What is political correctness?

I have often pointed out that political correctness is not some unnecessary or extraneous or silly or perverse or illiberal offshoot of modern liberalism, but is an intrinsic aspect of it. Why do the critics of political correctness fail to see this? It’s because the critics are themselves liberals (the great majority of modern Westerners, even if they call themselves conservatives, are basically liberals), and do not wish to attack liberalism as such. What is liberalism? At its core, it is the belief that only the individual matters, that all individuals are alike in possessing the same basic human desires and human rights, that group differences are unreal or of no social importance (except of course when the belief in group differences helps advance some favored minority), and that it is wicked, racist, and xenophobic to think otherwise. What then is political correctness? It is any liberal attack on assertions of group distinctions that goes “too far” and that liberals themselves don’t like. So they call it “political correctness,” instead of calling it what it is, which is liberalism.

Thus Powerline decries the systematic suppression of free speech in Europe, calling it “illiberalism.” But what does this suppression suppress? It suppresses speech that deals truthfully with racial, cultural, and religious differences, particularly differences that make non-Westerners appear in a negative light or suggest that not all non-Western groups can be expected to assimilate into Western society. But that, of course, is exactly what Powerline itself does, when, in order to avoid casting aspersions on a major world religion as murderously tyrannical and thus destroying the hope for a single liberal democratic world order, it criticizes a fictitious “Islamism” rather than Islam. Is Powerline being “illiberal” when it traffics in the “Islamism” euphemism in order to sustain the belief in a liberal world order? Of course not. It is being liberal. Yet when the Europeans carry to a farther extreme the same cover-up of Islam that Powerline itself routinely practices, well, according to Powerline, that’s illiberalism, that’s political correctness.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 11, 2006 12:11 PM | Send