Ronald S Stade. Conflict and Society. Volume 3, Annual 2017.
Political correctness has become a fighting word used to dismiss and discredit political opponents. The article traces the conceptual history of this fighting word. In anthropological terms, it describes the social life of the concept of political correctness and its negation, political incorrectness. It does so by adopting a concept-in- motion methodology, which involves tracking the concept through various cultural and political regimes. It represents an attempt to synthesize well-established historiographic and anthropological approaches. A Swedish case is introduced that reveals the kind of large-scale historical movements and deep-seated political conflicts that provide the contemporary context for political correctness and its negation. Thereupon follows an account of the conceptual history of political correctness from the eighteenth century up to the present. Instead of a conventional conclusion, the article ends with a political analysis of the current rise of fascism around the world and how the denunciation of political correctness is both indicative of and instrumental in this process.
The Study of Fighting Words
These days, calling something or someone “politically correct” is usually neither mere description nor praise. It is more likely an expression of disapproval, derision, or hostility. As such, it is mostly used to discredit antidiscrimination policies and practices. The conceptual constellation that supports attacks against “political correctness” is asymmetrical. It pits “political correctness,” which is vaguely defined as an oversensitive reaction to perceived discrimination, against common sense, which is taken to be intrinsically true and virtuous. Objecting to discriminatory language is made out to be the hallmark of “political correctness” gone mad, because words are not sticks and stones. History teaches us, however, that words in fact can function as the precondition of sticks and stones. A well-known example is the rhetorical dehumanization of certain groups that precedes mass murder (Germany in the 1930s, Rwanda in the 1990s, Syria today). Words like “vermin,” “cockroaches,” and “bacteria” are meant to dehumanize; they are fighting words. In the United States, the term “fighting words” has a specific legal meaning insofar as it refers to a 1942 Supreme Court decision and the so-called fighting words doctrine. My use of the expression “fighting words” is not constricted to this reference. Rather, it is grounded in the common notion that words can be wielded in fights—that, in effect, they can be weapons of sorts. In the current context, fighting words that are strictly of an interpersonal nature—someone calling someone else “stupid” or “evil” in a nonpublic context—shall not be considered. Instead, the focus is on fighting words that belong to the wider category of social and political concepts and on the historical and semantic changes they undergo.
In what follows, I attempt to outline the history of a particular fighting word: “political correctness,” as well as its negation, “political incorrectness” The attempt will conclude with the suggestion that we pay closer attention to the tropological level of conceptual research—especially with regard to irony—and to the ideological changes that are indicative of and induced by social and political key concepts. The first step is to clarify the methodological foundation and development of this project. Thereafter, a Swedish case is introduced to illustrate how an American understanding of “political correctness” was introduced in a European academic setting. The next sections are devoted to the conceptual historiography of political correctness, and rather than offering a conclusion, the final section consists of a discussion of how fighting words like “political correctness” are instrumentalized in a time of reinvigorated fascism.
Concepts in Motion
Clare Short, who at the time was a member of the British Parliament, wrote: “Political Correctness is a concept invented by hard-rightwing forces to defend their right to be racist, to treat women in a degrading way and to be truly vile about gay people. They invent these people who are Politically Correct, with a rigid, monstrous attitude to life so they can attack them. But we have all had to learn to modify our language. That’s all part of being a human being” (Guardian, 18 February 1995). As will be seen in subsequent sections, it was not “hard- rightwing forces” that invented the concept of political correctness. The conceptual history of political correctness is far richer. It begins in the eighteenth century and stretches into our own time. The expression “politically correct” does not just have a historical or temporal dimension; it also has a spatial dimension in that it spread across global space. Therefore, it is appropriate to draw theoretical inspiration from the long anthropological tradition of diffusionism, which has gone under various names in the more than a hundred years of systematic anthropological research. Diffusionism began as an antispeculative research program (see Stade 2015). Instead of speculating about cultural evolution and the causes of cultural differences, as the first generation of anthropologists did, diffusionists like Friedrich Ratzel advocated a strictly empirical approach to the study of culture; in his own words: “The first question here is not: Why?, but Where? And the second question after that is: Whence?” (1897: 270). Because he thought that the evidence shows that people, artifacts, practices, and ideas travel, and always have done so, he was convinced that “migration theory is the fundamental theory of world history” (1882: 464). A follower of Ratzel, Fritz Graebner, concluded that whatever one finds in any one location must therefore be a cultural hybrid (Kulturmischung in German; 1911: 93). On these grounds, diffusionists like Graebner opposed notions of cultural purity and cultural authenticity.
Among British social anthropologists, diffusionism came into disrepute when some of its self-appointed representatives, Grafton Elliot Smith and his disciple William Perry, suggested that civilization had spread to the rest of the world from a single center of creation and innovation, ancient Egypt. Also, the influence of towering figures like Bronislaw Malinowski, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, all of whom rejected diffusionism, left its mark on twentieth-century social anthropology. While the term “diffusionism” was expurgated from the historical record of Anglophone anthropology—if at all mentioned, it was described as an aberration—its analytical and methodological legacy lived on under new names, such as culture contact, acculturation, and globalization studies. Anthropological approaches to cultural hybridity and creolization have antecedents in diffusionism. An often-cited book (and book title) is The Social Life of Things (Appadurai 1986). The book is an anthology with contributions by historians and anthropologists on the movement of objects through “regimes of value.” The major contribution of the volume is not theoretical but methodological. In his introduction, Arjun Appadurai writes, “We have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories.” The value and meaning ascribed to a thing is context-dependent. “Thus, even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.”
My own methodological approach consists of merging diffusionism with conceptual history by replacing the word “thing” in Appadurai’s book title with that of “concept”: the social life of concepts would be one way of describing this approach, and the methodology is one of following the concepts-in-motion to “illuminate their human and social context.” The social life or diffusion of concepts is both a spatial and a temporal phenomenon. Cultural items like concepts spread from one place or context to another, and this process occurs over time. Sometimes diffusion is almost instantaneous; sometimes it is protracted. The history of concepts consists of their trajectories through various regimes of value. Earlier, the temporal and historical dimensions of culture and society were often ignored in anthropological fieldwork and edited out of ethnographies. Anthropologists studied nonliterate people as if they lived in an eternally unchanging present. This became untenable when anthropologists began conducting fieldwork among people whose situation demonstrably had changed over time, for example, through colonization and slavery. More importantly, the theoretical turn toward materialism, Marxism, world systems, and so forth forced anthropologists to spend at least some of their time in archives and at their desk reading historical accounts and official documents. It became difficult to ignore history. As a consequence, the disciplinary boundary between anthropology and history became increasingly blurry. The blurriness increased as historians turned to anthropology for theoretical and methodological inspiration (see, e.g., Gaunt 1982; Medick 1987; Thomas 1963) and anthropologists engaged in historiography (see, e.g., Bloch 1986; Sahlins 1981; Wolf 1982). An anthropologically inspired conceptual history benefits from this blurriness, as well as from the kind of diffusionism that is represented by the-social-life-of- things methodology. History and anthropology come together in the study of concepts-in-motion.
A Swedish Case
The diffusion of concepts across global space can create misunderstandings and friction. Not every concept travels easily and fits neatly in a new context. Agents of diffusion might not be aware of this, even in cases where they could be expected to. In 1999, Jonathan Friedman, born and raised in the United States and at the time a professor of social anthropology at a sociology department in Sweden, published an article in Current Anthropology, a four- field, peer-reviewed journal founded as “a world journal of the sciences of man.” In the article, he defended public statements made by his wife, Kajsa Ekholm Friedman, the other professor of social anthropology at the same department. The statements, originally made in 1997, warned against the Swedish nation being subverted and disintegrated by immigration, a view, at the time, held in Sweden only by a small minority of political extremists on the right-wing fringe. Kajsa Ekholm Friedman repeated her statements on a few public occasions—for instance, at a meeting of a Swedish fascist organization—whereupon a number of Swedish anthropologists, as well as students of both professors Friedman, and reportedly even their daughters, criticized the statements. Jonathan Friedman took it upon himself to speak for his wife and to erect a rhetorical bulwark against her critics. The Current Anthropology article was one of the building blocks in this bulwark. Another was the establishment of a course in social anthropology at the sociology department dedicated to the defense of Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and to “political correctness as an anthropological problem” (Jonathan Friedman 1999: 688). The allegation was that anyone criticizing Friedman’s wife was driven by political correctness. All of this was meant to be “a commentary on the state of academic elites and their clients in the contemporary world” (679). According to Friedman, “academic elites and their clients” are in effect fascists. The title of Friedman’s Current Anthropology piece is “Rhinoceros 2,” an allusion to Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 play, which allegorizes the gradual seizure of power by a totalitarian regime. In the play, more and more people transmute into rhinoceroses, that is, unthinking violent beasts. Hence, Friedman’s choice of title implies that “academic elites and their clients,” in particular Swedish ones, can be likened to dumb, violent fascists and that political correctness can be equated with totalitarianism.
At the time, these comments seemed rather eccentric from a Swedish point of view. The concept of political correctness, while not unfamiliar, did not yet have the same purchase in the general public debate as in the United States. Nonetheless, a handful of Friedman’s (Swedish) doctoral students embraced his ideas, and one or two of them have since carried on the fight against what they take to be political correctness in Sweden. They consider themselves to be voices in the (politically correct Swedish) wilderness. Their political activism is the result of Friedman introducing the right-wing US interpretation of political correctness into a Swedish context. Friedman was thus an agent (not the only one) of cultural diffusion. Despite his being a professor of anthropology, Friedman failed to notice the dissonance created by his projection of the American interpretation of political correctness onto the Swedish social and political situation. Some 20 years after Friedman depicted academics as fascists, actual fascists like Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte, who hardly can be accused of being politically correct, were voted into office. Against this historical background, the Friedmans and their acolytes resemble if not Ionescoan rhinoceroses then the character of the logician, who, in Ionesco’s play, engages in farcical analyses without any concern for the danger presented by stampeding rhinoceroses. It now seems that this group of anthropologists were unwitting members of a larger historical rhinocerotic movement that they failed to recognize. This movement deserves our attention and to be studied carefully using empirical methods. Therefore, we should take seriously Friedman’s suggestion to treat “political correctness as an anthropological problem.”
The Origins of Political Correctness
In this and the following sections, I will chronicle the social life of the concepts of “politically correct,” “political correctness,” “politically incorrect,” and “political incorrectness” by following their trajectory through changing historical contexts. The purpose is not to use “political correctness” and its derivatives as analytical concepts in historical research, as was done, for example, by the contributors in Lucian Holscher’s (2008) edited volume. Rather, it is to follow the concept itself through various regimes of value. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first occurrence in writing of the expression “politically correct” in the English language can be found in the opinion of Justice James Wilson given in 1793. Wilson, signatory of both the United States Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, had by then been appointed to the US Supreme Court. Wilson gave his opinion in the first case of principal significance before the court. At issue was whether the individual states that constitute the United States are sovereign and therefore immune to lawsuits. Wilson argued that only the people of the United States are sovereign. States exist for the sake of the people, which is why it would be “politically correct” to toast the people of the United States, rather than the United States (Dallas 1798: 462). Wilson goes on to point out that such a toast would also be “classically more correct”: when enumerating the Greek forces besieging Troy, Homer arranged them under the names of their different kings and princes; only when he came to the Athenians did he refer to them as the people of Athens (463). The phrase “politically correct” thus stood for something like “in accordance with facts.”
The term “politically correct” was rarely used over the next two centuries. On the few occasions it was recorded in print, it appears to have retained the original meaning of “in accordance with facts.” It is also difficult to ascertain when exactly the two words “politically” and “correct” gelled into the fixed collocation “politically correct.” What appears clear, though, is that the translation into English of similar Russian and Chinese concepts changed the meaning of the constituent words “politically” and “correct,” thereby preparing the ground for the fixed collocation. While the reference to “truthfulness” was preserved, the idea of political truthfulness was wedded to a particular political party line. In the 1920s, Lenin and, following in his footsteps, Stalin and his allies, in their struggle for control of the Russian Communist Party and the Soviet Union, began to lay claim to the word pravilnyy, usually translated as “correct,” to define what is in accordance with the general party line (generalnaya liniyapartii, or simply, generalnaya liniya). The noun associated with pravilnyy is pravilo, “rule,” “regulation” (as in the expression kakpravilo, “as a rule,” “usually” and “generally”). Thus, the phrase pravil’noy liniyey partii can also serve as a synonym of generalnaya liniyapartii.
Another connotation of pravilnyy, pravilno, and pravilo is “straight,” as opposed to “askew” or “sloping” Therefore, what in English translation is rendered as “deviation” (from the general party line) is in Russian uklone, “incline” “slope” In the 1921 Resolution of the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) on Party Unity, uklone, the term Lenin used for political deviation, was still set in quotation marks to mark it as a metaphor. Subsequently, the quotation marks disappeared, and Moscow-affiliated Communist parties and groups around the world adopted the Soviet vocabulary of “correct” and “deviant” In the preface to the program and constitution of the Workers Party of America, which was adopted over Christmas 1921, the rival Socialist Party is criticized for not going “on record for a statement of the only correct and pure principles” (Workers Party 1921: 4). And of the Socialist Labor Party, the other major contender on the Left in the United States, it is said that it, “in spite of its proud boast of revolutionary purity and correctness, is moribund.”
The Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of 1939 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union, code-named Operation Barbarossa, in 1941, intensified the struggle within the Communist movement over what was politically correct and deviant. In the aftermath of World War II, Communist parties ruled a long list of countries. Mongolia, North Korea, and China became the first non-European countries to become Communist “people’s republics” Movement leaders like Ho Chi Minh, who spent years in the Soviet Union and China, waged war under the banner of anticolonialism. Important ideological and strategic inspiration came from Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Communist Party of China. Upon Stalin’s death in 1953 followed a brief period of intensified exchanges and relationships between China and the Soviet Union. But when Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, initiated a large-scale policy of de-Stalinization, Mao Zedong was presented with a dilemma: follow suit and denounce Stalinism or stay the course and continue to commit to Stalinism. In 1956, Mao’s attempt to try a new “softer” approach, known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign (“let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend”), threatened to undermine the rule of the Communist Party and weaken Mao’s leadership position. As a consequence, there was a sharp reversal to Stalinism, officially labeled a purge of “rightist elements” (see, e.g., Walden 2015). This set the stage for the ideological conflict between China and the Soviet Union that ended in an open split between the two largest Communist countries.
The Chinese Connection
After the Sino-Soviet split, China competed for global ideological supremacy with the Soviet Union (see Jeremy Friedman 2015). Domestically, Mao Zedong suffered the consequences of having made terrible decisions for China’s economic development, which caused widespread famine. The de facto leadership of the country had been assumed by a group of pragmatists, and Mao’s influence seemed on the decline. Mao fought back by orchestrating attacks on key members of China’s ruling elite, who as a result were removed from their positions in disgrace. In a next step, Mao saw to it that the purge of so-called bourgeois elements spread across the country, in what came to be known as the Cultural Revolution. Part of this large-scale movement was the personality cult of Mao. His writings and speeches were treated as holy scripture. Lin Biao, China’s defense minister, ordered the official newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to publish a Mao quote each day (Leese 2014). One of the daily’s editors, Tian Xiaoguang, collected the quotes with the intention to publish them as an anthology. A number of drafts were produced until, finally, the General Political Department of the PLA put out the first official version of the Quotations from Chairman Mao in May 1964. It was first printed with paper wrappers for high-ranking officers, then with red vinyl covers for brigade teams. The latter version became known and spread around the world as the Little Red Book.
As mentioned, the official title of the Little Red Book was Quotations from Chairman Mao, in Pinyin, Mao Zhuxi Yulu. The last word in the title refers to the traditional Chinese genre of yulu, the paradigm of which is the Analects, a collection of quotes and ideas ascribed to Confucius. The Analects and the Mencius, by the Confucian philosopher Mengzi, were the two yulu that served as the principal sources for the imperial civil service examination, which required candidates to learn them by rote. Sayings from the Analects and the Mencius became an integral part of Chinese conversation and a reference in all kinds of deliberations. In the 1960s, the Little Red Book assumed the same canonical status, and quoting from it in all kinds of circumstances became fashionable. The Cultural Revolution broke out in May 1966 and already a month later most of the Chinese publishing industry was engaged in producing works by Mao, not least the Little Red Book (Leese 2014: 36). For China to compete with the Soviet Union in creating global alliances with revolutionary movements, the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, the Foreign Languages Press, and the International Bookstore were charged with translating, printing, and distributing Mao’s Little Red Book around the world. For a poor country like China, this was a costly but ultimately successful undertaking: “during the period from October 1966 to May 1967, the International Bookstore distributed more than 800,000 copies of the Little Red Book in 14 languages to 117 countries” (Xu 2014: 85). News coverage of China’s Cultural Revolution in the United States and other countries was accompanied by footage of thousands and thousands of young Chinese waving the Little Red Book over their heads. For an American audience, the Little Red Book, in combination with the wearing of what initially was called the Sun Yat-sen suit (Zhongshan zhuang) and, in the West, subsequently became known as the Mao suit, were the iconic symbols of the Cultural Revolution.
In 1967, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who had recently founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, went to Chinatown in San Francisco to buy 60 copies of the Little Red Book for 30 cents apiece with the intention of selling them for a dollar on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. The plan was successful, and soon Newton and Seale had raised enough money to buy a .357 Magnum pistol and a High Standard shotgun at the local department store (Bloom and Martin 2013: 48; Seale 1970: 82). Subsequently, more books were sold and more weapons were purchased. Soon, the Little Red Book became a common accessory in the streets of black America.
While this was a highly visible example of the link between Maoism and black nationalism in the United States, connections between the two had been established much earlier. W. E. B. Du Bois met with Mao Zedong as far back as 1959, and in 1965 Robert F. Williams (1962), a highly influential (but nowadays often forgotten) black nationalist and author of Negroes with Guns, settled in his Chinese exile. Historically, this coincided with events like Malcolm X’s intervention on behalf of Hinton Johnson (1957), Ghana’s independence (1957), the victory of the Cuban revolutionaries (1959), and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba (1961). Writing about black nationalists in 1962, Harold Cruse ([1962] 2009: 73) remarked: “Already they have a pantheon of modern heroes—Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure in Africa; Fidel Castro in Latin America; Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, in New York; Robert Williams in the South; and Mao Tse-tung in China.”
A consequential connection between Maoism and black nationalism was China’s Foreign Languages Press’s publication of a statement by Mao Zedong, in which he supported the anti-imperialist and anticolonial struggle of the “American Negroes” (Zedong 1963). This statement was well received by black nationalists and reinforced their conviction that their fight was part of a global revolutionary movement. More precisely, black leaders like Du Bois and Williams considered black America a colony in the United States and their struggle thus to be the same anticolonial fight as that of other colonized nations. Williams, who eventually was forced into exile because local authorities in collusion with the Ku Klux Klan and FBI had trumped up charges against him, was one of many World War II veterans who had returned to the Southern United States with its Jim Crow laws. Upon his return, he organized black people in his county for armed self-defense. When Ku Klux Klan motorcades arrived to harass or lynch African Americans, Williams and his followers stood ready behind sandbags with their guns pointed at the whites. It was not at all uncommon among African Americans in the South to own guns and to brandish them when whites tried to attack them. In other words, black armed self-defense in the South preceded, by decades, interventions in the South by Northern activists associated with the civil rights movement.
It was in Cuban exile, from which he subsequently moved to China, that Williams wrote the book Negroes with Guns, which had a decisive impact on Huey Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Already in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the political movement for the liberation and emancipation of African Americans was divided on the issue of violence. Martin Luther King Jr. came to represent the nonviolent faction of the movement (despite himself using armed guards for protection at times). His public stance contrasted with that of Malcolm X and Williams. The latter stated, “Nonviolence is a very potent weapon when the opponent is civilized, but nonviolence is no repellent for a sadist” (Williams 1960: 44). The split between armed self-defense and nonviolent protest became more entrenched over the years, in particular with the rise of the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement more generally. Williams (1967: 4) wrote:
The correctness of Chairman Mao’s words on August 8, 1963 is being borne out in armed uprising across the width and breadth of imperialist and tyrannical America … The phoney movement of passive resistance is being thoroughly discredited and more and more the oppressed black people are turning to armed revolutionary resistance. This is the era of Mao Tse-Tung, the era of world revolution and the Afro-American’s struggle for liberation is a part of an invincible world-wide movement.
From Black Maoism to Feminism
It was primarily through black Maoism that the terms “politically correct” and “political correctness” entered contemporary American vocabulary. In English, the title of chapter 4 in the Little Red Book is rendered as “The Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest textual reference, in English, to the Maoist meaning of “correctness” seems to be in a 1970 essay by Toni Cade, a writer, activist, and professor who later added “Bambara” to her last name. The essay is an edited version of a lecture that Cade gave in 1969 at Livingston College’s Black Woman Seminar. Livingston College had initially been conceived as an MIT of the social sciences, but because of the social and political upheavals of the 1960s it was subsequently, in 1969 to be specific, established on a former army base in Piscataway, New Jersey, as a progressive institution of higher learning. The motto of the new college became “strength through diversity,” and the curriculum included black studies, women’s studies, community development, and so forth. Cade’s lecture and essay dealt with “the Black Woman’s Role in the Revolution” (Cade 1970: 101). By revolution she meant the struggle for “black nationalism.” To Cade, Marxism, New Left politics, and doctrinaire Socialism were all incompatible with black nationalism (109). She wrote, “we rap about being correct” (103) and, “we’re so turned around about Western models, we don’t even know how to raise the correct questions” (105), therefore “we don’t even ask the correct questions, much less begin to move in a correct direction” (109). She argued, “Racism and chauvinism are anti- people. And a man cannot be politically correct and a chauvinist too” (107). She concluded: “Sitting around murder-mouthing incorrect niggers while your father goes upside your mother’s head is not revolutionary” (110). Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, the concept of political correctness was thus not conceived and used as an ironic, and even less as a self-ironic, reference. It was the very sincerity with which the concept was used in black Maoist and feminist circles that subsequently made possible the ironic inversion of its meaning.
Using the designation “politically correct” ironically was part of the so-called sex wars in feminism: “Feminist discussions of sex work, s/m, and women-centered sexualities uncovered a rift between feminists who believed firmly that women could claim sexual pleasure and agency within a patriarchal society, and women who believed that embracing radical sexualities constituted violence against women and submission to patriarchal ideals” (Basiliere 2009: 1). The frontline in the sex wars ran (and still runs) between, on one side, radical, sex-is-dangerous feminists who, according to their opponents, promote “vanilla sex,” and, on the other, sex-radical, sex-is-pleasure feminists who are labeled “sex-positive.”
On 24 April 1982, the Women’s Center at Barnard College hosted the Scholar and Feminist Conference IX. The concept paper for the conference opened with the following statement:
The ninth The Scholar and the Feminist conference will address women’s sexual pleasure, choice, and autonomy, acknowledging that sexuality is simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression, and danger, as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure, and agency. This dual focus is important, we think, for to speak only of pleasure and gratification ignores the patriarchal structure in which women act, yet to talk only of sexual violence and oppression ignores women’s experience with sexual agency and choice and unwittingly increases the sexual terror and despair in which women live. (Vance 1984: 443)
Groups like Women Against Pornography (WAP), which was led by Andrea Dworkin, Susan Brownmiller, and Robin Morgan, opposed the conference already at the planning stage. They contacted the president of the college, Ellen Futter, as well as faculty members and prominent feminists, demanding that the conference be stopped. On the day of the conference, members of groups like WAP picketed the meeting, sporting T-shirts with the print “For a Feminist Sexuality” on the front and “Against S/M” on the back (Basiliere 2009: 8). They also distributed a leaflet with the following accusation: “Represented at this conference are organizations that support and produce pornography, that promote sex roles and sadomasochism, and that have joined the straight and gay pedophile organizations in lobbying for an end to laws that protect children from sexual abuse by adults.” In addition, the leaflet singled out a number of feminists by name (Brett Harvey, Ellen Willis, Gayle Rubin, Pat Califia, and Dorothy Allison). Finally, the leaflet suggested that the concept of “politically incorrect sexuality” is just “a codeword for sadomasochistic sexuality,” which is “nothing less than sexual fascism.”
In response to the leaflet and the actions of the antipornography feminists, some 275 scholars and activists—among them Judith Butler, Ellen DuBois, Faye Ginsburg, Sherry Ortner, Donna Haraway, Susan Harding, Rayna Rapp, Gayle Rubin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Carole Vance, and Ellen Willis—signed a letter that was published in Feminist Studies (Abelove et al. 1983). The signatories protested the attempts to stop the conference and to censor the feminist dialogue on sexuality by using “McCarthyite tactics to silence other voices” (180). The conference, they argued, had addressed key issues, for example, “the question of whether there is such a thing as a ‘politically correct’ feminist sexuality” (179). Later, the feminist scholar Ruth Perry (1992: 16) wrote: “Within lesbian circles, being ‘politically incorrect,’ like being a ‘bad girl,’ was coming to mean hip, sophisticated, rebellious, impulsive.” The battle line was thus not just between feminists who considered sexuality dangerous and feminists who equated sexuality with pleasure. It was between feminists who focused on danger and feminists who considered danger to be part of pleasure. In an anthology, entitled Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Vance 1984), that came out of the Barnard Conference, Muriel Dimen (1984: 138- 139) argued: “Politically correct is an idea that emerges from the well-meaning attempt in social movements to bring the unsatisfactory present into line with the utopian future … Sexual intimacy is too generous an experience to exclude anything, including the forces of the unconscious and the forces of hierarchy” (142); “Notions of political correctness therefore constitute psychological footbinding” (144).
Structural Stupidity
While the feminist sex wars escalated and sectarianism flourished in Socialist circles around the world, the questioning of what counted as normal and self-evident continued. In the established order, men were thought to be superior to women, white people to people of color, heterosexuals to homosexuals, and so forth. As more and more groups normally defined and treated as inferior challenged this established order, many social institutions took measures to accommodate the claims from these groups. The logic behind this process seems to have been not functional but normative—that is, a change in cultural norms led institutions to adopt new policies and legislators to introduce new laws or revise old ones (for a conceptual framework of such processes, see, e.g., Stade 1998: 50-58; Strang and Meyer 1993). On one hand, there were the necessary legal reforms that, for example, outlawed racial segregation and discrimination and decriminalized homosexual acts. On the other, there was the shift in values that allowed individuals who were not straight white men to be seen and heard as full citizens in nationwide public spheres. In many institutions of higher education, this process took the shape of devoting part of the curriculum to the history and achievements of marginalized groups. Black (later African American and African) studies, women’s (later gender) studies, Chicano (later Latina/o) studies, Native American studies, LGBT studies, and so forth were introduced at ever more universities and colleges.
The composition of the student body changed as well. Ivy League universities in the United States stopped being sanctuaries for white people. Increasing numbers of what in America are called “minorities” began populating the campuses of elite and nonelite universities. Often, these changes met with resistance among students, faculty, and other staff. Although there were occurrences of physical violence, the most common means of opposing the inclusion of “minorities” was verbal altercations, condescending comments, and anonymous posts and graffiti. Language therefore became a focal point of attention in the conflict between “politically correct” and “politically incorrect” camps in academia. Descriptions of persons and collectives, which traditionally had entailed a more powerful majority naming and labeling a less powerful minority, became the object of political contestation. At issue was what David Graeber (2012, 2015) calls “structural stupidity,” that is, the fact that for those in power there exist “dead zones of the imagination” (2012: 105): bureaucrats need not imagine what it is like to be a client; men need not imagine what it is like to be a woman (American men can even brag about not understanding women); white people need not imagine what it is like to be nonwhite; heterosexual people need not imagine what it is like to be homo- or bisexual. This relationship is not symmetrical, because women, from an early age, learn to understand the world from a male point of view, and nonwhite people, not least African slaves in America, were forced to make sense of the thought processes of white people. Gays and lesbians are usually brought up in heterosexual families and socialized into a normatively hetero world. And so on.
Adopting Graeber’s analytical terminology, we can say that the discursive practices of the politically correct, hereinafter PC, movement targeted the structural stupidity of the status quo and that the immediate goal was to fight objectification and other forms of discrimination, whereas the more long-term and general goal was to eliminate the “dead zones of the imagination.” In this perspective, referring to someone as “fag,” “nigger,” or “retarded” is to use fighting words and is a sign of structural stupidity. The PC movement was successful in banning some of the fighting words from public discourse. It was no longer acceptable to use degrading labels for “minorities,” even if members of these “minorities” were not around. The linguistic struggle spread to technical vocabularies as well. The diagnostic term “mental retardation,” for example, was replaced with the official term “intellectual disability.” Activists now fight to replace this term as well, for example, with the adjective “differently abled.” The reason is that the concept of disability is itself problematic in that it is inherently comparative—that is, it refers to “ability,” which denotes a vaguely conceived notion of what “normal” people are able to do and identifies those who are “disabled” as defined by a lack of something, not (as would be the case if the terms were used symmetrically) by their abilities.
Self-description has been a major battlefield for the PC movement. The objective was to defend the right to define oneself, for example, as woman (instead of “girl” or “lady”), African American (instead of “Negro”), gay (instead of “homosexual”), Asian (instead of “Oriental”), little people (instead of “dwarf”), and so on. PC language reform, however, went beyond self-description. A word like “cisgender,” for example, is used as a designation for people whose gender identity matches the gender they were assigned at birth. Cisgender, however, is not and is unlikely to become a common self-description. Rather, it was invented by the German sexologist Volkmar Sigusch to mark and thereby make visible the particularity of what is usually taken for granted, that one’s gender identity matches the gender that one was assigned at birth. To use Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology, this is a maneuver of pulling something from the realm of doxa, which is the universe of what goes without saying, into the field of ortho- and heterodoxy, that is, the field in which there is debate and conceptual conflict (1977: 165- 167). In Bourdieu’s terms, the academy is a limited and particular social field with its own political values. Put into system, maneuvers like the one initiated by Sigusch with his invention of the word “cisgender” created a social field with distinct speech conventions that was quite isolated from the rest of society. By the late 1980s, one could find examples of campus codes against hate speech. This went hand in hand with questioning the established literary canon, attacking and examining sexism and racism, and doubting the trustworthiness of authority (see Tolmach Lakoff 2000: 91). The backlash against all this was immediate and fierce.
Political Incorrectness
In global perspective, the 1980s was a period of political backlash. Both in the United States and in Europe, concerted actions were taken to reclaim political influence and the public sphere (see Edwards 1997). Right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation labored to regain the power to define the social and global situation, to set the political agenda, and to dominate public discourse. Wealthy individuals and families poured resources into this strategy and actions associated with it.
Many of these financiers held (and still hold) opinions inspired by the kind of radical political ethics that Hitler and Ayn Rand championed: each man forges his own destiny and this is the ultimate virtue on which all morality must be based. (Hitler applied the same logic to collective individuals, i.e., “peoples”; see Dumont 1986: 149-179.) Among the financiers one can note John M. Olin, Charles and David Koch, Richard Mellon Scaife, Harry and Lynde Bradley, and the Coors and DeVos families (Mayer 2016). The first, highly conspicuous, sign of success of the radical rightist strategy was the election of Margaret Thatcher (in 1979) and Ronald Reagan (in 1980) into the highest office of their respective countries. Other signs of an ideological backlash could be found in popular culture, for example, in novels like American Psycho (1991) and The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), and in films like Wall Street (1987) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), all of which celebrate (with more or less irony) wealth, conspicuous consumption, and self-indulgence. The backlash also included renewed commitments to structural stupidity, particularly in the name of free speech. The attack on PC was spearheaded not just by pundits like Allan Bloom and Dinesh D’Souza (about whom more in a moment), but also by American comedians like George Carlin, Bill Hicks, and Bill Maher. In 1993, the latter began hosting a talk show on American TV called Politically Incorrect, in which he, from a Libertarian point of view, railed against what he perceived as political correctness. It is their Libertarian outlook that unites the type of comedians who in their stage acts criticize speech codes. While Libertarianism hardly amounts to a unified political philosophy, it is deeply anchored in American figments of “rugged individualism.” A fundamental Libertarian belief is that the state, in the United States typically referred to as “the government,” stands in the way of individual freedom. American Libertarians usually rally around three issues, which they take to typify the question of individual liberty versus governmental regulation: gun ownership, drug use, and free speech. In all three cases, Libertarians argue that the right of the individual ought to be unlimited. Anyone should be allowed, without legal interference, to own guns, use drugs, and state in public whatever they want. Obviously, this makes Libertarianism incompatible with Socialism and classical liberalism, for which not unrestricted individual freedom but social justice and human dignity are core values.
In an interview on ESPN radio, the American comedian Jerry Seinfeld responded to a question about performing at US colleges that, while he himself does not play campuses, he is warned by fellow comedians not to go near them because the students are so PC. He then recounts an anecdote involving his 14-year-old daughter, who accused him of being sexist because he told her that she eventually would be allowed to go into the city by herself to meet with boys. (Who is to say that it is boys she will want to meet, seems to be Seinfeld’s daughter’s objection.) Unaware of his own dark zone of the imagination, Seinfeld continued to rant about what he perceives to be folly accusations of racism and sexism. A number of North American comedians have stated publicly that they no longer perform at campuses because students are too PC. The right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza blamed multiculturalism and political correctness for this state of affairs. Like many other pundits on the extreme right, D’Souza was supported by the Olin Foundation, named after the just mentioned John M. Olin. In his book Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991), D’Souza tries to argue, based on anecdotes (some of which turned out to be untrue and others to be impossible to validate), that the American university system is failing because of political correctness. D’Souza, like the already mentioned Libertarians, attempts to contrast PC with free speech, claiming that the protection of free speech must supersede any consideration of antidiscrimination. In response to this and similar propositions, Stanley Fish (1994) argued that “there’s no such thing as free speech” and that this is “a good thing, too.” All speech, writes Fish, is always already positioned and partisan. It inevitably originates in an interpretive community. Furthermore, not all speech is protected by laws that guarantee freedom of expression. Libel, perjury, plagiarism constituting copyright infringement, child pornography, and so forth are all types of expression that can amount to punishable offenses in many, if not most, countries. “Speech, in short, is never a value in and of itself but is always produced within the precincts of some assumed conception of the good to which it must yield in the event of conflict” (Fish 1994: 104).
By taking an anti-essentialist, perspectivist stance, Fish is able to criticize the kind of ahistorical, fundamentalist free speech position from which D’Souza and Libertarian comedians argue. But it also forces him to attack political correctness because it too uses essentialist arguments and tries to substantiate them by referring to universalist values. The point of historical reference for both right-wing pundits like D’Souza and most left-wing activists is the European Enlightenment, of which Fish is critical because of its rationalist and universalist legacy. The academic debate on political correctness subsided toward the end of the twentieth century. In the meantime, the concept of political correctness had become a fighting word in the public sphere and in popular culture. No longer burdened with academic references to such things as cultural canons, the Enlightenment, and essentialism, it was made to stand for a certain type of attitude that is characterized by oversensitivity, censorship, and militancy. In an even more abridged version, PC now simply is shorthand for feminism, antiracism, antidiscrimination, and other emancipatory positions.
Political Correctness in the Age of Reinvigorated Fascism
In an article in The Guardian, Moira Weigel (2016) points out that the concept of PC acquired a new quality in the 2010s. In the 1990s, the battleground for attacks on political correctness was the academy and the targets were “academic elites and their clients,” as Jonathan Friedman put it (see above). The alleged goal was to save the intellectual achievements of Western civilization from “politically correct multiculturalists” who were said to substitute inferior cultural expressions for the established canon. In the 2010s, fascists like Trump and Duterte are not concerned with the Western canon and intellectual achievements more generally. The battlefield for their assaults on political correctness is the public sphere, not the academy, and their goal is to discredit the media and what is vaguely referred to as the political establishment. The term “political correctness” is now used to reinforce the idea that there is a deep divide between ordinary people and what is alleged to be a liberal elite. Fascists charge this “liberal elite” with policing language to prevent people from uttering inconvenient truths (Weigel 2016). The inconvenient truths contemporary fascists like to utter are that this or that ethnically defined group subverts the nation, eventually bringing about its downfall, and that “the elite” is complicit in this tragedy.
The ground for such accusations was prepared over several decades. Ever since the 1970s, the message from the political Right was that society could not afford large numbers of “takers,” that is, recipients of social insurance payments. Unemployment, for example, was gradually redefined from a structural phenomenon to a problem of work-shyness and individual incompetence. In one form or another, it was suggested that there is a group of people in society that takes advantage of everyone else by refusing to work or acquire the necessary skills to be gainfully employed. During the 2016 US presidential campaign, a right-wing TV ideologue, Bill O’Reilly, asked then candidate Donald Trump how he intended to provide jobs for young unemployed African Americans considering that many of them “are ill-educated and have tattoos on their foreheads.” In 2016, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, a German fascist political party, published a platform for one of its state elections in which it proposed that social assistance payments should be paid only to those who perform “citizen labor” (Burgerarbeit), that is, give back to society in return for benefits received (AfD 2016: 27). This proposal came at a time when a similar pilot project conducted by the German government (allegedly for the sake of offering an entry point to the labor market) already had been canceled because it had shown that this type of quasi-forced labor was costly and ineffective. Because the AfD seizes any opportunity to claim that non-Germans receive most social benefits, pitching anew the idea of citizen labor had a subtext: force those lazy foreigners to put in an honest day’s work. To summarize: contemporary fascism, of which racism is one dimension, is embedded in the value regime that was created by the right-wing and neoliberal attack on the welfare state, which, they argued, provides for the work-shy. Singling out ethnically defined groups as parasitic was a small step. It is this political situation that makes up the current context for the fighting word “politically correct.” In this climate, the concepts of political correctness and political incorrectness have lost any ironic quality. Gone is the playful use of “politically incorrect” in reference to lesbian sex. The campaign against discrimination has in many—but far from all or even most—parts of the world been codified and institutionalized, which does not leave much room for irony. Instead, the expression “politically correct” is used as a weapon in the assault on the welfare state and its institutions. The purpose of attacking the opponents of discrimination by dismissing them as PC is to cut the moral ground from under their feet. This is the same moral ground on which the welfare state was constructed: individuals should be able to develop their natural capabilities; society should be as just as possible for its least advantaged members; majorities should be prohibited from tyrannizing minorities; and so on. The teasing, ironic use of PC dissipated. Our current predicament is that the non-ironic, derogatory use of PC is both indicative of and instrumental in the rise of fascism.