The Roots of Political Correctness

"In the meantime, political correctness – which had once been rightly considered so radical and authoritarian – was becoming mainstream. It did not lose its authoritarian element; instead, by gaining popularity among the students, it transformed into something totalitarian." . . .

Intellectual Takeout

"Over the last thirty years, political correctness has metastasized. Today, so many politically-correct assumptions have become mainstream that, as Tocqueville once predicted, they have narrowed our questions and our ability to question, rather than actually tell us the exact answers to things.

"Over the last decade, it has become normal for students, professors, and the public at large to think of Western civilization as a term meaning, covertly and not so covertly, white supremacy or the mere history of white people. In many circles today, well beyond the intelligentsia, it has become commonplace to sneer when Western civilization is mentioned, as if we’re really all in on the secret. Too clever. Too clever, by far.

"Undoubtedly, these attacks – often known broadly as political correctness – stem from the Maoist and the New Leftist infiltration of Western society in the 1960s. Unlike the Stalinists and the Old Left, the New Left – often the actual biological children of the Old Left, a.k.a. “Red Diaper Babies” – understood that Marxist economic determinism had failed time and again, especially in a society as abundantly wealthy as that of America (even during the Great Depression, the economy continued to persevere, if only half-heartedly). Rather than rely on the supposed inevitable Marxist dialectic of history, the New Left understood that it must change things culturally if it were to have any real influence at all. As opposed to leading labor unions, they understood they must play the long game, hiding out in institutions that matter culturally, especially those in education and religion. The long game told them to ignore the present generation and begin to train the upcoming and forthcoming generations. By the early 1980s, the New Left controlled much of academia (and the public schools, K-12).

"This had been the plan since, at least, 1962, when the New Left formed around the ideas of Tom Hayden:

"The university is located in a permanent position of social influence. Its educational function makes it indispensable and automatically makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes. Second, in an unbelievably complicated world, it is the central institution for organizing, evaluating and transmitting knowledge. Third, the extent to which academic resources presently are used to buttress immoral social practice is revealed, first, by the extent to which defense contracts make the universities engineers of the arms race. Too, the use of modern social science as a manipulative tool reveals itself in the ‘human relations’ consultants to the modern corporations, who introduce trivial sops to give laborers feelings of ‘participation’ or ‘belonging,’ while actually deluding them in order to further exploit their labor. And, of course, the use of motivational research is already infamous as a manipulative aspect of American politics. But these social uses of the universities’ resources also demonstrate the unchangeable reliance by men of power on the men and storehouses of knowledge: this makes the university functionally tied to society in new ways, revealing new potentialities, new levers for change. Fourth, the university is the only mainstream institution that is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint." . . .