Social media gives new muscle to German Marxist Herbert Marcuse's arguments against free discourse.

Yes, Political Correctness Really Exists

By SAMUEL GOLDMAN

Jonathan Chait burned up the Internet this week with his critique of so-called political correctness. Among many responses, Amanda Taub‘s stands out for its denial of Chait’s basic premise. According to Taub:

…there’s no such thing as “political correctness.” The term’s in wide use, certainly, but has no actual fixed or specific meaning. What defines it is not what it describes but how it’s used: as a way to dismiss a concern or demand as a frivolous grievance rather than a real issue.

This is a curious response. Sure, people use the term in different ways. But Chait provides a perfectly serviceable definition: “political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate.”

I don’t think Taub would deny that this political style exists, although one may quibble with some of Chait’s examples. What she objects to is the way Chait describes it. In her view, calling denunciations of putatively bigoted opinions “political correctness” allows their advocates to avoid taking those criticisms seriously. So, in a feat of rhetorical jujitsu, Chait becomes guilty of the same tendency he opposes: ruling views he rejects out of respectable conversation.

This dispute is an object lesson in the pernicious effect of political correctness—or whatever you want to call it—on intellectual and political debate. Arguments about ideas devolve into wrangling about words. The conduct of politics by means of semantics sometimes reaches comic heights. In his piece, Chait reports an incident in which,

UCLA students staged a sit-in to protest microaggressions such as when a professor corrected a student’s decision to spell the word indigenous with an uppercase I—one example of many “perceived grammatical choices that in actuality reflect ideologies.”

But there’s nothing important at stake in the phrase “political correctness”. So let’s drop it, at least provisionally, and focus on the phenomenon that Chait describes. Contrary to popular perception, it’s not just a product of youthful exuberance among student activists or the ease and enforced brevity of Twitter. It’s rooted in a philosophical critique of the liberal theory of discourse.

Although it has precedents in Kant, this theory received a definitive formulation in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. According to Mill, the truth is most likely to emerge from unrestricted debate. Although Mill did not use the metaphor, such a debate is conventionally described as a “marketplace of ideas,” in which vendors are free to offer their wares and customers are at liberty to purchase only the best goods.

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