didn’t say it was successful. Nor did I offer some plaint of unfair treatment or claim to have suffered merely because some self-appointed guardian of political purity among the like-minded has so little political acuity or so few interpersonal skills as to actually presume to condescend to tell their peers what does and does not qualify as thinkable thought on a given issue (without examining its real-world complexities). Nor for that matter, more currently, is any authority conferred on peers with so little intellectual heft or awareness of interpersonal politics that they feel free to presume to condescend to know and disrespect the ‘philosophy’ on which a paragraph I penned must in your view ‘depend’ (without doing the responsible, readerly work of examining that text from a range of angles).

Not sure where you’re comin’ from, Tim. I was not responding to your comment @ #144. I had not read it. But a passing familiarity with rhetoric or a handful of poststructuralist texts, or for that matter a few key texts falling squarely within what was once considered the canonical patrimony, would easily situate what I was getting at within the realm of the correct (accurate)—- if not the unquestionable(!) (clause contingent on your ability to get the joke there).

Point being, ‘politically incorrect’ is not a matter of etiquette. Nor could ‘enforcement’ of this particular worldview ever remotely begin to approach some variant of ‘fascism’. Initially used as a highly effective critique of the left by the left, it handily exposed many self-important ideologues who could not distinguish between political difference and retrograde anti-Constitutionalist heresy—- and who did presume to enforce their party line of choice. Those serious folks doing the policing, missing any sense of irony and entirely missing the pointed contradiction in terms inherent in the phrase, soon adopted the term as a rhetorical trump card, and used it sincerely and ineffectively. The phrase was subsequently adopted by the ilk of George Will, who also misunderstood its the term as badly as he misunderstood progressive politics.

You may have to divest yourself of some disciplinary baggage, Tim, to fully appreciate the normative usage of the term. Multiple views on a single issue about which there is general agreement should signal that no one opinion among those perspectives can be held up as the “politically correct” perspective. The point of free expression is that no single human arbiter of sound opinion, thinkable thought or effective policy is really reliable. The point of politics is that it is opinionated and subjective, consisting of more than a statistically-verified body of facts. One viewpoint may win out as the result of the exercise of power, and another opinion may be inconsistent with Constitutional principles, but none are ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ in a contested political arena. (I’d go on to argue, however, that our core Constitutional principles form a social commons and a set of rules for engagement, and hotly contested opinions may describe accurately or be consistent with that framework; such political positions may be termed politically correct, without risk of aneurysm or seizure).

Couple additional responses:
Or: what plays the role of a sovereign’s use or theat of force in your ‘enthronement’ metaphor (see #144)?

No one plays “the role of a sovereign,” nor assumes to wield the “sovereign’s use or threat of force.” Why would they? Don’t know what you’re getting at here. Think small ‘e’ ‘enthronement’ within the average use of language, not Big Allegory Enthronement. We’re talking rhetoric and argument-ending tactics here, not literary tropes in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

Or, labeling something ‘PC’ does not end the debate, and no one needs to wield concrete power or literal threats for anyone to realize this.

Or: what makes ‘PC’ something other than a move in the battle for primacy among political positions? Why can it not be countered by ordinary argumentative means, instead requiring something like appeal to an umpire/parent figure?

Who requires appeal to an umpire or authority? Ordinary means are enough, are they not? The misuse of the term is so patently crude that it’d be weak, if the compulsion for political control wasn’t so virulent.

I don’t believe I said ‘PC’ was something other than “a move in the battle for primacy”; I said it was often an ineffectual, self-contradictory and off-target move that chose in-fighting among allies and later handed all its ammunition to the conservatives it loathed. Those conservatives proceeded to get the term and its usage and the political positions of the left completely wrong, of course, waving the bloody shirt or straw man of supposedly dogmatic liberals in the national media and making much hay in the process. Why look, now that the careers of George Will, Sarah Palin and Calvin Thomas are at their zenith, having won universal admiration and unimaginable influence, we can sit back and assess how they’ve wielded all that power to win for gays and folks of color and white men too the full slate of creator-endowed liberties guaranteed in teh Constitution but gutted in practice that conservaties so espouse.

…just trying to close that/those italics tag(s). Probably won’t work.

It’s a rhetorical trump card. But…any political position has to battle it out for primacy—- not be granted an ideological throne
How does the rule ‘PCs are trumps’ gain its unfair (boo hoo, widdle piddle) authority over those who don’t agree? Or: what plays the role of a sovereign’s use or theat of force in your ‘enthronement’ metaphor (see #144)? Or: what makes ‘PC’ something other than a move in the battle for primacy among political positions? Why can it not be countered by ordinary argumentative means, instead requiring something like appeal to an umpire/parent figure?

PC had been wielded, with a great degree of irony, against liberals who’d gone overboard with the dogma. It was then misunderstood by those ideologues and adopted by them, and further misunderstood by the national commentariat (George Will & Co.), who had no sense of humor and no conception of irony
Finding it less than simple to grasp what the posited second layer of misunderstanding consists of – it looks as though the first misunderstanding does all the work. See in any case #44.

More generally, I thought the main element of the views labelled ‘PC’ (with or without various kinds of ever-so-subtle irony) is the idea that certain terms, jokes, concepts, practices etc have implicit meanings or presuppositions that are (as you point out, mostly uncontroversially) unacceptable if made explicit. Thus attacks aganst ‘PC’ from the right commonly take (or used to take) the form of examples, mostly spurious, in which such implicit meanings were wrongly attributed, e.g. ‘bah bah white sheep’ etc, rather than suggesting that the substantive politics were at fault (‘Yes, the accusation of racism is accurate and relevant to my opinions – but who made anti-racism trumps?’).

It’s a rhetorical trump card. But…any political position has to battle it out for primacy—- not be granted an ideological throne
How does the rule ‘PCs are trumps’ gain its unfair (boo hoo, widdle piddle) authority over those who don’t agree? Or: what plays the role of a sovereign’s use or theat of force in your ‘enthronement’ metaphor (see #144)? Or: what makes ‘PC’ something other than a move in the battle for primacy among political positions? Why can it not be countered by ordinary argumentative means, instead requiring something like appeal to an umpire/parent figure?

PC had been wielded, with a great degree of irony, against liberals who’d gone overboard with the dogma. It was then misunderstood by those ideologues and adopted by them, and further misunderstood by the national commentariat (George Will & Co.), who had no sense of humor and no conception of irony
Finding it less than simple to grasp what the posited second layer of misunderstanding consists of – it looks as though the first misunderstanding does all the work. See in any case #44.

More generally, I thought the main element of the views labelled ‘PC’ (with or without various kinds of ever-so-subtle irony) is the idea that certain terms, jokes, concepts, practices etc have implicit meanings or presuppositions that are (as you point out, mostly uncontroversially) unacceptable if made explicit. Thus attacks aganst ‘PC’ from the right commonly take (or used to take) the form of examples, mostly spurious, in which such implicit meanings were wrongly attributed, e.g. ‘bah bah white sheep’ etc, rather than suggesting that the substantive politics were at fault (‘Yes, the accusation of racism is accurate and relevant to my opinions – but who made anti-racism trumps?’).

It was used by liberals to critique fellow liberals who thought it useful or bright to run around policing allies for insufficient solidarity with a generally hard-left stance, esp regarding policies revolving around women’s rights, gay rights, the anti-Apartheid movement, a pro-multi-culti/diversity outlook, or an anti-Reagan politics in general. None of which appeared particularly radical to me at the time (because they’re conservative in their adherence to Constitutional values).

Point being, politically incorrect is and always has been a contradiction in terms: how can anyone possibly be political and incorrect at the same time?? Political opinions have always been intractable in character and infinite in variation, and by definition under our Constitution, none of them can be correct, as they’re all always contested.

Calling someone “politically incorrect!” because they disagree with you, no matter how right you are about the rights of various parties or the wrongness of a given foreign policy, is just an attempt to keep someone in line without exploring the more interesting aspects of an issue at a more detailed and difficult level. It’s a rhetorical trump card. But no opinion is more ‘correct’ than any other in an arena fraught with interpersonal politics and politics defined more broadly: any political position has to battle it out for primacy—- not be granted an ideological throne based on some code word used to police one’s allies by some self-appointed guardian of a puritanical position within an already degraded discourse.

Adherence to Constitutional principles may render political positions worthy and accurate and consistent with the system that upholds

So—- in the usage I had seen, PC had been wielded, with a great degree of irony, against liberals who’d gone overboard with the dogma. It was then misunderstood by those ideologues and adopted by them, and further misunderstood by the national commentariat (George Will & Co.), who had no sense of humor and no conception of irony and mischaracterize both the multi-culti ‘left’ and the meaning and origin of the term ‘PC’ itself.

So simple. So easy to grasp.

The best response to ‘free speech’-based handwaving is to point out that the complainer is in fact quite free to troll/columnise/discuss ludicrous racial theories on Question Time, and is just upset at being disdained, disliked, or challenged, i.e. is a whingeing bedwetter. The role of underdog is after all perilously close to that of ‘loser’. (There could even be a bumper sticker in there somewhere.)

The effectiveness of such an approach is reduced though, if some bunch of morons decide to go round banning ‘hate speech’ and locking people up. (I hate those morons and so should you – go on, hate them.) On the other hand, perhaps the muscular-moron approach might attract those voters whose (passive-)authoritarian/macho tendencies are the main reason for a policy-independent dislike of ‘liberals’. Some sort of uniform could perhaps be devised.

National Review: “Heterophobia, hatred of the normal” and “ethnophobia, or hatred of one’s own ethnic group” – brilliant. Lack of Greek is one thing (I understand some quite respectable people have none these days), but to devise those and peg an article on them takes an impressive lack of interest in what words actually mean. But then I suppose it’s a good-to-safe bet that they are based on the similarly unhappy ‘homophobia’. I hadn’t realised it had been around that long – but then the UK tends to lag behind such trends by a fair few years.

Why the hippies and not the beats? Well, the hippies changed the world, while the beats arguably had some influence on literature. Our liberal divorce laws are pretty hard to picture absent the 60’s “sexual revolution”, and that alone has changed the world for good and ill. Many or most of the prominent beats were openly homosexual (Ginsberg, Burroughs, et al) and fiercely homoerotic in their writing. Accomplished little for gay rights, though. Homosexuality was less or less openly a part of hippiedom, yet Stonewall emerged in the hippy era, probably as an accidental by-product of an atmosphere or rebellion that made it thinkable to fight back physically against “The Man”.

As for why, well, the time was more ripe, but also by adopting music rather than literature as their iconic art form, the hippies were able to reach through the media to a larger mass. Hippiedom, in at least in superficial manifestations, was briefly the mainstream culture of youth and popular music.

Punk is an interesting third case to look at, but I don’t know that anyone else is interested in this discussion, and it is wandering off from the topic.

Reading this piece, it’s also clear that it would have used “politically correct” as a jibe if that term had been current in rightwing discussions. A possible analysis is that “liberal fascism” was on the rise, but was displaced by “political correctness”, which could be (mis)represented as a leftwing self-description.

Now that “political correctness” has been worn out, to the point where, as noted above, it can be reappropriate as a favorable term (“If it’s politically correct to oppose racism, then I’m politically correct”), “liberal fascism” is having its long-delayed day in the sun.