542
PARTISAN REVLEW
to justifY them as truths anymore. If my students feel a hint of regret
about their obsolescence (as I think they do), then we have made a be–
ginning toward regaining some sense of a collective destiny.
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
Correcting PC
This is rather late in the day for a symposium on political correctness.
The great public debate peaked in 1991 and its effects can still be felt. I
first heard the phrase a year or two earlier as it was still in transition
from a stamp of approval to a very effective slogan of opprobrium. My
own position has always been somewhat anomalous: I detest political
correctness as a form of mindless conformity yet also dislike most of the
attacks that brandish the term as a club to batter every liberal initiative.
The comically right-thinking mindset of PC, though now on the defen–
sive, remains a nuisance in several fields, yet the phrase became an indis–
criminate but highly effective weapon in the culture wars. The term is so
inexact, so freighted polemically, that it should be retired forthwith; I
use it myself only with reluctance. But as long as we
are
using it, we
might as well describe it with some precision.
Perhaps we should begin by agreeing what it is
not.
Political cor–
rectness is not a concern for equal treatment of blacks, women, homo–
sexuals, Native Americans, and others who have been subjected to bla–
tant discrimination . Such a concern is shared by virtually every thoughtful
American; it has been the aim of our best social movements of the past
century. For the same reason, PC is not liberalism, nor can it be closely
identified with the values of the 1960s. As a form of orthodoxy and in–
tolerance, PC is the exact opposite of both liberal pluralism and the an–
archic individualism dear to the sixties - at least until its last, angry, self–
destructive phase. The me-too conformity of PC completely reverses the
liberal or radical values in whose name it sometimes pretends to speak.
Right now it espouses a cultural nationalism that has deeper roots in the
history of the right than in the traditions of the left.
Political correctness is not exclusively a phenomenon of the would–
be left. Nothing could be more PC than the rigid ideological test ap–
plied during the Reagan and Bush years to all prospective appointments
