Political correctness
1990's
The term "political correctness" in its modern pejorative sense became part of the US public debate in the late 1980s, with its media use becoming widespread in 1991. It became a key term encapsulating conservative concerns about the left in academia in particular, and in culture and political debate more broadly. Two articles on the topic in late 1990 in Forbes and Newsweek both used the term "Thought police" in their headlines, exemplifying the tone of the new usage, but it was Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991) which "captured the press's imagination". "Political correctness" here was a label for a range of policies in academia around supporting multiculturalism though affirmative action, sanctions against anti-minority "hate speech", and revising curricula (sometimes referred to as "canon busting"). These trends were at least in part a response to the rise of identity politics, with movements such feminism, gay rights movements and ethnic minority movements. That response received significant direct and indirect funding from conservative foundations and think tanks, not least the John M. Olin Foundation, which funded D'Souza's book.
In the event, the previously obscure term became common-currency in the lexicon of the conservative social and political challenges against progressive teaching methods and curriculum changes in the secondary schools and universities (public and private) of the U.S. Hence, in 1991, at a commencement ceremony for a graduating class of the University of Michigan, U.S. President George H.W. Bush (198993) spoke against: "... a movement [that would] declare certain topics off-limits, certain expressions off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits...."
Herbert Kohl (1992) pointed out that a number of neoconservatives who promoted the use of the term "politically correct" in the early 1990s were actually former Communist Party members, and as a result familiar with the original use of the phrase. He argued that in doing so, they intended "to insinuate that egalitarian democratic ideas are actually authoritarian, orthodox and Communist-influenced, when they oppose the right of people to be racist, sexist, and homophobic."
Mainstream usages of the term politically correct, and its adjectival derivatives political correctness and PC began in the 1990s, when right-wing politicians adopted the phrase as a pejorative descriptor of their ideologic enemies especially in context of the Culture Wars about language and the content of public-school curricula. Generally, any policy, behavior, and speech code that the speaker or the writer regards as the imposition of a liberal orthodoxy about people and things, can be described and criticized as politically correct. Jan Narveson has written that "that phrase was born to live between scare-quotes: it suggests that the operative considerations in the area so called are merely political, steamrollering the genuine reasons of principle for which we ought to be acting..."
Liberal commentators have argued that the conservatives and reactionaries who used the term did so in effort to divert political discussion away from the substantive matters of resolving societal discrimination such as racial, social class, gender, and legal inequality against people whom the right-wing do not consider part of the social mainstream.
In the course of the 1990s, the term was increasingly commonly used in the United Kingdom, with the expression "political correctness gone mad" becoming a catchphrase, usually associated with the politically conservative Daily Mail newspaper. In The Abolition of Britain (1999), Peter Hitchens wrote that: "What Americans describe with the casual phrase ... political correctness is the most intolerant system of thought to dominate the British Isles since the Reformation."
In 2001 Will Hutton wrote:
Political correctness is one of the brilliant tools that the American Right developed in the mid1980s, as part of its demolition of American liberalism.... What the sharpest thinkers on the American Right saw quickly was that by declaring war on the cultural manifestations of liberalism by leveling the charge of political correctness against its exponents they could discredit the whole political project.
Words Really are Important, Mr Blunkett, The Observer (16 December 2001)
Similarly Polly Toynbee, writing in 2001, said the phrase is an empty, right-wing smear, designed only to elevate its user, and, in 2010 "...the phrase political correctness was born as a coded cover for all who still want to say Paki, spastic, or queer..."