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Why do I use the term Political Correctness, instead of Liberalism?
The reasons include:
1. The confusion over what 'liberalism' means - to some a free marketeer, to others a socialist.
2. Differences in usage between the UK and US: in the UK the Liberals are a strange mixture of business- and farming-friendly centrists with pacifist leftists of an upper middle class type; in the US Liberals are the furthest left of mainstream political ideologies.
3. That although PC clearly evolved from (what is in the US) called liberalism, PC is the outcome of a distinctive 'turn' in leftist politics, which became apparent in the mid-1960s. In its apparent, surface features PC is something new under the sun, never before seen in history.
4. The dawning realization that the phenomena collected together under the jokey term 'political correctness' was a vastly more robust and malignant thing than I had ever imagined.
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So that what seemed either silly or trivial or both, will end by destroying that modernity which made PC possible in the first place.
Yet we can perceive now, in advance of all this, that even when PC is utterly swept-away it will be blind to what has happened, and to what it had done. PC will always see itself as being on the side of the angels, whatever its outcome may be. Its capacity for shifting blame is unconstrained.
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It is a truly amazing thing, this political correctness; something so paltry, so puny, so soft - yet wreaking such devastation.
It seemed, therefore, worth discussing under its new name, as a phenomenon not truly new at its deepest level - but new in its combination of idealistic, delusional subjectivism with deadly, plodding bureaucracy.
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