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correct" described the self-righteous, non-smoking, ecologically sensitive,
vegetarian, feminist, non-racist, sandal-wearing beneficiaries of capitalism
- £1Culty as well as students - who paraded their outworn sixties-radical–
ism in the classroom and in their social life. Mostly, it was a joke. Who
could take these people seriously? Thus it is that the acronym "PC" first
won larger notice in a student cartoon strip out of Brown University,
an institution still distinguished for its overweening quotient of politi cal
correctness if little else.
Some of the jokes preserve a residue of humor. Non-academics, at
least, still chuckle when told about "Specific Manifestations of
Oppression," a document that Smith College distributes to all incoming
students in which the sin of "lookism" - the politically incorrect belief
that some people are more attractive than others - is enrolled in the
catalogue of punishable prejudices. The rub, of course, is "punishable."
At colleges across the country, students (and staff and faculty) can be dis–
ciplined by campus diversity police not only for behaving in certain pro–
scribed ways
bllt also Jor expressillg Jorbiddell opilliolls or exhibiting certain
III/popular attitudes.
As the ethos of political correctness spread and codi–
fied, what seemed at first a disagreeable joke began to appear consider–
ably more ominous. The odor of totalitarian intolerance was unmistak–
able. And in this context it is worth noting that the proponents of po–
litical co rrectness have all along vociferously denied that they were polit–
ically correct: denial has always been a totalitarian specialty. But anyone
who has taken the trouble to observe what has happened in the academy
knows that over the last couple of years political correctness has evolved
from a sporadic expression of left-leaning self-righteousness into a dogma
of orthodoA)' that is widely accepted, and widely enforced, by Ameri ca's
cultural elite.
That was stage one. Stage two, the penetration of political correct–
ness into public policy, is now underway. Future historians will look
back to the election of Bill Clinton as a defining event in this process.
As Hillary Clinton rattled on about "the politics of meaning" - what a
delicious phrase: so redolent of virtue, so empty of content! - her hus–
band set about filling (or at least attempting to fill) top government
posts with people distinguished chiefly for their championship of politi–
cally correct causes. The appointment of Donna Shalala, former
Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, to the Clinton cabinet as
Secretary of Health and Human Services will surely be remembered as a
watershed. The woman who in 1989 insisted that "Covert racism [in
America] is just as bad today as overt racism was thirty years ago" now
presides over the single largest budget in the United States government.
Yet somehow even more disturbing is President Clinton's nomina-
