Everyone knows what “political correctness” means until they are asked to define it. It may mean no more than avoiding language likely to cause offence. It may also mean a system in which political acceptability counts for more than truth. These are not merely rival definitions of one thing, but different meanings accumulated over more than a century and now carelessly confused.
The words themselves are older than communism. In the 1793 Supreme Court case Chisholm v. Georgia, James Wilson, a founding father of the United States, objected to a toast made to “the United States” rather than “the people of the United States”. “This is not politically correct,” he wrote. Wilson was discussing popular sovereignty, not offensive language or minority rights. It is an etymological curiosity and little more.
The modern sense came from another political world. Within communist movements, “correct” meant more than factually true. There was a correct political line, a correct class position and a correct understanding of history. Lenin placed literature, economic policy and specialised knowledge within the wider purposes of the Party. A proposal could be technically sound and politically wrong.
Communists did not profess contempt for objective truth. Stalin presented dialectical materialism as a scientific explanation of reality, while Mao stressed experience and practical results. The difficulty was that the Party also claimed the final authority to interpret what the evidence meant. An inconvenient conclusion could be dismissed as bourgeois, reactionary or contrary to the direction of history.
Mao stated the hierarchy with particular clarity. In 1942, he distinguished artistic from political standards and placed the political standard first. In 1957, he offered six political criteria for judging public words and actions, giving priority to support for socialism and Communist Party leadership. Political correctness in this sense meant conformity with the recognised political framework. Whether a statement appeared true could become secondary to the consequences of admitting it.
The expression later appeared among Western socialists, often as a joke against precisely this mentality. Writing in 1992, the American educator Herbert Kohl recalled socialists in the Bronx during the late 1940s and early 1950s using “politically correct” sarcastically against members of the Communist Party. His recollection came four decades after the conversations concerned, but the point of the joke was plain. The politically correct answer was the answer approved by Moscow, regardless of how matters appeared to everyone else.
By the 1960s and 1970s, the expression had spread among the New Left, socialists and feminists.
Often it was a joke; sometimes it was not. It could mock excessive ideological discipline or acknowledge that an opinion conformed to movement expectations. It could also be used in earnest when personal conduct failed to match professed political commitments. A radical who opposed imperialism while treating women in a manner other activists considered chauvinistic, or merely retaining traditional views on sex, might be judged “correct” on imperialism and “incorrect” on sex.
No congress resolved that an ironic communist expression should become an earnest liberal doctrine. The joke and the doctrine existed together. Activists mocked the notion of a politically correct answer while continuing to believe that some answers were politically preferable. A movement can pull down one orthodoxy and build another without ever formally deciding to do so.
For years, the phrase scarcely ventured beyond political and academic circles. At the end of the 1980s, it entered the wider American culture war. Richard Bernstein’s 1990 New York Times article, “The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct”, presented disputes over university curricula, language and race as parts of a single expanding phenomenon. What had been a taunt within the left became a charge against the left.
Within a year, it had reached the White House. Speaking at the University of Michigan in 1991, George H. W. Bush stated that campaigns against prejudice arose from a desire to remove the remnants of racism and hatred. He argued that political correctness had begun to replace old prejudices with new forms of coercion. By then the controversy was national. The internet merely gave it new reach two decades later.
Under this one heading were thrown disputes about reading lists, racial considerations in admissions, campus speech codes, personal insults and degrading language. They did not all belong to the same category. Expanding a curriculum was not the same as prohibiting a book. Discouraging a slur was not necessarily the same as forbidding an argument. Yet courtesy could become a convenient name for regulating disputed ideas, and the boundary between courtesy and control was precisely what was at issue.
“Political correctness” consequently became a name for several different things. Sometimes it meant considerate language intended to avoid needless insult. Sometimes it meant institutional rules governing speech and conduct. It could describe the quieter pressure which persuaded people to conceal opinions that might damage their social or professional standing. At its laziest, it became a general term of abuse for any ‘progressive’ belief, however freely expressed or reasonably defended. The new orthodoxy was strongest when it ceased to appear political at all, presenting disputed judgements as no more than the minimum requirements of decency.
Not every demand for courtesy is tyrannical. Even the young reactionary may discover that abandoning a needless slur is a modest price for having the rest of their argument heard. Every society maintains conventions governing how people address one another. We should not pretend that centrists or conservatives would necessarily be any less capable of enforcing linguistic rules when their own values are involved.
The dividing line lies between etiquette and epistemology. Etiquette concerns the conduct of a disagreement; epistemology concerns how we determine what is true. A demand for civility does not settle an argument in advance. A demand that everybody affirm a disputed political proposition does.
Trouble begins when that line is erased. Once a contested claim has been classified as harmful, the alleged harm may be treated as reason enough to prevent its examination. Political disagreement becomes evidence of moral deficiency. The dissenter is no longer merely wrong; they are deemed unsafe, hateful or unfit to participate. The pressure passes from language into belief.
The conflict was old by the 2010s. The machinery was new. Social media could carry an accusation to an enormous audience within hours. Universities, businesses and professional organisations developed elaborate systems for managing complaints and reputational risks. A local quarrel could become a national scandal before anyone had established what had happened.
There was no Central Committee. The rules emerged from campaigners, administrators, employers, journalists and online crowds responding to one another. The approved vocabulary also changed rapidly. An expression regarded as enlightened in one decade might be condemned as outdated in the next. No definitive order had to be issued. Institutions learned to anticipate the complaint.
The pressure was no less real for being decentralised. A 2020 Cato Institute survey found that 62% of Americans believed the political climate prevented them from expressing some of their opinions because others might find them offensive. The poll measured fear rather than confirmed punishment and Cato’s interest in free expression is obvious. Even so, the number is too large to wave away.
Meanwhile, “political correctness” itself began to sound dated. “Woke”, drawn originally from African American vernacular and associated with alertness to perceived racial injustice, became a broader description of ‘progressive’ social attitudes. Its critics then made it answer for every species of fashionable cant, administrative zeal and moral exhibitionism. “Cancel culture” named the punitive element more directly. The vocabulary changed faster than the quarrel beneath it.
None of this makes a university disciplinary hearing the Gulag. The Soviet state could imprison dissenters, eliminate rival institutions and prevent meaningful exit. Universities, employers and media organisations in the modern West operate within a more plural society and under laws they do not exclusively control. Public denunciation, disciplinary investigation and dismissal can be unjust without being equivalent to imprisonment in a one-party state.
The comparison reaches no further than function. In both settings, political commitments may decide which claims are acceptable before their truth has been examined. The doctrines, authorities and punishments differ. The old temptation to approve the answer before permitting the question remains.
Ireland is no exception. The 26-County State, once accused of allowing Catholic teaching to govern public life, now congratulates itself endlessly on having escaped clerical authority, even
as a new moral vocabulary travels through government departments, universities, NGOs, broadcasters and corporate offices. The Six Counties have their own political orthodoxies, but much the same managerial language crosses the border without difficulty. A society taught to recognise the old clerisy by its collar can be curiously slow to recognise the new one wearing a lanyard. The catechism has changed; dissent is punished through public disgrace, professional exclusion and social ostracism.
Anyone who calls themselves a Republican ought to recognise that the question is national as well as intellectual. A people which receives its approved language ready-made from London, Brussels and corporate America may possess all the outward trappings of sovereignty and still remain provincial in mind.
Political correctness had no single inventor. Communist party discipline, left-wing mockery of that discipline, attempts to police personal conduct, campaigns for more inclusive language and the inevitable reaction against changes within universities and corporate life all left their mark.
Much of the modern argument is verbal confusion. One person uses the term to mean basic courtesy while another uses it to mean compelled ideological conformity. Both phenomena exist, but they are not the same thing.
The expression remains useful in its older critical sense. A proposition becomes politically correct when its acceptability depends less upon whether it is true than upon whether it supports the recognised political framework. No telegram from Moscow is required. The doctrine may call itself socialist, liberal, conservative or something else entirely. Political correctness begins when the answer has been approved before the question is permitted.
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