Any time you have discourse between conservatives and liberals or anyone from an extremely right camp and somebody from an extremely left camp, the term: Political Correctness is thrown in there.
I don't usually interchange leftism and liberalism. I know its commonplace in contemporary discourse and there's plenty of overlap but there's also a distinction that often gets thrown out. LEFT-WING politics supports social equality and egalitarianism, universal civil rights. LIBERAL politics supports liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law. A zero tolerance policy governing racism in school is quite leftist but not at all liberal. Free economic markets are quite liberal but not very leftist.
But why? I've typically seen it used by conservatives who don't like... trans, gay, or racial equality, throw it at people who say things like: "Gender and Sex are different things", or even, "Gay people should be allowed to adopt same as straight people", etc, etc... but why? Do they assume that left-leaning people just... don't actually believe those things? What do these people think to motivates left-leaning people to lie to people on the internet over things like this?
The term began on the LEFT as a liberal critique of leftism and was coopted by the Dinesh D'Souza set as a sly FOX News critique of egalitarianism itself. By the time Trump ran for president, political correctness had no real defined meaning for the right-wing. Rather, like the word liberal or socialist, the term is just another right wing identifier for the doubleplusungood, detached from meaning or context. I like acglade's Chomsky quote or Krugman: "the big threat to our discourse is right-wing political correctness, which – unlike the liberal version – has lots of power and money behind it. And the goal is very much the kind of thing Orwell tried to convey with his notion of "Newspeak": to make it impossible to talk, and possibly even think, about ideas that challenge the established order." On the right-wing today, the lie that Trump won the 2020 election is so PC that the GOP will vote you out of the party for saying otherwise. Even a right-wing coup attempt must be cleaned up and justified and made correct. Even (maybe especially) right wing critics of anti-democratic violence must be ostracized.
Anyway, that is a little bit off-topic, who actually uses political correctness?
I think the era of fine-toothed liberal critiques of leftist overreach are lost in or at least useless to our current schism. When the critics of political correctness prove as now to be anti-democratic, anti-truth then the fine balances of franchise vs freedom are set aside and all good citizens rally to the over-arching and most manifest correctness of a constitutional republic and the incorrectness of tyranny,
Well.... typically conservative and alt-right people.... there called EUPHAMISMS. They've been a term forever... because people have used them... for a long time. Old conservative presidents used the euphemism of "job security" to be racist, or "family values" to be homophobic, and so and so forth. Let's talk about the alt-right though, they use euphemisms such as: "The Jewish question", to be super anti-semantic, "The great replacement" to be xenophobic, etc, etc, my point? Traditionally speaking, it has always been the right to hide things behind a political facade, not the left, the problem with the left is that its typically TOO honest for people to like it. You know.. like calling for Medicare for all and being called socialist? That type of thing. So... why?
The original point of left v. right was people v. king (or autocracy or hierarchy) in the question of rulership. When a mistake is made in a republic, the people change executives and an honest appraisal can lead to better government. When a mistake is made by authoritarian, the executive must suppress and conceal any honest appraisal to prevent a change of executive. Therefore, rightism is inherently less honest as well as slower to improve government.
Consider Atwater's famous clarity regarding the southern strategy he ran for the GOP in the '80's.
You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger". By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger". So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.
(Lee Atwater thought of Roger AIles his "soul brother")
Trump's innovation was to drop the subtlety, to remove any policy or commitment to objective truth and insert himself, Trump's own emodiment as the racist-euphemism-in-chief. So, it doesn't matter whether birtherism is objectively true, what matters is that Trump establishes his racist credentials. Eventually, even free and fair elections are willingly tabled so long as the tyrant is your kind of bigot.
