Duly Noted

by John Holbo on October 8, 2015

‘Politically correct’ is so unamenable to non-absurd definition that it seldom receives even the lightest semantic gloss. So this is noteworthy, from Lowry and Ponnuru:

Among the most consequential forms of political correctness — in the sense of the use of social pressure to suppress the expression of widespread and legitimate viewpoints

It is, I suppose, possible that by ‘legitimate’ they just mean conservative. But that would be rather question-begging. The alternative is that they are begging the question against conservatism, which reduces to political correctness, due to it being a not utterly un-Burkean affair. A third possibility is that our authors haven’t given the matter much thought.