political correctness suppresses our freedom of speech essay

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Get connected, is ‘political correctness’ threatening freedom of speech.

"As a result of the cultural-left’s long march through the institutions … political correctness involving identity politics, privileging victimhood and virtue signalling dominate public policy and debate", whined Kevin Donnelly, Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University, in the Sydney Morning Herald .

"Like never before Free Speech is facing extinction in Australia", exclaimed conservative activist group Advance Australia. "We are at a crossroad. We either stand up and demand a fair go or we get trampled."

But is it really the free speech of conservatives, right-wing radicals and religious fundamentalists that is under attack?

The August 8 decision of the High Court to uphold the sacking of Michaela Banerji , a public servant employed by the Department of Immigration who tweeted anonymously against the treatment of immigration detainees, sent political chills through those of us employed by government. It confirmed the fact that should I, an employee of local government, speak out against the actions of my council, no matter that I do so anonymously and in my own time, may be sacked just as surely as if I were drunk on duty or had punched a councillor.

Head of the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland Professor Kath Gelber told Green Left Weekly : "The implications [of the Banerji case] for public employees are considerable because, in this case, the employer went out of their way to discover the identity of the person on Twitter who was using an anonymous handle. So this does restrict employees being able to be openly critical of government policy when they can be identified as working for the government/in the public service.

"I think we are witnessing a high point in the place of the idea of 'free speech' in public discourse, yet contrarily, at the same time, a highly selective approach to free speech by its staunchest advocates.

"So, those who cited free speech as crucial to being able to express opposition to same-sex marriage or to being able to speak your mind in relation to Section 18C [of the Racial Discrimination Act ] and racial vilification, tend to be silent when it comes to laws that seriously encroach on free speech in relation to national security, for example."

Even progressive artistic expression is under threat. Waverley Council, in Sydney’s east, voted down a motion on August 6 to remove a mural painted on the Bondi seawall by renowned artist Luke Cornish. The mural depicts 24 heavily-armed Border Force goons, with the slogan "NOT welcome to Bondi". The 24 guards represented the 24 suicides of people in onshore and offshore immigration detention facility since 2010.

Hours after the council voted not to remove the mural, it was defaced with white paint .

Laws against offensive language are also being used to limit the free speech of progressive activists. Peace activist Danny Lim was violently arrested by police at Barangaroo in Sydney on January 11 and fined $500 for refusing to remove a sandwich-board placard that read, "SMILE CVN'T! WHY CVN'T?". 

Police officers defended their actions , arguing that the sign was deeply offensive, even after they swore profusely at Lim and bystanders supporting him during the arrest.

Nevertheless, the free speech of radical conservatives is guaranteed.

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held in Sydney on August 9-10 — an outgrowth of the US conservative establishment conference of the same name — has provided US conservatives such as radical Republican and Trump supporter Judge Jeanine Pirro with a platform to describe "America’s southern border as being under siege by murderers and gangsters", according to the SMH . 

The CPAC in Sydney was attended by reactionary luminaries, including former Coalition prime minister Tony Abbott; Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage; and former Breitbart News website editor Raheem Kassam, whose visa to Australia Labor home affairs spokesperson Kristina Keneally sought unsuccessfully to have revoked .

The free speech of reactionary commentators such as Andrew Bolt also flourishes unrestricted in the pages of News Corp publications. A documentary detailing the end of Adam Goodes' AFL career , The Final Quarter , shows how Bolt relentlessly pursued Goodes in his columns for the Herald Sun and other newspapers, while Goodes was being actively booed by crowds at AFL games from 2013 to 2015.

Bolt told the ABC: "My criticism of Goodes is very simple: he singled out a 13-year-old girl who should have been protected, not publicly shown, identified and humiliated nationally as the face of Australian racism."

Yet, Goodes had called for the community to support the 13-year-old girl who had racially vilified him. In May 2013, Goodes said : "I just hope that people give the 13-year-old girl the same sort of support, because she needs it, her family needs it, and the people around them need it. 

"It's not a witch-hunt, I don't want people to go after this young girl. We've just got to help educate society better so it doesn't happen again."

Gelber explained: "Free speech is not a free for all; a free for all would mean that the loudest and those with the most power get to speak and be heard, while others are marginalised and excluded from public debate.

"The importance of free speech to democracy means that we need to facilitate as many people as possible to participate in public debate meaningfully. This means regulating speech that is harmful to the extent that it prevents others from also participating."

The marginalised, oppressed and those who speak for them have a right to be heard. 

The noisy clamour, claiming that “political correctness” is threatening free speech, is in fact a campaign to silence them.

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How Americans feel about ‘cancel culture’ and offensive speech in 6 charts

Americans have long debated the boundaries of free speech, from what is and isn’t protected by the First Amendment to discussions about “political correctness” and, more recently, “cancel culture.” The internet has amplified these debates and fostered new questions about tone and tenor in recent years. Here’s a look at how adults in the United States see these and related issues, based on Pew Research Center surveys.

This Pew Research Center analysis looks at how Americans view the tenor of discourse, both online and off. The findings used here come from three surveys the Center conducted in fall 2020. Sample sizes, field dates and methodological information for each survey are accessible through the links in this analysis.

In a September 2020 survey, 44% of Americans said they’d heard at least a fair amount about the phrase “cancel culture,” including 22% who had heard a great deal about it. A majority of Americans (56%) said they’d heard nothing or not too much about it, including 38% – the largest share – who had heard nothing at all about the phrase.

Familiarity with the term cancel culture varied by age, gender and education level, but not political party affiliation, according to the same survey.

Younger adults were more likely to have heard about cancel culture than their older counterparts. Roughly two-thirds (64%) of adults under 30 said they’d heard a great deal or fair amount about cancel culture, compared with 46% of those ages 30 to 49 and 34% of those 50 and older.

Men were more likely than women to be familiar with the phrase, as were those who have a bachelor’s or advanced degree when compared with those who have lower levels of formal education.

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were about as likely as Republicans and GOP leaners to say they had heard at least a fair amount about cancel culture (46% vs. 44%). But there were more pronounced differences within each party when taking ideology into account. About six-in-ten liberal Democrats (59%) said they had heard at least a fair amount about cancel culture, compared with roughly a third of conservative and moderate Democrats (34%). Similarly, around half of conservative Republicans (49%) had heard of the term, compared with around a third of moderate and liberal Republicans (36%).

Americans were most likely to mention accountability when describing what the phrase cancel culture means to them. As part of the fall 2020 survey, the Center asked U.S. adults who had heard a fair amount or a great deal about the term to explain in their own words what it meant to them. Around half (49%) said it describes actions people take to hold others accountable.

Smaller shares described cancel culture as a form of censorship – such as a restriction on free speech or as history being erased – or as mean-spirited attacks used to cause others harm (14% and 12%, respectively).

About a third of conservative Republicans who had heard of the phrase (36%) described it as actions taken to hold people accountable, compared with roughly half or more of moderate or liberal Republicans (51%), conservative or moderate Democrats (54%) and liberal Democrats (59%).

Conservative Republicans who had heard of the term were also more likely to see cancel culture as a form of censorship: 26% described it as censorship, compared with 15% of moderate or liberal Republicans and roughly one-in-ten or fewer Democrats, regardless of ideology.

In the September 2020 survey, Americans said they believed calling out others on social media is more likely to hold people accountable than punish people who don’t deserve it. Overall, 58% of adults said that in general, when people publicly call others out on social media for posting content that might be considered offensive, they are more likely to hold people accountable . In comparison, 38% said this kind of action is more likely to punish people who don’t deserve it.

Views on this question differed sharply by political party. Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to say that this type of action holds people accountable (75% vs. 39%). In contrast, 56% of Republicans – but just 22% of Democrats – said this generally punishes people who don’t deserve it.

In a separate report using data from the same September 2020 survey, 55% of Americans said many people take offensive content they see online too seriously , while a smaller share (42%) said offensive content online is too often excused as not a big deal.

Americans’ attitudes again differed widely by political party. Roughly six-in-ten Democrats (59%) said offensive content online is too often excused as not a big deal, while just a quarter of Republicans agreed – a 34 percentage point gap. And while 72% of Republicans said many people take offensive content they see online too seriously, about four-in-ten Democrats (39%) said the same.

In a four-country survey conducted in the fall of 2020, Americans were the most likely to say that people today are too easily offended . A majority of Americans (57%) said people today are too easily offended by what others say, while four-in-ten said people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others, according to the survey of adults in the U.S., Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

In contrast, respondents in the three European countries surveyed were more closely divided over whether people today are too easily offended or whether people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others.

Opinions on this topic were connected to ideological leanings in three of the four countries surveyed, with the largest gap among U.S. adults. Around two-thirds of Americans on the ideological left (65%) said people should be careful to avoid offending others, compared with about one-in-four on the ideological right – a gap of 42 percentage points. The left-right difference was 17 points in the UK and 15 points in Germany. There was no significant difference between the left and the right in France.

In the U.S., the ideological divide was closely related to political party affiliation: Six-in-ten Democrats said people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others, while only 17% of Republicans said the same.

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Katherine Schaeffer is a research analyst at Pew Research Center .

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The Purpose of Political Correctness

By Isaac Chotiner

Nesrine Malik, a columnist for the Guardian , has covered many of the cultural and political controversies that have emerged in the U.S. and Britain over the past half decade, including debates over Islamophobia and the cultural aspects of Brexit. In her first book, “ We Need New Stories: The Myths That Subvert Freedom ,” Malik argues that much of the angst and anger over “cancel culture” and free speech are the result of misleading stories that Americans tell themselves. Her aim, she writes, is to “tackle the ways in which history, race, gender, and classical liberal values are being leveraged to halt any disruption of a centuries-old hierarchy that is paying dividends for fewer and fewer people.”

I recently spoke by phone with Malik, who was born in Sudan and lives in London. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the state of free speech, how much of cancel culture is really corporate damage control, and why the work of the anti-racism consultant Robin DiAngelo represents “an extreme bout of group narcissism.”

It seems to me that fights over political correctness or cancel culture are happening more within liberal institutions. Does that seem accurate?

That is entirely accurate. The front line has moved, as you accurately point out, from between right and left, or right and progressive, to within progressive circles and within liberal circles. And now we’re hand-wringing about these issues as well—political correctness and freedom of speech.

Free speech is a really big one that liberal institutions, liberal media institutions in particular, are quite disturbed by. And that’s a new development, and it’s a function of three things. One is the success of the right in mainstreaming these negative notions about progressive or left-wing culture, or social-political activism culture in general. The second reason is that liberal spaces have become really quite preoccupied—especially since the election of Donald Trump, in America, and the Brexit vote, in the United Kingdom—with the sense that the right is doing something right, and we were doing something wrong. And, actually, maybe we need to be more tolerant or more curious or more engaged or more open to these notions that we had rejected before. And now they have come roaring back at us and taken us completely by surprise. So it’s also a crisis of confidence within liberal spaces and within the liberal media.

The third thing is just the proliferation of social-media channels. There is now so much content out there that, before, we just didn’t see, or that liberal institutions weren’t particularly exposed to. These debates were confined to the academy and activist spaces. And now they’re everywhere, and liberal institutions, be they political parties or media organizations, have to reckon with how to deal with this kind of content—what to amplify, what to ignore. And, in that reckoning, they have become embroiled in it themselves.

Do you think, though, that these institutions are at risk of losing something valuable? I know you don’t see it as a free-speech issue, but do you think that there is a real danger of losing valuable ideas?

I do agree that these conversations that are happening within these liberal spaces are legitimate and valid and sometimes concerning. I’m not tempted to say that just because there is no cancel-culture crisis or there is no free-speech crisis it doesn’t mean that what is happening within liberal institutions in terms of limits on what people feel like they’re allowed to say, what people feel that they are permitted to get away with, in terms of slightly divergent political positions, is not a worry.

The thing that I think is happening falls along multiple lines. It’s, in part, a generational issue. There is a clear generational divide between people who feel like there needs to be less tolerance of certain political positions, certain opinions, certain views on race, on gender, on sexuality. I think the younger generation has a much more zero-tolerance approach to these things.

But there is a second part to that dynamic, which is that there are also more people in those liberal spaces that fall on the sharp end of the debates that people previously were quite indulgent of. There are more people of color. There are more people from immigrant backgrounds. There are more people who are gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer, and the progress that we have seen in liberal institutions in opening up their doors to people from different backgrounds means that there is now a conflict about agreed-upon red lines that existed in those places before those people came in. And so it’s also a discussion about how a society expands and includes new people in these spaces that are very influential and that manage and amplify national debates on quite controversial or quite sensitive issues.

We can’t expect that to happen without some messiness or excess. And that’s where I disagree with people who have a moral panic about excessive patrolling of what people are allowed to say or what they’re not allowed to say in the public space or in the media. Excesses are expected, but they are not everything. We can’t collapse everything into the excesses or the transgressions that we see in these spaces, where people go too far in insisting that certain views or certain people who hold those views are ejected or shunned from their jobs or from polite society. I think that we should try to use them as guiding points in how we plot the path forward and how we calibrate our responses. But to expect these huge shifts in the makeup of the media and liberal spaces to happen without incident is unrealistic.

I perceive much of what’s going on along the lines of what you said, that people are being brought into élite institutions, and there’s this huge earthquake happening. It does seem, though, in America at least, that some of the excesses are being driven more by college-educated white people than by people of color.

That aspect of it is purely because white people still dominate these spaces in which we see these excesses. So I see this particularly in publishing, and it’s been a personal frustration of mine to see publishing open up so much to people of color, but only with respect to race-related grievance nonfiction or race-related grievance fictional suffering porn. Marginalized identities and marginalized views, by the nature of being marginalized, do not own the means of cultural production. They’re not in the newsrooms. They’re not in the commissioning meetings in publishing houses. They’re not on the boards of U.S. colleges. And, because white people are over-empowered or overconfident when it comes to their correct politics—not political correctness—they then go and enact what they think is the correct way to be an ally. And most times these ways are narcissistic, self-involved, and actually detrimental to the wider cause.

One thing that we have to be very mindful of is that, when there are offers of big cultural or corporate concessions to the demands of, for example, race-equality movements, those offers are not for us. They are not for the marginalized. They are not for people on the periphery. They are for the white consumers of politically correct, or politically-consonant-with-the-moment products. And those products are books. They are news articles. They are sometimes literal soup packets and milk bottles that have different branding on them. Then we end up in a situation where we prop up the status quo by catering to the white consumer’s guilt and the white consumer’s desire to appear politically aware and have the right credentials.

Did you follow the story in which the Philip Roth biography was discontinued by Norton after allegations of sexual assault against the author, Blake Bailey ? (Bailey has denied the allegations.)

Yes, they are my publisher. So I have to.

This seemed to me like a corporate damage-control situation, where the publisher had screwed up by not taking seriously initial allegations against Bailey. So they did damage control, in the form of pulling the book, which everyone I talked to seems to think was bad. Now you are unable to get a book, which some people see as an abridgment of speech, but no one is happy about the situation, and no one feels this was a good thing for women’s rights or social justice.

Yeah. Cancel culture, in many instances, if one bothers to look underneath the hood, is corporate damage-control culture. It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as nicely as “cancel culture,” and what the commercial entity sees is not what you and I see. It doesn’t see the contours of the social, racial, or gender-related grievance. All it sees are dollar signs or lack thereof. And so its response is, “How much of a risk is this to us?” They don’t make these decisions based on a commitment to higher principles such as free speech, or because they believe in a particular thing that they want to produce. In the end, books are products. And the people who publish books are vulnerable to public opinion.

Milo Yiannopoulos’s book was withdrawn by his publisher for no other reason than that Milo had made controversial comments about having sex with minors. Milo had said several things for many years beforehand that were controversial, but this was seen as one that was particularly commercially damaging. All the language that Milo’s publisher was using before it made the decision to withdraw his book was about these lofty ideals, about free speech, about how it can’t get involved in curating the public marketplace of ideas. You know, all they do is take people’s ideas and their experiences and they publish them, and they basically have no active role. And then, suddenly, they had a very active role.

One thing that does seem different to me about corporations now, though, is that they are often concerned about their employees and also the consumer. I think that social media is part of this, because employees have their own outlet to talk about these things. And this also goes to the age difference you were talking about.

Yes. In the book, I talk about something called growing pains. This is a function or a feature of growing pains in a society. And you’re right—these institutions, publishing houses, corporations, people are worried about their employees turning against them and exposing them in public spaces. You have more nascent whistle-blowers than you would’ve had ten years ago, and that is a function of social media.

I guess the choice of the word “whistle-blower” comes down to whether you think these things are good or bad.

Yeah. It’s very hard to be someone who is actually quite excited and inspirited by these belated transformations that are happening in these élite liberal institutions, while also seeing incidents that seem like the pendulum swinging too much to the other side, that do seem like overcorrections. It’s a very bloodless thing to say, but that’s what happens when change takes long to happen. You get a situation in which you are stormed, as opposed to things happening in a regulated, modulated, sensible way. When you don’t manage change well, you end up with a sort of coup, and coups are nasty.

And I’ve seen things that are concerning, when people have committed a professional error or faux pas and then been punished for it by losing their jobs, even though they have gone through an internal process of adjudication and discipline, because it had come out into the public space. That I find concerning. You start then behaving like politicians, and you start thinking about reputational damage. You start thinking, Maybe we just throw this person under the bus to show that we are moving in the right direction. And so that method is one I find extremely disconcerting, because real people are getting caught up in it. But to collapse all of it into that, I think, is not accurate.

We were talking about corporate damage control, and you said you didn’t think that it was ideological. Robin DiAngelo’s work on white fragility has been used by a lot of corporations for training seminars, but her book is also developing what you might call an ideology, and one held not by underrepresented communities but by educated white people.

I think it’s only an ideology insofar as it is an extreme bout of group narcissism. I don’t think that there is any sort of politically transformative goal behind it, other than to further reinforce white liberal narcissism. And it’s basically so flamboyantly extra, right? Which I think is a giveaway, in this performative-solidarity literature and performative-solidarity consumption of that literature. It makes me think that it is actually more about engaging in cultish self-help trends or self-improvement trends than it is about wanting to enact profound change in which your demographic loses quite a lot of capital actually, if you were to do it right.

The second reason why it’s a kind of group narcissism is that it promotes this notion that identity politics is about easing the passage of people of color in élite spaces. It’s about being nice to them. It’s about accommodating them and understanding how white people need to undo so much of their programming so that they can welcome people of color in their own spaces. It’s about giving people a piece of the pie, as it were. And so, instead of helping the grass roots to drive and push the periphery more toward the center—for example, by encouraging participatory democracy, voter registration, etc.—all it does is it basically expands the weekend barbecue. It also promotes a view that reform is via individual guilt and correction, and distracts from the systemic ways that identity politics is being nurtured by the media and politicians. So, while we are busying ourselves with corporate H.R. techniques, a ground movement of entitled white grievance has been building up in the United States.

You say in the book that we could do with more political correctness rather than less. Where do you think that we need more political correctness?

Well, I think we need more political correctness in the way that we have commodified people’s pain in our media discourse. One of the things that have been very difficult to see over the past five years, in particular, is this creation of an almost Colosseum-like public arena, where people shout at one another, and abuse one another, and we bring down the dignity of people as they try to make points about their safety and their respect.

For example, the Muslim ban was a very big moment in my life, because it was so clear to me that we had reached a point where we had so dehumanized Muslims in our public consciousness and in the public space that it became possible to enact that kind of law, and the ensuing discussion was people kind of equivocating, right? People being, like, we need to figure out what’s happening with the bad Muslims, so we can keep the good Muslims in. All of that was extremely undignified, extremely painful, extremely detrimental to the perception of Muslims. I think it’s a function of people on the right, in particular, thinking that having less political correctness was the way forward.

It’s just about respect. It’s about how, when you extend a certain sanctity of language and dignity to human beings, that then extends to their real life. And so, when I say we need more political correctness, I’m talking primarily in the realm of the media, where, on the opposite side of the spectrum to the discussions that we were having earlier about the constrictions of liberal space, we also have seen a commodification of the conflict between identities. I think that has been damaging to the public discourse. I think that it has contributed to racial tension and has contributed to a general fraying of our relationships. And so the reason I encourage political correctness is that it’s tense out there. We all are bringing certain ideas, certain backgrounds, certain religions to the discourse. And the only way we can oil that conversation is to extend the protocols of political correctness to everyone.

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Political Correctness And Freedom Of Speech

• Category Politics
• Topic Political Correctness

Who determines if political correctness or freedom of speech is harmful or helpful? Does the average civilian believe that political correctness deters freedom of speech? Political correctness is a language that avoids hurting people of different genders, sexual preference, or cultures. Political correctness deters freedom of speech, which is written as a constitutional right, but if you ask me which one is helpful? I’d have to say freedom of speech. It promotes the free exchange of ideas, advances knowledge for a society, and gives us an opportunity to challenge hate.

First off, freedom of speech helps promotes free exchange of ideas to help create a more knowledgeable commonality. In the article, “The War Photo No One Would Publish” by Torie Rose DeGhett, a freelance writer and blogger, writes about a combat photographer, Kenneth Jarecke, who photographed an Iraqi solider who was burnt alive in a vehicle which frames his face and chest. Every news media refused to air such gruesome war photos because they believed that withholding an image means protecting the community from such messy, imprecise ramification of a war, making the broadcasting sketchy, and even deceptive (cite). The media needs to start coming more forward with more information instead of trying to “protect” us. By holding back information and pictures from our society we don’t get the chance to learn from hearing experiences and perspectives from one another. The First Amendment allows citizens to communicate and to be uncovered to a wide field of opinions and outlooks. This was designed to ensure a free exchange of ideas even if the ideas are unpopular (First Amendment: Freedom of Expression and Religion). These war photos tell a story, the story has a point and if the point is pure annihilation of people who were there and all the charred bodies, then that’s the heart-breaking truth. Everyone knows that war is ugly and hideous, but photographs like Jarecke’s disclose significant stories about the aftermath of American and affiliated airpower. (cite) Some may disagree about showing bloodshed and trauma frequently and sensationally can weaken emotional understanding. But if we never show these pictures ever then it guarantees that such an understanding will never advance. Can you envision how your mental, political, and moral world would be if you were never exposed to a photograph? Jarecke’s photos show us the real action how bombs drop on actual people, but they also make the public feel accountable. (cite) Do the following commentary sounds familiar? “Don’t you dare challenge the boss”; “People are scared to express themselves at meetings.”; “No one cares to hear my perception anyways.” These comments share a fundamental feeling in the absence of freedom to communicate completely (Haskins). Without freedom of speech advocating the free exchange of ideas we would not be able to openly share our ideas to one another to help grow each other’s imagination.

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Although, freedom of speech promotes free exchange of ideas to create a wiser populace, it also advances knowledge for a society. My college writing II class had a discussion over the article “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathon Haidt. We were able to come together as a collective and discuss our point of view on the reading. Hearing my classmates share their perception helped open my eyes to seeing different viewpoints. The more popular comedians, such as Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Bill Maher, all have stopped performing at college campuses because of college students being overly sensitive. Jerry and Bill said “..too many of them can’t take a joke.” (cite, p263) Every comedian is different and have their own style for entertaining their audience. College students are missing out on the information these comedians are expressing into their work, it is not always jokes, they speak on controversial topics that have happened in our society. College campus in America where you expect freedom to be the most free, where our future leaders are educated at, have to deal with their highly restricting speech codes. (video cite) Shielding our young adults college campuses into “safe spaces” from words and topics that make them feel uncomfortable would prohibit their learning experiences and they won’t be exposed to create their own opinions. Higher education who promotes biased and unconstitutional speech codes deserves thorough critiquing for punishing college students and faculty for expressing their views. The greater mistake of higher education is ignoring to advise the intellectual routine that advocate “debate and discussion, tolerance for views we hate, epistemic humility, and genuine pluralism.” (Lukianoff p.13). This is what would happen if we continue to shield our college campuses from advancing in society.

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What Research Says About The Consequences Of PC Culture

One of the most popular arguments against political correctness is that it stifles speech, but a Cornell study found that it boosted creativity in mixed-gender groups. Tamir Kalifa/AP hide caption

One of the most popular arguments against political correctness is that it stifles speech, but a Cornell study found that it boosted creativity in mixed-gender groups.

By now, you've surely seen Jonathan Chait's sprawling takedown of what he describes as a dangerous resurgence of political correctness in the 21st century. In his telling, a "PC culture" that flourished on college campuses in the '90s is back, stronger than ever thanks to Twitter and social media, and it's been crippling political discourse — and maybe even democracy itself.

There have been elated cosigns . There has been sharp pushback .

I'm not the first to point out that Chait offers little in the way of hard evidence to back up his warnings. He gives a lot of weight to comments lifted from a Facebook page and an incident in which a feminist studies professor shoved a protester. He also notes the complaints lodged by a few high-profile and well-connected authors that Change.org petitions, Twitter hashtags and other forms of social media pushback have made them gun-shy about opinionating online.

But when we're worrying over the future of human communication — and the future of democracy — anecdotes and isolated incidents are only part of the conversation. They aren't enough on their own. And since Chait doesn't present research on how political correctness may or may not affect the way people exchange ideas, I decided to go looking for it.

Michelle Duguid, a professor of organizational behavior at Washington University in St. Louis, has co-authored one such study, inspired by an offhand debate with some colleagues over whether political correctness hurts or helps productivity. Unlike the rest of us, Duguid and her peers had the means to empirically test their positions. The result is a study published last year by Cornell University .

Here's how the study worked: The researchers asked hundreds of college students to brainstorm new business ideas for an empty restaurant space on campus. But first, they separated the students into groups and instructed some of the groups to discuss an instance of political correctness they'd heard or personally experienced. They did this to effectively put the notion of political correctness into their collective heads and impose what they call a "PC norm" on the group as a whole. (You can read the study for the science behind this.) Other groups got no such instruction.

The researchers found that groups that had both men and women and had been exposed to the PC norm went on to generate more ideas — and more novel ideas — for how to use the vacant lot than the mixed-gender groups that hadn't discussed political correctness. (The ideas were graded for "novelty" by an independent panel, based on how much an idea diverged from the rest.)

The researchers' takeaway: By imposing a PC environment, they had made it easier for men and women to speak their minds in mixed company. They had "reduced the uncertainty" that can come with interacting with someone from the opposite sex.

"Our work challenges the widespread assumption that true creativity requires a kind of anarchy in which people are permitted to speak their minds, whatever the consequence," Jack Goncalo, the study's lead author, has said .

"The big part of it that we found is that you should act a certain way [in any group setting] and there are sanctions if you don't act in that way," Duguid told me.

All groups have implied norms — maybe around political correctness, say, but also around things like how to dress or speak or pray — and not following those rules might earn furious side-eyes if not straight-up ostracism.

What's more, the researchers believe political correctness could have "similar, and perhaps even stronger effects" in groups with other kinds of diversity, like race, "which can heighten uncertainty and trigger anxiety."

"Until the uncertainty caused by demographic differences can be overcome within diverse groups," they conclude, "the effort to be PC can be justified not merely on moral grounds, but also by the practical and potentially profitable consequences of facilitating the exchange of creative ideas."

That is to say, it's a lot easier for people in mixed company — i.e., everywhere, increasingly — to come up with great ideas together with the benefit of a social blueprint.

Duguid warned me that my hunt for more peer-reviewed research on the subject of political correctness and group dynamics would be short. She called the field "barren," and indeed her study is the only one I've found so far that looks squarely at political correctness and speech.

And to be sure, this study measured creativity in a workplace-like setting, while Chait's major concern is the marketplace of ideas. He's not necessarily suggesting that PC culture is bad for business. It's liberal discourse that's under assault, he warns, and political correctness threatens to take the very foundations of democracy down with it.

"Politics in a democracy is still based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree," Chait writes.

But I would argue that the Cornell study has a place in this conversation. It's measuring people's abilities to communicate with each other in productive ways, as well as the ways imposing constraints on speech helps or hurts that effort. It's not that big a jump to apply implications for workplace performance to the realm of political effectiveness.

Chait's certainly right about one thing: The culture wars play out differently in the age of social media. But the rancor we see on Twitter may not be an indication that political correctness is making it harder to talk to each other. It may be simply be a byproduct of where the debate is taking place. The rules of engagement on social media platforms are in their infancy; after all, Twitter only introduced a "report abuse" button in 2013 . And Twitter, famously, magnifies voices, meaning a few dedicated, sufficiently loud dissenters in a conversation can sometimes feel like an angry, critical mass. It's much harder to encourage — or trick — the thousands of people fighting across a given Twitter hashtag into norms of politeness than a controlled group of study participants.

It's just one study, but we know that political correctness is a measurable thing. Future studies might even bear out Chait's thesis. But marshaling a whole bunch of compelling anecdotes about the pernicious effects of political correctness isn't enough to make Chait's point true.

Political Correctness: the Twofold Protection of Liberalism

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• Published: 17 June 2019
• Volume 48 , pages 95–114, ( 2020 )

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• Sandra Dzenis   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2705-7862 1 &
• Filipe Nobre Faria 2  

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As understood today, political correctness aims at preventing social discrimination by curtailing offensive speech and behaviour towards underprivileged groups of individuals. The core proponents of political correctness often draw on post-modernism and critical theory and are notorious for their scepticism about objective truth and scientific rationality. Conversely, the  critics of post-modern political correctness uphold Enlightenment liberal principles of scientific reasoning, rational truth-seeking and open discourse against claims of relativism and oppression. Yet, both the post-modern proponents and their Enlightenment liberal critics make up two sides of the same phenomenon of political correctness. Both sides intend to protect a liberal value system from illiberal truth-claims, which is the function of politically correct regulation. While post-modern advocates attempt to promote liberating tolerance, Enlightenment liberals place liberal values above the open-ended search for truth. Despite appearances to the contrary, this socio-academic debate is not about two sides favouring and opposing political correctness. In fact, it is a debate about the type of politically correct regulation that can better guard liberal values.

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1 Introduction

As a term, political correctness (PC) is regularly present in the political lexicon of the contemporary West. The term now refers to a concrete social phenomenon with broad recognition. Although defining PC can be contentious, according to the Oxford Dictionary of New Words , PC is ‘conformity to a body of liberal or radical opinion on social matters, characterised by the advocacy of approved views and the rejection of language and behaviour considered discriminatory or offensive’ (Knowles and Elliott 1997 ). As we understand it, this definition adequately describes the nature of the phenomenon; hence, it is the reference throughout the article.

Even though it is possible to trace back the term’s origin to historical forces such as Marxism and Maoism (D'Souza 1991 ; Hildebrandt 2005 ), many critics of the term understand its modern meaning as an invention of the political Right to marginalise the Left’s efforts to reach a more egalitarian society (Feldstein 1997 ; Sparrow 2002 ; Wilson 1995 ). These critics think the political Right invented the concept of PC to strengthen the right to dominate women and minorities, including racial minorities and homosexuals. Whatever its origins, the term is more popular among detractors of the content of PC. Accusing someone of PC ‘has become a sarcastic jibe used by those, conservatives and classical liberals alike, to describe what they see as a growing intolerance’ that shuts down debate with accusations of ‘sexism, racism and homophobia’ (R. Bernstein 1990 ).

While some political egalitarians defend certain aspects of PC (Fish 1994 ), others accept parts of the conservative critique (Gitlin 1995 ; Lea 2009 ). Some others, like Richard Rorty ( 1998 , pp. 81–82), regard PC as a product of civilization that reflects ‘a basic desire to tolerate, not persecute, those who have different faiths, beliefs, or skin colour’ (Roxburgh 2002 , p. 302). Although perhaps few people would claim to be believers in PC as a label, the term widely represents the advocacy of censorship that aims at protecting vulnerable groups. In social discourse, the term identifies a practice with ideological advocates regardless of whether they identify with the PC label. In this sense, the social impact of the term justifies the choice of PC over less impactful terms such as self-censorship (Cook and Heilmann 2012 ) or conformity (Williams 2016 ).

Debates about PC have focused on the consequences PC brings to academic freedom and political discourse (Bloom 1987 ; Cole 2006 ; Kimball 1990 ; Lukianoff and Haidt 2015 ; Moller 2016 ; Williams 2016 ). Within this overarching socio-academic debate, we detected a general argumentative trend that divides claims in favour and against PC into two epistemic and normative camps characterised as follows:

the post-modern-like advocates of PC who favour regulating speech and behaviour to achieve social justice (Fish 1994 ; Lawrence 1990 ; Matsuda 1993 ) and

the Enlightenment liberals who oppose PC by upholding truth-seeking open discourse and scientific rationality (Chait 2015 ; Furedi 2016 ; Pinker 2017 ; Pinker 2018 ; Rauch 2013 ).

This dichotomy arose when the second camp denounced the first one and adopted a comprehensive anti-PC stance. Footnote 1 The aim of this paper is to show that this dichotomy does not hold up under scrutiny. We argue that

no visible camp is in fact defending an open-ended scientific discourse, that

PC is a protection mechanism of liberal values and that

both sides represent PC.

The current debate is in reality about how to protect liberal values.

The structure of the argument is the following. First, the paper traces back the ideological roots of PC to core liberal values and goes on exploring how PC’s function is to protect and further liberalism. Then, it claims the post-modern abandonment of enlightened truth-seeking is a particular form of PC, which attempts to protect liberalism from illiberal forces. Afterwards, the paper argues that although Enlightenment liberals claim to oppose PC, they still impose it by only engaging with truth-claims within the liberal framework. At the close, we show that science does not commit itself to liberalism.

2 PC as a Mechanism to Protect Liberty and Equality

PC emphasises a strong inclusive position, according to which individuals require moral equality in all aspects of life regardless of their religion, race, age, ethnicity, sex or gender. To enforce this attitude, PC advocates may use affirmative action or restrict free speech with speech codes and anti-discrimination laws (D. E. Bernstein 2003 , pp. 1–4). However, Glenn Loury suggests that PC also implies conformity to a desired opinion on socio-political matters, which proliferates via social pressure:

(…) the more subtle threat is the voluntary limitation of speech that a climate of social conformity encourages. It is not the iron fist of repression, but the velvet glove of seduction that is the real problem. Accordingly, (…) the PC phenomenon [can be treated] as an implicit social convention of restraint on public expression, operating within a given community. (…) Members whose beliefs are sound but who nevertheless differ from some aspect of communal wisdom are compelled by a fear of ostracism to avoid the candid expression of their opinions (Loury 1994 , p. 430).

Given the existing social pressure for conformity of beliefs, a scrutiny of the ideological or moral underpinnings of PC is of importance to understand its ontological constitution. In particular, there is a strong connection between politically correct (pc) attitudes and specific liberal values, such as individual freedom and equality, to an extent that it is possible to understand PC as being underpinned by liberalism.

As Michael Freeden points out, although the fluidity of liberalism may force us to acknowledge its existence in the plural, ‘liberalism is a particular configuration of political concepts that has a loose but identifiable morphology’ (Freeden 2008 , p. 12), of which liberty and equality are identifiable central values common to all liberal versions. This specific liberal morphology makes it possible to address liberalism in the singular, thus distinguishing it from other value systems. Still, PC seems to fit better with a vertical conception of liberalism – also understood as welfare or social liberalism –, which promotes upward social movement and relies on positive conceptions of freedom. Positive freedom emphasises the need to remove the inhibitions of any social structure that prevent individuals from exercising their free will, inhibitions such as economic hardship, classism or racism. Such a conception of liberalism understands that unhindered self-realisation is illusory and therefore achieving real freedom and equality requires communal and state assistance. The pc approach also relies upon the idea that individuals of marginalised groups require assistance from community and state when struggling against offensive attitudes. Censoring offensive speech and attitudes that hinder the freedom of these individuals can be a way to free them from oppressive social structures.

A horizontal conception of liberalism – also regarded as constitutional or classical liberalism – seems to be less amenable to PC. This conception of liberalism emphasises free choice, dispersed knowledge and constitutional protection of negative liberties. Negative liberty is freedom from external restraints on the actions of individuals, something associated with minimal state representations. According to these representations, authority focuses on protecting direct harm and not on removing structural obstacles to achievement. The communal and state actions that would legitimise PC under a vertical/social conception of liberalism sit uneasily upon the horizontal/classical conception. The reason being that the latter conception relies on negative freedom. Thus, the laissez-faire attitude coming from a negative conception of freedom is more amicable to uncensored speech. Yet, as we will show later in the article, even a more horizontal/classical liberal position can use PC to defend liberalism. It can do so by endorsing a culture of voluntary ostracism towards illiberal viewpoints.

Subject to the condition that – overall – legal equality is in place in liberal democracies, pc attitudes focus mostly on substantive or enabling equality, an equality that aims at levelling departure points and enabling achievements. A pc position also emphasises the freedom of the individual, meaning every individual should be free from constraint to pursue one’s own notion of a ‘good life’ (Rawls 1993 , p. 19). This ethical pluralism entails that different notions of the good life are of equal value as long as these notions respect basic universal freedoms. And it ties to liberal pluralism in the sense that free individuals should be eligible to follow their own perception of the ethical life.

In consequence, a pc attitude manifests itself by assuming that the desired freedom for individuals in society is attainable by implementing not only formal but enabling equality (e.g. affirmative action, women’s quota, etc.). In addition, pc positions inhibit the accentuation of certain individual and group differences to prevent unequal treatment. For instance, it is pc to deny or at least downplay innate human differences because these differences may explain inequalities of outcome (e.g. the gender pay gap). Pc thought seems to rely on the assumption that the way to achieve the most significant goal of individual freedom is through (a certain type) of equality.

Scholarly literature suggests that liberal thought has its foundation in the legacy of the Enlightenment (Brink 2000 ; Byrne 1997 ; Waldron 1993 ; Zafirovski 2011 ). As noted by Bert van der Brink ( 2000 , p. 13), the idea of equality rests upon the liberal notion that all human beings hold the fundamental right to respect due to their status as reasonable and free individuals. The belief that the individual mind can gain genuine knowledge and grasp the fundamental principles of the world led to the conclusion that we should treat all reasonable beings as equals. As John Locke argued, nobody should ever be ‘subjected to the Political Power of another without his own Consent’ (Locke 1988 , II, sec. 95) given men’s moral sameness in nature.

Likewise, the Enlightenment gave birth to human rights to protect the autonomy and equal liberties of individuals. Perhaps the practical implementation of some human rights requires a certain level of PC. How, for instance, can one expect ethnic minorities/LGBT members/disabled people to take part in the cultural and political life of the community (“UDHR,” 2010 , art. 27(1)) if they feel marginalised by some members of society? Thus, PC advocates campaign for speech codes and for conformity of thought towards minority groups in order for these groups to enjoy their complete human rights. Also, the right to education (“UDHR,” 2010 , art. 26(1)) may lead PC proponents to the conclusion that only with the help of affirmative action can certain minority groups enjoy their rights. Even trickier seems to be the right to liberty (“UDHR,” 2010 , art. 3). Some PC supporters claim unrestricted speech and discriminatory behaviour threatens the liberty (and therefore a major human right) of affected human beings (Delgado 1982 ; Matsuda 1989 ; Parekh 2017 ).

3 PC as Liberating Tolerance

The most common advocacy of PC comes from contemporary post-modernists and critical theorists (Fish 1994 ; Lawrence 1990 ; Matsuda 1993 ; Rorty 1998 ) who often advocate forms of post-modern liberalism (Dryzek 2000 , p. 27). But what is the standard intellectual source of this advocacy within PC-focused scholarship? When starting his essay ‘Imagined tyranny’? Political correctness reconsidered , sociologist Paul Hollander puts forward the concept of repressive tolerance – introduced by Herbert Marcuse ( 1965 ) –, which is of high influence for ‘the most widespread form of institutionalized intolerance in American higher education’ (Hollander 1994 , p. 51). Also, in their work The shadow university: The betrayal of liberty on American campuses , Kors and Silverglate ( 1998 ) argue that Marcuse’s philosophy is the intellectual progenitor of PC at university campuses: ‘The contemporary movement that seeks to restrict liberty on campus arose specifically in the provocative work of the late Marxist political and social philosopher Herbert Marcuse’, who challenged ‘the essence and legitimacy of free speech’ (Kors and Silverglate 1998 , p. 68). It is thus significant to set out Marcuse’s theory of repressive tolerance, which this scholarly literature shows to be the birth hour of PC.

In his essay on repressive tolerance, Marcuse tries to figure out if there are ethical limits to tolerance and what consequences come from this enquiry. According to Marcuse, universal tolerance is only real when serving the cause of liberation and proper tolerance cannot arise as long as the holders of power and the guardians of the status quo indoctrinate society to keep inequalities stable. He considers it unfair to let the powerful and the powerless play under the same rules, because the powerful would always win and, as a result, would impose a violent and repressive agenda on the powerless. Hence, he points out that movements from the Left must replace the political Right. This replacement aims at implementing the Left’s ‘liberating tolerance’ (Marcuse 1965 , p. 109), which censors oppressive speech while expelling the Right’s repressive tolerance, namely the repression operating under the guise of free speech.

Marcuse asserts that liberating tolerance is the only way to exercise (civil) rights and liberties for the oppressed. Hence, it should ‘be enforced by the students and teachers themselves, and thus be self-imposed’, withdrawing any ‘tolerance toward regressive and repressive opinions and movements’ (Marcuse 1965 , p. 101). As a result, Marcuse’s liberating tolerance, under which real freedom could flourish, should thrive first on university campuses before the concept encroaches upon the greater society: ‘This re-education alone could create a “progressive” society, where true freedom and democracy would reign’ (Kors and Silverglate 1998 , p. 71). While people outside academia may know little about Marcuse’s formula for a progressive society, his prescriptions represent the paradigm for speech restrictions in the contemporary academic world. The liberal dimension of Marcuse‘s rhetoric is not always straightforward, perhaps because of his Marxist background. Yet, his philosophy suggests that universal liberties can only flourish within society if pc measures minimise the power and influence of any repressive establishment. Today’s advocates of repressive tolerance are more explicit regarding the liberal aims of PC (Kernohan 1998 ; Levin 2010 ).

Contemporary social scientists advocating PC, such as Charles R. Lawrence, Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda, build their research on race and gender bias upon Marcuse’s idea of repressive tolerance (Delgado 1982 ; Lawrence 1990 ; Matsuda 1993 ); that is, on the idea that pc speech restriction applied to dominant/privileged groups allows for all members of society to experience equal freedom. Lawrence, for instance, notes that because white supremacy is the underlying message of racist speech, non-whites experience limited life opportunities: ‘There can be no true free speech where there are still masters and slaves’ (Lawrence 1990 , p. 481). Matsuda adds that official tolerance of racist speech on campus is harmful since it attacks ‘the goals of inclusion, education, development of knowledge, and ethics that universities exist and stand for’ (Matsuda 1989 , p. 2371). In addition, Matsuda argues that individuals do not depart from an equal point. As a result, evaluating hateful speech regarding race/ethnicity must take the targets of such speech into consideration. Delgado concludes that racial speech cannot be part of the marketplace of ideas because instead of informing or convincing the listener, racial speech merely inflicts harm. Hence, such speech prevents the speaker and the listener from having a meaningful discourse (Delgado 1982 , p. 177). By denying unrestricted freedom of expression, Delgado desires effective freedom in order for ‘all citizens to lead their lives free from attacks on their dignity and psychological integrity’ (Delgado 1982 , p. 181).

The arguments against robust free speech put forward by Lawrence, Matsuda and Delgado echo Marcuse’s concept of repressive tolerance. In relation to implementing ‘repressive tolerance’ on campuses, Kors and Silverglate ( 1998 ) argue that university speech codes reflect Marcuse’s idea of freedom and tolerance . They claim these Marcusian values try to balance the right of free speech with the right of not being harassed, to balance negative freedom with positive freedom. In this sense, speech restrictions assure liberty for some by limiting it for others.

Philosophers Andrew Kernohan and Abigail Levin, for instance, worry about state neutrality, which in the PC debate means unrestricted freedom of expression and a hands-off approach regarding the cultural marketplace. They argue that contemporary liberalism has given too much emphasis on tolerance at the cost of equality. Hence, there is a need for an advocacy strategy toward cultural reform, a compromise between unrestricted freedom of expression and coercive censorship by the state (Kernohan 1998 ; Levin 2010 ). In the same wavelength, Kernohan suggests state-promoted social conformity (i.e. PC). He points out that tolerance is not something for the enemies of liberalism to enjoy:

Liberalism requires tolerance of all manner of views on how to lead a worthwhile life, but not of views that deny the fundamental assumption of moral equality. (…) Liberal tolerance comes to an end for views (that are) inconsistent with liberal principles, and [that] threaten significant harm to society as a whole. (…) Therefore the liberal state must take an active role in reforming culture and combatting the cultural oppression of groups (Kernohan 1998 , pp. 4-25).

Overall, contemporary liberal academics, such as Lawrence, Delgado, Matsuda, Levin and Kernohan, support certain pc measures on behalf of the liberal state to counteract oppression and social inequalities. The specific claims of Kernohan and Levin suggest that PC operates as a mechanism to promote and defend liberalism.

Some may argue that because critical or post-modern PC defends rights on the basis of group identity, it deviates from liberalism’s commitment to ontological individualism, therefore becoming illiberal. This claim grows stronger because some early proponents of PC, such as Marcuse, came from a Marxist-influenced intellectual sphere. Yet, PC is not an illiberal phenomenon by necessity. In fact, group identity is often a liberating argumentative tool that marginalised individuals use against any oppressive institution which discriminates against them because of their group identity. In this sense, in order for individuals of unprivileged groups to enjoy liberty and equality, they need to emphasise their identity as the reason for their lack of equal liberty. We are not dealing with a novel issue. Throughout history liberals have used collective-based and identity-based concepts, such as the people , to overthrow non-liberal and allegedly oppressive political regimes (Eddy 2017 ). Due to their flexibility, liberal values often accommodate their egalitarian critics. In the words of John Dryzek:

Liberalism is the most effective vacuum cleaner in the history of political thought, capable of sucking up all the doctrines that appear to challenge it, be they critical theory, environmentalism, feminism, or socialism (Dryzek 2000 , p. 27).

In particular, because egalitarian doctrines are many times in line with the moral desirability of liberal values, these doctrines can flourish within the fluid realm of liberalism. As for PC, the current and most common justification for its legitimacy relies on liberal concepts. Namely, speech restrictions are legitimate because they increase the liberties of individuals in marginalised groups by enhancing positive freedom, while these liberties deteriorate through negative freedom and unfettered critical discourse.

Not all authors following Marcuse’s repressive tolerance may identify as liberals. Some would balk at applying the term liberal to their lines of thought. But their claims relating to PC take place in a liberal academic context and most of these authors use liberal normative concepts when justifying the censorship of particular speeches and actions (Delgado 1982 ; Kernohan 1998 ; Lawrence 1990 ; Levin 2010 ; Matsuda 1993 ).

4 Post-Modern Liberalism: Scientific Rationality as Political Incorrectness

While post-modern liberalism upholds the Enlightenment related values of individual liberty and equality, another Enlightenment value – that of autonomy reached by reason and pursuit of knowledge – fell by the wayside.

As Immanuel Kant admonished in his 1784 essay An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? : ‘Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment’ (Schmidt 1996 , p. 58). He called for the enlightened individual to ‘dare to know’, to use reason in order to disenthrall itself from immaturity. John Stuart Mill also asserted that the autonomous individual ‘must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold his deliberate decision’ (Ten 2008 , p. 47).

However, Western liberal societies that impose speech codes, prosecute microaggressions and ban speakers with controversial opinions from university campuses do not fit the picture of this described Enlightenment ideal of critical discourse. Hence, the question comes up, why did the Enlightenment values of reason and scientific rationality lose their importance in post-modern liberalism while other Enlightenment-related values, such as (individual) freedom and equality are still being held up? Joanna Williams offers a possible explanation when stating that, after the experience of the Holocaust during World War II, the Enlightenment promoted value of reason and its respective methods (rationality, the search for truth and empirical evidence) plunged into crisis: ‘The Holocaust was considered by many to be a logical consequence of the endeavour to shape society through science and rationality’ (Williams 2016 , p. 63). Science as ‘the emancipation of reason from emotions, of rationality from normative pressures, of effectiveness from ethics’ (Bauman 1989 , p. 108) came out of World War II as a failure and a succour of the Holocaust perpetrators. For those liberals disillusioned by scientific progress, post-modern liberalism became a viable option. Conversely, those others who saw war events as a product of irrationality can stand by enlightened liberalism.

A certain disappointment regarding the desirability of science had a particular consequence. Namely, truth-claims and the vision that a particular body of knowledge should assist us in moving closer to the truth became disreputable within parts of academia, especially in the radical humanities disciplines. As a result, some insights of critical post-modernism such as truth being relative and multiple replaced enlightened rationalism. Critical theory, developed by scholars from the Frankfurt School and later carried on by post-modernists like Michel Foucault, often questioned that to pursue knowledge and rationality would simply lead to truth-claims. Instead, they pointed to the seductive power of images and words, which these scholars perceive as having the potential to shape reality and to harm people (Williams 2016 , p. 133). In this sense, truth-claims would rather implement and reinforce pre-existing power structures in society. According to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, ‘technical rationality today is the rationality of domination. It is the compulsive character of a society alienated from itself” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 , p. 95). A critical and scientific discourse based on empirical evidence is then a tool of a political and economic power elite to strengthen its own position. In the words of Foucault:

Truth is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. ‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it (Foucault 1980 , p. 133).

As a result, this vision of truth and science ‘undermines the ability to generate criteria for making ethical and political judgments, thereby threatening to plunge critical theory into relativism’ (Bronner 2011 , p. 33).

To be sure, not all critical theorists embrace post-modernism‘s incredulity towards universal scientific truth. For instance, Jürgen Habermas is a notorious critic of post-modern theory (Aylesworth 2015 ).

Yet, since its inception, critical theory emphasised how scientific and technological advancements are an instrument of domination in social relations (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 ). Recent post-modern critical theory took one more step in this domination-oriented reasoning by casting out non-contingent scientific truth altogether. By doing so, critical post-modernism curtails the legitimacy of any potential governmental control undertaken in the name of objective truth. It is thus important to understand how bringing up epistemic relativism impacts the debate on PC.

First, there is not a single truth: Universities teach and uphold competing hypotheses. Still, there seem to be reservations towards making assertions that claim to be better and truer than other competing contentions. For example, while some feminist scholars (Grosz 1994 ; MacKinnon 1989 ; Prokhovnik 1999 ) claim physical differences between men and women (i.e. sex) are not responsible for behavioural differences (i.e. gender), there is a consensus among biologists, physicians and evolutionary psychologists that gender is (also) determined by biology (Baron-Cohen et al. 2005 ; Buss 1995 ; Hines 1982 ). However, these two competing assertions are both acknowledged within academia and are being taught on campus and published in leading international journals. Competing hypotheses within academia are the standard, but accepting no common standard of evaluation is likely to lead to parallel worlds of knowledge. Such worlds cannot assess one another without potential accusations of illegitimate authoritarianism.

Second, truth depends on perspective. The notion that knowledge is subjective leads way to contemporary identity politics. If truth is a personal construct, a heterosexual person, for instance, perceives the world in an entirely different way than a homosexual person. As a result, there cannot be a critical discourse about the accuracy of these two perspectives. None of them is truer than the other but they offer rather a distinctive point of view. According to some (Sue 2010 ; Waldron 2012 ), words have the potential to damage individuals at the psychological level; so to spread knowledge that historically disadvantaged groups and minorities may perceive as offensive is an act of aggression to avoid. Thus, it is not pc to claim certain knowledge is more valuable than another or to disconnect truth-claims from identity.

On the whole, contemporary post-modern liberalism has shifted away from the Enlightenment ideals of reason and scientific rationality. We may infer from the liberal egalitarian motivations behind this shift that liberalism neglected the value of striving for truth through knowledge and logic to protect itself from destruction via illiberal forces. As Michael Freeden notes, ‘liberalism adapts through internal changes in the prioritization of its core concepts’ (Freeden 2008 , p. 15). And it seems adaptation was in order. What if because of a rational and scientific discourse someone established that individual freedom and universal equality are deficient ideas to construct the social order and that hierarchy and authority are systems which lead populations to greater success and satisfaction? By discrediting (objective) knowledge and critical reasoning, it is possible to diminish the potential danger of rational discourse for liberal tenets. In this sense, post-modern liberalism (Rorty 1992 ) seems to work as a purification of Enlightenment-liberal ideals, as an already tested and thus more robust version, which upholds certain liberal values, such as individual freedom and equality and therefore has to sacrifice idiosyncratic Enlightenment values, such as rationality and objective knowledge.

5 Liberal Science: A Veiled PC

As a reaction against post-modern PC advocates, Enlightenment liberals arose as the main opposing force to PC within socio-academic discourse. Although appearing to be fighting PC, this intellectual force ends up enforcing another version of the same phenomenon. Namely, they uphold science, reason and critical discourse but make sure potential illiberal findings or claims remain irrelevant. Enlightenment liberals defend liberal science Footnote 2 against PC because they believe identity-based thought control endangers liberalism. In particular, these writers claim PC is authoritarianism – especially speech restriction –, which endangers liberalism in its most dominant appearances: liberal democracy and liberal science (Chait 2015 ; Green 2006 ; Rauch 2013 ).

In his work Kindly inquisitors – The new attacks on free thought, Jonathan Rauch describes the liberal intellectual system (liberal science) as the only alternative to authoritarian orders (Rauch 2013 , p. 28). Notably, Rauch shows two ways to rescue liberalism by reintroducing the Enlightenment ideal of reason and critical discourse.

First, Rauch asks for de-relativising knowledge. That is, to let liberal science decide about correct hypotheses (i.e. having knowledge) and incorrect claims (i.e. just having an opinion): ‘Checking of each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right’ (Rauch 2013 , p. 6). Hence, Rauch criticises the egalitarian attempt to relativise knowledge by respecting multiple truths and claims researchers should detect truth via critical discourse within liberal science.

Second, Rauch objurgates what he calls the humanitarian threat (Rauch 2013 , p. 111) by asserting that the possibility of critical discourse is of higher importance to liberalism than the harm that offensive truth-claims can do to disadvantaged/minority groups. In order for liberal science to identify real knowledge, it cannot be ‘nice (…). It does not give a damn about your feelings and happily tramples them in the name of finding truth’ (Rauch 2013 , p. 19).

Hence, for Rauch, liberal science is the best mechanism to protect a liberal society from authoritarian measures. If everybody enjoys free speech and can put out truth-claims, the diverse scientific community sorts out the facts and disregards the errors. In this way, it is possible to avoid authoritarian decision makers who determine what is right and what is wrong: ‘In an imperfect world, the best insurance we have against truth’s being politicized is to put no one in particular in charge of it’ (Rauch 2013 , p. 110). On the one hand, according to Rauch, liberal science respects freedom of speech and belief; on the other hand, liberal science does not accept the right of beliefs to become knowledge straight away. Everybody can make claims all the time, but in order for claims to achieve the status of knowledge, they have to pass the process of the ‘science game for checking’ (Rauch 2013 , p. 116). The idea here is to avoid empowering a political elite who then decides if something is knowledge or not. Instead, a competent but also diffuse scientific community (with no special interest in claiming power) controls the process of knowledge verification.

It is at least doubtful if liberals, such as Rauch, obey their strict rules of scientific discourse. Regarding potentially offensive truth-claims, Rauch ( 2013 , p. 129) suggests ignoring offensive beliefs when they are uncontested or if liberal science already showed them to be wrong. In the same way as the post-modernists, liberal scientists may fear that through reason one may conclude that a liberal polity is undesirable. In fact, rational discussions within the scientific community often marginalise truth-claims whose implications question contemporary liberal morality. For instance, Duarte et al. show that liberals embed their values into investigation fields and methods. As a result, these liberals keep other researchers away from ‘politically unpalatable research topics (…): areas such as race, gender, stereotyping, environmentalism, power, and inequality’ (Duarte et al. 2015 , pp. 1–2). So, the liberal scientific community is more likely to ignore or marginalise illiberal claims. Yet, to advocate free speech does not imply to refuse PC. Just because a scientist may enjoy free speech, it does not mean he can expect his controversial work to receive an objective and rational feedback within liberal science. Science is far from being self-correcting in matters of moral and political sensibility when there is an overarching moral consensus (Cofnas 2016 ), as it is the case with liberalism (D. B. Klein and Stern 2005 ). PC measures, such as pushing academics to liberal conformism, protect liberal hegemony.

First, Rauch illustrates the push for liberal conformism when stating that one should criticise or ignore hurtful opinions (Rauch 2013 , p. 159). He is obviously supportive of neglecting controversial – assumable illiberal – truth-claims instead of engaging with difficult issues. This is a common position (Horgan 2013 ; S. Klein 2017 ; McWhorter 2017 ; Rose 2009 ). For instance, political theorist Steven Klein argues that we should allow individuals to present controversial (illiberal) truth-claims, but we should prevent them from entering the academic debate. As he puts it:

Today, we’ve conflated a right to speak with a right to be taken seriously and debated. But while the former is a right, the latter is a privilege, and one that should be reserved for ideas that do not fundamentally threaten the foundations of our free and democratic society (S. Klein 2017 ). 72

Also, Steven Pinker, who notably criticises the damaging effects of PC on social and scientific discourse, opens specific exceptions for the ‘benign taboos on racism, sexism and homophobia’ (Pinker 2018 , p. 219). He clarifies that we should be ‘mindful of excessive taboos’ because they can diminish the credibility of journalists and academics (Pinker and (Producer) 2018 ), yet he is not claiming we should be mindful of – liberal – taboos per se. This overall ethical approach can be partly responsible for young scholars avoiding controversial areas of research as it contributes to a climate of liberal conformity among academics.

Second, Rauch’s claim that we should not try ‘to silence or punish’ people who hold discriminatory opinions but instead try ‘to correct them’ (Rauch 2013 , p. 181) implies that truth-claims with discriminatory content are (morally) wrong and therefore we must amend them. Likewise, Pinker argues that academic free speech is necessary because freedom of expression allows us to use rationality to put controversial facts in a liberal context, which helps to avoid illiberal dangerous conclusions (Pinker 2017 ). Apparently, thinkers like Pinker and Rauch are self-assured that reason will never give support to non-liberal forms of political organisation. By this means, they show that they do not understand science as a process with an open outcome but as a process whose duty is to protect liberalism. There is also another stated reason for why potentially offensive speech should be permissible: ‘And what about the day when right-wingers get the upper hand? Will they be “fair”?’ (Rauch 2013 , p. 143). It exists a latent fear that the ‘inquisition’ (Rauch 2013 , p. 27) put in place by egalitarians and humanitarians to defend their vision of freedom and equality leads to authoritarian structures which an up-coming inegalitarian regime may use. A central aim of liberal science is to prevent illiberal political power from arising.

Enlightenment liberals advocate free speech and support the de-relativisation of knowledge. However, if their critical discourse only engages with claims and theories that remain within the liberal framework, if they ignore or marginalise claims outside this framework, they endorse a different kind of PC. Specifically, a PC that does not act authoritarian by forbidding offensive expressions and filing anti-discrimination laws but a PC that rather pushes people to perform self-censored conformist behaviour in order not to get marginalised. Liberal science worries that an authoritarian and identity-driven PC, as carried out by egalitarians and humanitarians, harbours the danger of triggering an illiberal identitarian counter-movement. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains it:

If you keep treating white men as an identity group, you keep saying that ‘they are terrible; they are evil’ – eventually they become just like another identity group and they vote[d] their racial interests, in a sense you might say. So identity politics on the Left eventually triggers identity politics on the Right (Jonathan Haidt 2016 ).

Likewise, in defence of liberal science and moral individualism, the prominent anti-PC activist and psychologist Jordan Peterson clarifies that both identity politics – from the Left and from the Right – are ‘equally dangerous’ (Luscombe 2018 ). Thus, the tactic of ignoring, marginalising and not offering critical engagement with system-challenging opinions relies on the central goal of preventing the rise of identitarian illiberalism (Pinker and (Producer) 2018 , p. 143; Rauch 2013 ). This goal and result oriented science promoted by Enlightenment liberals does not seem to have much in common with Kant’s ‘dare to know’ attitude towards science. Instead, it bears similarities to Karl Popper’s ( 1945 ) advocacy of intolerance towards illiberal discourses as the best way to protect the open society.

All in all, it is possible to understand that both the post-modern advocates of PC and their Enlightenment liberal opponents make up two sides of the same coin. On the side of post-modern PC, traditional Enlightenment values of reason and rationality got partly ejected from contemporary liberalism, being replaced by relativism and perspectivism. On the side of the Enlightenment liberals, there seems to exist liberal truth-claims that they do not debate and take for granted; so they marginalise or ignore claims challenging these pre-assumed positions. In this context, Williams asserts that Enlightenment liberals often assume that:

the truth of a particular issue is settled beyond question. The tendency to label critics, or skeptics, on issues as wide ranging as the Holocaust, climate change, patriarchy and rape culture, as ‘deniers’ suggests not a clash of opposing understandings but that the truth has already been determined and people who do not accept it are deluded. It suggests that any further discussion is not only futile but problematic as it detracts from dealing practically with the issues concerned (Williams 2016 , p. 67).

Williams understands that ‘both the rejection of truth and the notion that the truth is settled curtail academic debate by undermining the assumption that knowledge progresses through competing truth claims’ (Williams 2016 , p. 67).

6 PC and the Disconnection between Liberalism and the Enlightenment

The moral positions that sprung from Enlightenment thought are not uniform. Particularly at the moral or ideological level, we can speak of Enlightenments, plural. Yet, Enlightenment liberals conflate liberalism and the Enlightenment as if these two concepts were interchangeable. The two concepts represent in fact two different traditions. As the likes of Nietzsche ( 2009 ) and Tocqueville ( 1959 ) realise, liberalism’s defence of liberty and equality in universalistic and individualistic terms derives from Christian monotheism. In contrast, the Enlightenment defence of reason and scientific rationality evolved from ancient Greek thought, which often operated in a (pagan) non-liberal moral framework. Both Aristotelian and Platonic streams of thought were deeply biopolitical and strongly concerned with controlling the quality of population, therefore deriving moral worth from a hierarchical biological status (Ojakangas 2016 ). In this sense, to uphold scientific rationality does not require liberalism.

Without doubt, Enlightenment thinkers were not all liberal. Most notably, Auguste Comte’s rejection of Christian-liberal metaphysics (e.g. human rights) led him to advocate a new ‘religion of humanity’, where scientific experts of the industry would discover the most appropriate moral framework for society (Comte 1927 ). As John Gray points out, ‘the link between the Enlightenment and liberal values (…) is actually rather tenuous. It is strongest in Enlightenment thinkers who were wedded to monotheism, such as Locke and indeed Kant’ (Gray 2018 ). Those unwedded to monotheism oftentimes espouse non-liberal values informed by science (Ojakangas 2016 ).

The close relationship between the Enlightenment advocacy of science and illiberalism is now an influential idea in scholarly terms, especially among critical perspectives (Geuss 1998 ). In particular, Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment ( 2002 ) disseminated the tight link between science and illiberalism. In this book, the two authors focus on the social consequences of instrumental reason, which is the capacity to discover effective means to satisfy whatever ends an agent may have. In its most sophisticated form, instrumental reason aims at finding scientific truth while remaining morally agnostic. They think the findings of empirical science alone cannot validate Enlightenment liberal ideals. For them, if facts are the single source of knowledge, ‘in the end the (liberal) ideals themselves come to look like myths or prejudices which ought to be discarded’ (Geuss 1998 ), thus opening the way to an explicit dominance hierarchy. However, the scientific knowledge of the natural world may be capable of identifying objective values — a standard philosophical position within natural moral realism (Richards 2017 ). But whether or not science can identify true moral values, Adorno and Horkheimer understand that Enlightenment liberal values are not free from naturalist scrutiny.

To embrace scientific rationality altogether – by removing it from unnaturalistic metaphysics – should mean that one is open to revising moral values according to the progress of knowledge. By making a case against PC and in favour of critical discourse, Enlightenment liberals should be open to moral revision. After all, morality is a social phenomenon thoroughly studied by science (Ruse and Richards 2017 ). Still, they do not show the willingness to revise their values according to science and continue to understand liberalism as having priority over scientific reason. For instance, Pinker claims scientific reason justifies liberal cosmopolitanism and disproves the value of in-group favouritism. He asserts that

reason goads us into realizing that there can be nothing uniquely deserving about ourselves or any of the groups to which we belong. We are forced into cosmopolitanism: accepting our citizenship in the world (Pinker 2018 , p. 11).

Yet, numerous scientific theorists demonstrate the importance of in-group favouritism in the evolutionary system (Axelrod and Hammond 2006 ; Faria 2017 ; Hartshorn et al. 2013 ), making his normative claim far from scientifically informed. The assertion that science only validates liberal values is another form of PC, which delegitimises illiberal scientific claims within the academic sphere.

Perhaps all ideological positions defend a set of values that demarcate no-go areas of belief, and liberalism is no exception. But one should not confuse the defence of values with PC. If not, all defences of certain value preferences over others would make up PC. Instead, the pc phenomenon is about silencing modes of expression antagonistic to one’s value systems. Footnote 3 What Enlightenment liberals do is not only to defend liberal values through reasoned rhetoric. Contrary to their open discourse narrative , they have an active role in silencing dissident voices by dismissing or overlooking illiberal truth-claims. Although outright censorship is not part of liberal science, this worldview engages in subtle mechanisms that restrict undesired positions.

For instance, liberal science conflates (liberal) value and (scientific) fact. By theoretically promoting critical discourse and the quest for truth, Enlightenment liberals seem to believe that no truth can ever justify illiberal claims. They seem to think truth has already validated liberalism, therefore making it safe to ignore illiberal truth-claims, portraying these claims as the product of bad science (Barber 2013 ; Newby and Newby 1995 ). Pinker ( 2017 ) goes so far as saying that any empirical truth should appear in critical academic forums for academics to diffuse potential illiberal truth-claims. Likewise, self-described conservative author Andrew Sullivan claims dangerous findings on genetic group differences obliges us to

establish a liberalism that is immune to such genetic revelations, that can strive for equality of opportunity, and can affirm the moral and civic equality of every human being on the planet (Sullivan 2018 ).

Enlightenment liberals set two levels of scientific truth-seeking, one open to most facts and another one closed to non-liberal moral claims deriving from threatening facts.

The scientific behavioural fields that study average genetic differences between social groups regarding race and sex provide several examples of how PC became a method to protect liberal values. For instance, Noam Chomsky notes that these studies are of ‘no scientific interest and of no social significance, except to racists, sexists, and the like’ (Chomsky 1988 , p. 164). Distinguished psychologist Howard Gardner calls the researchers that find natural inequalities between groups ‘bad guys’ (Gardner 2009 ) and ‘pseudo-scientists’ (Gardner 2001 , pp. 6–7). In turn, evolutionary philosopher Daniel Dennett reveals the classic strategy to protect liberal morality from dangerous findings that reveal natural inequalities between groups (e.g. IQ, personality traits):

if I encountered people conveying a message I thought was so dangerous that I could not risk giving it a fair hearing, I would be at least strongly tempted to misrepresent it, to caricature it for the public good. I’d want to make up some good epithets, such as genetic determinist or reductionist or Darwinian Fundamentalist, and then flail those straw men as hard as I could. As the saying goes, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it (Dennett 2003 , pp. 19-20).

Dennett seems to claim that these dangerous findings should remain outside of scientific discourse regardless of how good the evidence may be. Yet, he made no claims of legally forbidding research, which reminds us that PC, in the form of soft-censorship, often operates without outright prohibition and instead manifests itself through social pressure towards conformity (Loury 1994 , p. 430). On another occasion, Dennett ( 2006 , p. 337) condemns lying about scientific facts when other political forces like Marxism do it, showing that the defence of liberalism justifies the means.

After surveying the scientific community’s attitudes towards these ‘dangerous’ topics since the 1970s, Nathan Cofnas concludes that within the community there is a widespread acceptance of two central ideas:

The prevailing morality requires that ‘scientists should not conduct research that threatens to uncover facts that contradict these morally required beliefs’ and

the same morality ‘requires people to hold certain beliefs regardless of the evidence’ (Cofnas 2016 , p. 479).

Given these widespread beliefs, it is not surprising that Enlightenment liberals are merely engaged in another form of PC, which, although rejecting the post-modern disregard for the truth, equally disregards the importance of knowledge when it conflicts with liberal values.

Ultimately, both post-modern advocates of PC and Enlightenment liberals deliberately conflate fact and value. The former understand scientific knowledge not as truth but as a narrative of power, while the latter are interested in truth as long as it validates liberalism as objectively good. Remarkably, no side seems to believe in the strict separation of is from ought , which is clear in the shared fear that the discovery of empirical facts can lead to illiberal normative claims. As philosopher Robert J. Richards showed in his defence of evolutionary ethics, the reason it is so complicated to separate is from ought is that moral justification

must ultimately lead to an appeal to the beliefs and practices of men, which of course is an empirical appeal. So moral principles ultimately can be justified only by facts (Richards 1986 , p. 286).

Because of this prevalent conflation of fact and value, the socio-academic debate about PC is actually a debate about how to better protect liberalism. Strikingly, there is a general absence of critiques of PC that are truly open-ended regarding (scientific) truth and its moral consequences, including those of a potentially illiberal nature. A possible explanation for this absence has two dimensions:

the academic community is overwhelmingly liberal, leading to a general lack of moral diversity and to a weak pluralism (D. B. Klein and Stern 2005 ).

PC itself, with its soft penalties at the social and professional levels, makes up a barrier against the existence of open-ended critiques of PC.

This leads us to a full circle where the debates about PC are themselves pc.

7 Conclusion

The socio-academic debate about PC presents a dichotomy between critical post-modern advocates of PC and those Enlightenment liberals who oppose PC. Yet, we showed that this dichotomy does not hold under scrutiny and that both sides are ultimately defenders of PC who merely use different pc strategies. In particular, Enlightenment liberals represent a concealed form of PC. Both sides are more interested in defending liberal values than in unfettered critical discourse. While post-modern advocates of PC straightforwardly dismiss objective truth, Enlightenment liberals uphold the existence and the desirability of truth. Yet, these science-based liberals are in fact protecting liberalism from an uncompromising open-ended quest for scientific truth.

As demonstrated, both sides use PC because PC works as a mechanism to protect and further liberal values. Its central aim is to prevent the rise of illiberal truth-claims. Hence, the socio-academic debate about PC is not a debate between two factions in favour and against PC, but a debate about how to better protect and further liberalism. It is a debate about the kind and degree of PC restrictions that can best defend liberalism from illiberal truth-claims and political stances. On one side, post-modern advocates wish to censor political incorrectness due to their understanding of some truth-claims as narratives of oppression. These advocates aim to suppress such narratives in the name of liberating tolerance. On the other side, Enlightenment liberals are more inclined to marginalise dangerous scientific research. Although falling short from banning dangerous speech, they reject the moral and scientific legitimacy of truth-claims that fall outside of the liberal paradigm. Enlightenment liberals often assert that certain (liberal) truth-claims are scientifically sound and beyond sensible debate.

Last, by noting that the Enlightenment differs from liberalism, we argued that Enlightenment principles of truth-seeking and critical discourse may also operate in non-liberal moral spheres or lead to them. Hence, to conflate liberalism and Enlightenment reveals not a commitment to open-ended scientific rationality but, above all, a commitment to liberalism and its (PC) safeguard. The debate on PC lacks a prominent anti-PC side arguing for an open-ended critical discourse at the scientific and moral levels, an absence likely caused by liberal hegemonic thought in academia and by PC itself. As a result, the PC debate represents a circular and closed dispute about how to uphold liberal values.

The two camps battle over epistemological differences. If there is no substantive truth – as in post-modernist discourse –, potential claims for tolerance of offensive viewpoints in the name of truth and open discourse may lose their value. In this sense, the normative clash between the two camps involves asserting the epistemic status of scientific truth. Not everyone must identify with one of the two camps. Some may, for instance, support certain levels of PC while upholding scientific realism. Yet, supporting PC within science requires science-based supporters of PC to justify why truth is less relevant than restricting viewpoints for moral reasons, which again brings the epistemic dimension to the fore. Epistemology is key in the current PC debate.

Liberal science is a term developed by Jonathan Rauch ( 2013 ) that represents an Enlightenment liberal intellectual system of knowledge production. It works with the following rules: no argument is really over; anyone can take part in scientific discussions. This system of knowledge production relies on the primacy of evidence and open discourse. As a term, liberal science remains in use, often by those opposing PC (Bailey 2005 ; J. Haidt and Lukianoff 2017 ).

Unlike other ideologies that do not sacralise free expression, liberalism has a special inner tension because freedom of expression is an important part of the traditional liberal ethos.

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We are grateful to Jonathan Anomaly and to three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts. Their constructive criticisms strengthened this article.

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Sandra Dzenis

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Dzenis, S., Nobre Faria, F. Political Correctness: the Twofold Protection of Liberalism. Philosophia 48 , 95–114 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00094-4

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Student Opinion

Why Is Freedom of Speech an Important Right? When, if Ever, Can It Be Limited?

By Michael Gonchar

• Sept. 12, 2018

This extended Student Opinion question and a related lesson plan were created in partnership with the National Constitution Center in advance of Constitution Day on Sept. 17. For information about a cross-classroom “Constitutional Exchange,” see The Lauder Project .

One of the founding principles of the United States that Americans cherish is the right to freedom of speech. Enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of speech grants all Americans the liberty to criticize the government and speak their minds without fear of being censored or persecuted.

Even though the concept of freedom of speech on its face seems quite simple, in reality there are complex lines that can be drawn around what kinds of speech are protected and in what setting.

The Supreme Court declared in the case Schenck v. United States in 1919 that individuals are not entitled to speech that presents a “clear and present danger” to society. For example, a person cannot falsely yell “fire” in a crowded theater because that speech doesn’t contribute to the range of ideas being discussed in society, yet the risk of someone getting injured is high. On the other hand, in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, the court declared that even inflammatory speech, such as racist language by a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, should generally be protected unless it is likely to cause imminent violence.

While the text and principle of the First Amendment have stayed the same, the court’s interpretation has indeed changed over time . Judges, lawmakers and scholars continue to struggle with balancing strong speech protections with the necessity of maintaining a peaceful society.

What do you think? Why is the freedom of speech an important right? Why might it be important to protect even unpopular or hurtful speech? And yet, when might the government draw reasonable limits on speech, and why?

Before answering this question, read the full text of the amendment. What does it say about speech?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Next, read these excerpts from three recent articles about free speech cases that might affect your life:

In a September 2017 article, “ High Schools Threaten to Punish Students Who Kneel During Anthem ,” Christine Hauser writes:

The controversy over kneeling in protest of racial injustice moved beyond the world of professional sports this week, when a number of schools told students they were expected to stand during the national anthem. On Long Island, the Diocese of Rockville Centre, which runs a private Catholic school system, said students at its three high schools could face “serious disciplinary action” if they knelt during the anthem before sporting events.

In a June 2018 article, “ Colleges Grapple With Where — or Whether — to Draw the Line on Free Speech ,” Alina Tugend writes:

It has happened across the country, at small private colleges and large public universities: an invited guest is heckled or shouted down or disinvited because of opposing political views. And the incident is followed by a competing chorus of accusations about the rights of free speech versus the need to feel safe and welcome. It’s something those in higher education have grappled with for decades. But after the 2016 presidential election and the increasing polarization of the country, the issue has taken on a new resonance.

In another June 2018 article, “ Supreme Court Strikes Down Law Barring Political Apparel at Polling Places ,” Adam Liptak writes:

The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a Minnesota law that prohibits voters from wearing T-shirts, hats and buttons expressing political views at polling places. In a cautious 7-to-2 decision, the court acknowledged the value of decorum and solemn deliberation as voters prepare to cast their ballots. But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that Minnesota’s law was not “capable of reasoned application.”

Students, read at least one of the above articles in its entirety, then tell us:

— Why is the freedom of speech an important right? Why do you think it’s worth protecting?

— What is the value in protecting unpopular speech?

— The Supreme Court has determined that certain types of speech, such as fighting words, violent threats and misleading advertising, are of only “low” First Amendment value because they don’t contribute to a public discussion of ideas, and are therefore not protected. Even though the text of the First Amendment does not make any distinction between “low” and “high” value speech, do you think the court is correct in ruling that some categories of speech are not worth protecting? What types of speech would you consider to be “low” value? What types of speech are “high” value, in your opinion?

— What do you think about the free speech issues raised in the three articles above? For example:

• Should students be allowed to kneel during the national anthem? Why? • Should colleges be allowed to forbid controversial or “offensive” guests from speaking on campus? Why? • Should individuals be able to wear overtly political T-shirts or hats to the polling booth? Why?

— When might the government draw reasonable limits to the freedom of speech, and why?

— We now want to ask you an important constitutional question: When does the First Amendment allow the government to limit speech? We want to hear what you think. But to clarify, we’re not asking for your opinion about policy. In other words, we’re not asking whether a certain type of speech, like flag burning or hate speech, should be protected or prohibited. Instead, we’re asking you to interpret the Constitution: Does the First Amendment protect that speech?

Do your best to base your interpretation on the text of the amendment itself and your knowledge of how it can be understood. You may want to consult this essay in the National Constitution Center’s Interactive Constitution to learn more about how scholars and judges have interpreted the First Amendment, but rest assured, you don’t have to be a Supreme Court justice to have an opinion on this matter, and even the justices themselves often disagree.

— When you interpret the First Amendment, what do you think it has to say about the free speech issues raised in the three articles. For example:

• Does the First Amendment protect the right of students at government-run schools (public schools) to protest? What about students who attend private schools? • Does the First Amendment allow private colleges to prohibit certain controversial speakers? What about government-run colleges (public colleges)? • Finally, does the First Amendment protect voters’ right to wear whatever they want to the polling booth?

Are any of your answers different from your answers above, when you answered the three “should” questions?

— When scholars, judges and lawmakers try to balance strong speech protections with the goal of maintaining a peaceful society, what ideas or principles do you think are most important for them to keep in mind? Explain.

Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

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Courtesy or censorship?

The resurgent fight over politically correct speech.

By Natalia Galicza

No issue has defined the culture wars like political correctness, ever since the idea took hold in the 1990s. Merriam-Webster calls it “a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated.” Proponents see this as a comprehensive modern approach to the age-old mandate to be polite and respectful to people of different groups and backgrounds. But opponents, leery of the motives behind it, bristle at the idea that they can’t say whatever they want in the manner they’re accustomed to. What does it all come down to?

Language evolves with society

Being more conscientious about the words we choose and expanding our vocabulary can make language more flexible and accurate. This allows our speech to reflect a growing understanding of social realities as we strive to see our world from different points of view — particularly with regard to gender, race and other facets of identity. From this perspective, political correctness helps us to speak with respect for others whose experiences we might not share or understand.

We should expect language to keep changing along these lines, as the public discourse casts light on historical inaccuracies and inequities that persist in our words. For example, recent research into American slavery has spurred the use of “enslaved person” in lieu of “slave,” in an effort to avoid dehumanizing the subject while clarifying they were forced into that situation. This term has been adopted by the Library of Congress, National Archives, national parks and other institutions.

“When we use a category in English or any language, it defines someone as that’s who they are,” says Gregory Ward, professor of linguistics, gender and sexuality studies, and philosophy at Northwestern University. “To say that slaves were slaves eliminates their identity of being anything else.”

Political correctness tends to work in this fashion. People consider a label unrepresentative of an identity, lobby for change and start using a new alternative. Eventually, if the new phrase takes hold, it gets adopted by institutions with the power to shape our everyday language more broadly — as The Associated Press did in 2020 by deciding to capitalize “Black” to match other racial and ethnic descriptors like “Latino.”

Proponents argue that it comes back to choice. Yes, an individual should have agency in how they speak, but they argue that people should also have agency in how they are spoken about, from demographic labels to personal pronouns. “The people who say they’re silly aren’t the people who belong to the groups that are impacted by those terms,” Ward says. “They tend to be the majority, who have always had the benefit of being the arbiters of language.”

Speech restrictions hurt everyone

Some react derisively to the stilted constructions and sometimes precious distinctions that have become hallmarks of political correctness — like “unhoused” over “homeless” or “mummified persons” replacing “mummies.” But opponents also raise serious concerns, arguing that the movement stifles speech across the board and makes it difficult for people to engage in healthy discourse about social and political issues. Some warn of a blowback effect, with otherwise courteous people acting out against the imposition of new rules. They don’t support harmful speech, but rather oppose limits on dialogue and personal choice.

These fears are exacerbated when restrictions are imposed by powerful institutions. In 2022, Stanford University’s failed harmful language initiative flagged more than 100 words as potentially offensive — including terms like “master” and “slave” for connected hard drives and everyday words like “American.” The initiative was canceled after national media outlets called it “Orwellian,” and a student newspaper complained that the school “continually pressures students to submit to the woke newspeak regime.” The case highlights free speech issues, says Zach Greenberg, senior program officer for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “For an authoritative university body to come down and say these are the end-all be-all bad words, it shuts out debate or discussion.”

In general, labeling certain speech as correct or incorrect deters people from exchanging ideas. A 2017 survey titled “ The State of Free Speech and Tolerance in America ” by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that 71 percent of respondents believe political correctness has silenced discussions that are important to society. It also found that while a majority of Americans view hate speech as morally unacceptable, they oppose laws to regulate hate speech.

Perhaps the most notable backlash has occurred in electoral politics. Former President Donald Trump became a hero to many after not only refusing to sanitize his speech, but defying the concept of civility as an impediment to progress. Once unorthodox, his behavior has become a model for others — including Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s main rival in the GOP, who has waged a war on “woke” speech in Florida. 

This story appears in the July/August issue of Deseret Magazine . Learn more about how to subscribe .

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Political correctness and freedom of speech

In the past few months, student protests have swept across college campuses in the U.S.

Focused on issues of race and marginalization, these student protests have highlighted questions that have been at the forefront for a while: Should communities be sensitive to the experiences and cultures that different people represent? What should be the role of an administration, and what is the larger role of an institution as a ‘safe space?’

At the University of Missouri, tensions culminated in multiple demonstrations, a hunger strike and a boycott from the football team. Students were protesting a lack of administrative response to incidents of racial slurs and discrimination.

At Yale University, female students were allegedly turned away from a fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s party one night, saying that the party was for “white girls only.”

That same day, students received an email from the administration and campus diversity groups advising students to “actively avoid Halloween costumes” that disrespect and appropriate different groups. Shortly after, Yale Lecturer and wife of Associate Dean Erika Christakis responded with another email saying that the administration was bringing free speech into question. “American universities were once a safe space; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition,” Christakis wrote.

Social Justice Council co-president Julia Leland (’16) believes that the role of an administration is to guide its students, and argues that in this case, Yale did the right thing in sending out the email. She points out that the letter was not a strict demand and nor did it have consequences if breached. “They were just saying, ‘think about your costume, is it respectful?’ Leland said. “They were making a suggestion, which is no different than the Middle School dress code: ‘do you feel comfortable in your clothes? Will it offend someone else?’”

On the other hand, Spencer Swanson (’16) believes that all administrations should stay out of matters of behavior and sensitivity due to the subjectivity of the issue. “There’s a huge gray area with things where the administration shouldn’t have a role, that area where one person may find it offensive but another person may not,” he said. “In those cases, we should leave the individuals of a community to sort it out for themselves.”

Leland worries that if students are left to deal with these issues themselves, it poses a risk that students will offend others. “College is a place where you should be exploring and making mistakes, but it isn’t the place where you should be allowed to be disrespectful,” Leland said. “Just because you are a college kid doesn’t make it okay.”

Social Studies Teacher Mike McGowan recognizes the activism on college campuses as part of a debate of the role of political correctness in communities. “With political correctness, there’s always tension between the community and the individual, between what the individual would like to say versus community norms,” he said.

Caroline Tisdale (’13), currently a sophomore at Yale, sees the larger movement at her school and beyond as more than just political correctness and freedom of speech. “People have the freedom to say what they like and freedom of speech protects one against the law but it doesn’t protect one against the consequences of one’s words,” she said. “This is about respect and understanding and especially from the Christakis’ position within the university, creating a safe inclusive space for all students.”

Swanson, though, sees the issue as more indicative of a “hypersensitive” culture than a culture of inclusitivity. “Often at ASL, people are working really hard to get offended at things,” he said. “They hear something and they think, ‘oh, I want to get offended’ or they twist something on purpose. This is a theme with political correctness – trying to not offend somebody in 2015 is nearly impossible.”

This issue of “hypersensitivity” manifested itself at school last year. Social Justice Council Member and Unity in Diversity leader Milo Kremer (’16) remembers that in a student gender equity group discussion, mildly offensive comments inflamed others to the point that these people were excluded from the group. “And now, when I go ask them to go to Unity meetings, they’re like ‘why should I come to a place where my views aren’t even welcome?’” Kremer said.

Kremer believes this mentality has led to only a certain group of students being involved in social issues at school. “We need to have everyone involved in this, it can’t just be a niche in the school. There needs to be a more welcoming attitude and a more inclusive attitude with these clubs [from both the members and club leaders].”

Upon graduating ASL, Tisdale felt that the lack of social justice activism at school meant that she was not prepared to go on to university. She is vehement that these discussions must happen.”I think going into college I thought I was very tolerant,aware,unbiased because I’ve lived abroad and have then perhaps had a more global experience than most other students,” she said. “However, I soon realized that I was very unequipped to have conversations on social issues.”

McGowan agrees with Tisdale and believes that students are not aware specifically about issues relating to race. “[Students] are entering a world where there is a heightened sensitivity to issues involving race,” McGowan said. “I’m not sure [the school] always really makes [students] are of that.

These discussions could be facilitated if they were integrated in the school curriculum. “On some level, activism should be part of the experience. If activism means getting involved in important issues and trying to change things, we should embrace [it],” he said.

From the Yale Movement:

Yale University freshman Myles Cameron has been an active participant in the student movement at Yale. He describes the marches and demonstrations as unlike anything he’s ever felt.

“Being there, marching with all these people, all the love and camaraderie in the air – it was such a powerful environment,” he said.

To him, the movement, more than anything, is about making sure all students, regardless of race or culture, feel welcome at Yale. “[The demonstrations] were more of a solidarity kind of thing, everyone wanted to support the girls of color who were genuinely hurting after the [fraternity] incident and people who felt offended by the email. To be there for support, and to say ‘we belong here at Yale,’” he said.

The media, though, hasn’t fully portrayed this message properly. “The craziest thing for me is seeing how the media can twist things different ways,” Cameron said. He cites that the liberal outlets have “supported” the movement by showing how the marches are about inclusivity and a call for improvement of the institution. More conservative outlets have interpreted the message differently. “[These] media outlets are like ‘students march about free speech’ and it’s like ‘what, what are you talking about?’” he said.

Yale sophomore and ASL alum Caroline Tisdale (’13) agrees with Cameron in that the discussion is about respect and cultural sensitivity. She believes that in making the debate about freedom of speech, people do not recognize the real issue of sensitivity and the nuances the issue contains. “This is an extremely nuanced issue that affects black students differently than it affects native or Asian students,” she said.“It’s very easy to sidestep that discussion by making it about free speech and totally ignore that there might have been something culturally insensitive said when you make it about if you can say whatever you want. I was angry how it got twisted in that way,” he said.

Cameron points to activism as an important way to spark change in college and beyond. “The world obviously doesn’t represent everyone’s point of view and by starting in your university, and finding your voice there, you can make your college bubble better. And by affecting the people around you, they will carry that with them moving on,” he said.

One opinion is that the activism at Yale, however, is out of hand. Some believe that by protesting, students are “making noise” and disrupting college life unnecessarily.

Cameron, though, emphasizes that this couldn’t be farther from what they are doing. “A lot of the activism on Yale’s campus is out of love for Yale and the student body, we want make this place better for people like us, ” he said. “We do not want to go around and stir arguments, we want to go out and make this university the best it can be.”

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Political Correctness and Freedom of Speech

Political Correctness and Freedom of Speech (In Hellinger M and Pauwels A (eds.) (2007) Language and communication: Diversity and change (Vol. 9 Handbooks of applied linguistics) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter) The term ‘political correctness’ is highly problematic. It is principally used by its detractors and unlikely to be mentioned in recommendations about inclusivity, ethics and general good practice in the media (e.g. Alia 2004). It is largely used to vilify concerns about social inequity. ‘Anti-PC discourse’ (Cameron 1995) developed in the 1980s as a counter discourse resisting overt efforts by feminist and anti-racist activists to bring about social changes. While a corpus-based study of its use in the British press shows a sharp decline after the Labour victory in 1997 (Johnson, Culpepper and Suhr 2003), it is still in regular use. For example, former Conservative PM, William Hague, has just recently said that ‘we must never put political correctness before the safety of the British people’ (‘Any Questions’, Radio 4, 3 July 2004), in response to community leaders’ concerns about the proportion of young Muslims in police ‘stop and search’ figures since the Terrorism Act. In the case of ‘PC’ and freedom of speech, then, it is difficult to identify where the ‘problem’ lies and to pinpoint the ‘solution’ that Applied Linguistics might offer, other than a continued engagement with the issues leading to better theoretical understanding of them (e.g. Fairclough 2003). This chapter will explore the tensions surrounding press freedom, shifts in taboo, inclusivity and ethics. It will focus in particular on two controversial cases involving resignation following alleged racial slurs (a mayoral aide in Washington DC in 1999 and a British TV football commentator in 2004). References Alia, Valerie (2004) Media ethics and social change Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Cameron, Deborah (1995) Verbal hygiene London: Routledge Fairclough, Norman (2003) ‘Political correctness’: the politics of culture and language, Discourse and society 14(1): 17-28 Johnson, Sally, Culpepper, Jonathan and Suhr, Stephanie (2003) From ‘politically correct councillors’ to ‘Blairite nonsense’: discourses of ‘political correctness’ in three British newspapers, Discourse and society 14(1): 29-48

Related Papers

Discourse and Society

Jonathan Culpeper

This article explores discourses of ‘political correctness’ (‘PC’) in a corpus of articles gathered from three broadsheet newspapers in the UK between 1994 and 1999. Using the software package WordSmith Tools (Scott, 1999) two types of analysis were undertaken: first, a numerical count of so- called ‘PC’-related terms (‘political correctness’, ‘politically correct’, etc.) in each of the three newspapers; and second, a compilation of the ‘keywords’ which occurred most frequently within the corpus in relation to the term ‘political correctness’. Our study reveals an overall decline in the use of ‘PC’- related terms throughout the period in question, but suggests some interesting shifts in the way in which discourses of ‘political correctness’ have been drawn upon as a means of framing debates over the British Labour Party.

International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Andy Pilkington

This paper seeks to deconstruct the concept of political correctness (PC). Evidence is produced to suggest that PC is routinely drawn upon in the media as an interpretive framework. It is argued that this framework resonates with many readers. The hegemonic position of what is labelled an anti-PC discourse, it is argued, can in turn encourage a perception that issues relating to equality and diversity issues are at best trivial and at worst a minefield to be steadfastly avoided. The paper critically challenges this anti-PC ...

JPE Journal of Practical Ethics

abstraCt Debates about political correctness often proceed as if proponents see nothing to fear in erecting norms that inhibit expression on the one side, and opponents see nothing but misguided efforts to silence political enemies on the other. 1 both views are mistaken. Political correctness, as I argue, is an important attempt to advance the legitimate interests of certain groups in the public sphere. However, this type of norm comes with costs that mustn't be neglected–sometimes in the form of conflict with other values we hold dear, but often by creating an internal schism that threatens us with collective irrationality. Political correctness thus sets up dilemmas I wish to set out (but not, alas, resolve). the cliché is that political correctness tramples on rights to free-speech, as if the potential loss were merely expressive; the real issue is that in filtering public discourse, political correctness may defeat our own substantive aims.

Global media ethics and the digital revolution

The concept of political correctness, or more accurately, anti-political correctness has reemerged in the last decade as a major interpretive framework in the media. Populist politicians such as Trump in the US and Farage (a key advocate of Brexit) and Johnson in the UK for example routinely draw upon a discourse featuring political correctness as a bete noire. I adopt a Foucauldian analysis to argue in this paper that such an anti-political correctness discourse has become hegemonic and is frequently routinely reproduced by journalists. This paper critically examines the arguments mounted by critics of political correctness and argues that they are not only flawed but that they also constitute an ideology which delegitimises an agenda concerned to promote equality, diversity and inclusion.

Norman Fairclough

In this article, I approach the controversy over ‘political correctness’ (PC) in terms of three questions: a socio-historical question, a theoretical question and a political question as follows. (1) Why this apparently increasing focus in politics on achieving social and political change through changing culture and changing language – what has happened socially that can explain the ‘cultural turn’ and the ‘language turn’ in politics, in social and political theory, and in other domains of social practice? (2) How are we to understand the relationships among culture, language and other elements of social life and social practices – how are we to understand the relationship between change in culture and language, and social change? (3) For those who are politically committed to substantive social and political change (whether on the right or on the left), what place can a politics centred around culture and language have in a political strategy which is to have some chance of success? The article concludes with a discussion of strategies and tactics for contesting critiques of ‘PC’.

Jenny Healy

I begin by examining three factors which enable the term 'political correct-ness' (hereafter PC) itself to feed into the hands of its opponents: namely, the trivialization of the actual issues which are attributed to PC, the villainization of those involved in the PC movement, and the conferring of a sense of legitimacy on the opposition movement. The bulk of the paper provides a detailed summary and critique of every single articulated Canadian position I encountered against such PC measures as fair language policies. I have distinguished between arguments directed at the ideological content and the methodology of PC. Arguments directed at the ideological content are divided into the threat to freedom of expression argument, the threat to academic freedom argument, and the degen-eration into triviality argument; arguments directed at the methdology are divided into the argument that PC commits the very evils that it addresses and the argument that PC uses unjust means to get its way. The paper ends by claiming that if PC means minimizing sexual and racial harrassment, discourgaing homophobic, racist, and sexist discourse within educational settings, and curtailing policies which victimize oppressed groups, then political correctness is not merely correct, but morally obligatory as well. 1. 'POLITICALLY CORRECT': THE TERM AND THE CONTEXT According to Greek legend, Heracles was set the task of destroying the nine-headed monster, Hydra; this was a fearsome task, as each head, when severed, was replaced by two new ones. In opting to write a paper on this topic, I feel as though I have assumed a task of Heracletian proportions. Reading, summarizing, and even critiquing these arguments is in fact akin to the two-for-one feature of the Greek myth, for the very act of paying attention to the arguments and using the term 'political correctness' may serve to strengthen the influence of those who oppose political correctness. Three separate factors enable the term 'political correctness' itself to feed into the hands of its opponents: namely, the trivialization of the actual issues which are attributed to political correctness, the villainization of those involved in the political correctness movement, and the conferring of a sense of legitimacy on the anti-political correctness movement. I shall begin this paper (Part 1) with a brief discussion of each of these factors; then

Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal

The concept of political correctness, or more accurately, anti-political correctness has re-emerged in the last decade as a major interpretive framework in the media. While the attack on PC is typically made by conservatives, I focus in this paper on a left wing critic, Trevor Phillips who argues that the pervasiveness of PC has resulted in a populist backlash. I focus on a television programme, 'Has political correctness gone mad? presented by Trevor Phillips which I deconstruct and critique. 'It is argued, contrary to Phillips, that it is not PC but an anti-PC discourse that lies behind the success of populist politicians in the UK and US and that the campaign against political correctness plays well with their supporters.

bobana m. andjelkovic

Political correctness is not human attainment, it is even less of something natural which comes with the development of specific language or its gargons. Political correctness is an imposed value. At the same time, it all has to look like someone somewhere wants to fight and care for others, for equality, fraternity and all the other giant words which lost valuable meanings while language was raped. Political correctness dates from the political debates and arguments within extreme politics, its gargon and politics as false democratic activity. It all had started with Stalinists in the Communist Party and was euphemism for those who crossed the permissible line of ideological thinking. As continued in false democratic political debates in the USA after WWII, it became more than obvious that inisisting on it did not have anything to do with social achievements and with aim that people normally treat each other no matter what differences exist between them, but it has to do with political madness, extremism in disguise, utilitarianism and seriously disturbed individuals or groups imposing it.

Lorraine Finlay , Augusto Zimmermann

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Political Correctness, n., the avoidance of forms of expression or action that exclude, marginalise or insult racial and cultural minorities.- Oxford English Dictionary (9th Edition)All I want of you is a little seevility, and that of the commonest goddamnedest kind.- Z. W. Pease, The History of New Bedford (1918)Forgive us all our peccadillos.With the fullness of time, when all has been said and done in both the heat of the moment and the cooler perspective of experience, what has come to be called "Political Correctness" will be revealed as little more than passionate folly-merely another skirmish in the eternal battle for the minds, hearts, and souls of humankind."There is nothing new under the sun," said the wise King Solomon; life is full of futility. And, indeed, such have been the lessons of history. There is nothing new about PC, either, except perhaps the futility of defining it. Nor is it a passing fancy: like religion (and despite the dictionary), the ...

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Political correctness: a threat to free speech or a tool to achieve equality? : an examination of whether political correctness is a justified restriction to freedom of speech or not

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Home » Articles » Topic » Issues » Issues Related to Speech, Press, Assembly, or Petition » Political Correctness

Political Correctness

Written by Anne Reynolds, published on January 1, 2009 , last updated on May 6, 2024

The concept of political correctness is based on the belief that speech or behavior that is offensive to various groups’ sensibilities should be eliminated, by means of regulations or penalties if necessary. An example of a political correctness debate involves the name of the Washington Redskins NFL team. The name has inspired protest, hearings and lawsuits. (Here, Zena "Chief Zee" Williams, unofficial mascot of the Washington Redskins, signing autographs during fan appreciation day. AP Photo/Alex Brandon, used with permission from the Associated Press)

The concept of political correctness is based on the belief that speech or behavior that is offensive to various groups’ sensibilities should be eliminated, by means of regulations or penalties if necessary. Since the First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech,” enforcement of political correctness in America normally comes not from legislation but from rules and regulations, such as campus speech codes , which seek in part to protect students from harassing comments. Some fear that such rules are based on the sort of cultural consensus that Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill referred to as the “tyranny of the majority.” The origins of political correctness are debatable. Some trace it to liberals in the 1960s critical of the government and government propaganda. Others point to the early 1990s, when the term was used pejoratively by conservatives to attack liberal legislation.

There have been laws with political correctness intents

There are, however, instances of legislation with politically correct intent. Oklahoma Senate Bill 567 , the so-called Oklahoma Racial Mascots Act, introduced in 2005, would have prohibited “the use of racially derogatory or discriminatory Native American school or athletic team names .” The Racial Mascots Act was opposed by Oklahoma state representative Mike Reynolds, who stated on the Oklahoma House of Representatives website that, “Words once meant as terms of honor now seem to be derogatory terms. . . .I think we’re letting political correctness run amok when we start legislating names for football teams.” The bill did not clear the Senate. Proponents of such measures, however, contend that allowing names offensive to certain cultures exploits and demeans the less powerful and perpetuates stereotypes.

Arguments against penalizing offensive speech

If laws are made that penalize offensive speech, at least three points of possible contention are immediately apparent:

• the determination of what is offensive,
• who is to decide what is offensive,
• and the determination of what language should be eliminated.

Questions arise as to whether language should be prohibited on the basis of one person being offended, a certain percentage of people taking offense, or simply decided by those in political power.

This is the crux of the problem. Political correctness seeks to put boundaries on offensive speech and behavior; but there is the risk that such boundaries are likely to be determined by the personal beliefs and values of those in power. This means that the definition of what is offensive can change with each group that comes into power. The goals of political correctness are often noble, often serving to protect marginalized, less powerful groups. Critics, however, contend that to legislate political correctness offends the First Amendment.

Anne Foust Reynolds , Cataloging Librarian at the Jerry Falwell Library for Liberty University, is also author of Racial Quotas for the Encyclopedia of the United States Constitution. This article was originally published in 2009.

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The myth of the free speech crisis

How overblown fears of censorship have normalised hate speech and silenced minorities. By Nesrine Malik

W hen I started writing a column in the Guardian, I would engage with the commenters who made valid points and urge those whose response was getting lost in rage to re-read the piece and return. Comments were open for 72 hours. Coming up for air at the end of a thread felt like mooring a ship after a few days on choppy waters, like an achievement, something that I and the readers had gone through together. We had discussed sensitive, complicated ideas about politics, race, gender and sexuality and, at the end, via a rolling conversation, we had got somewhere.

In the decade since, the tenor of those comments became so personalised and abusive that the ship often drowned before making it to shore – the moderators would simply shut the thread down. When it first started happening, I took it as a personal failure – perhaps I had not struck the right tone or not sufficiently hedged all my points, provoking readers into thinking I was being dishonest or incendiary. In time, it dawned on me that my writing was the same. It was the commenters who had changed. It was becoming harder to discuss almost anything without a virtual snarl in response. And it was becoming harder to do so if one were not white or male.

As a result, the Guardian overhauled its policy and decided that it would not open comment threads on pieces that were certain to derail. The moderators had a duty of care to the writers, some of whom struggled with the abuse, and a duty of care to new writers who might succumb to a chilling effect if they knew that to embark on a journalism career nowadays comes inevitably with no protection from online thuggery. Alongside these moral concerns there were also practical, commercial ones. There were simply not enough resources to manage all the open threads at the same time with the increased level of attention that was now required.

In the past 10 years, many platforms in the press and social media have had to grapple with the challenges of managing users with increasingly sharp and offensive tones, while maintaining enough space for expression, feedback and interaction. Speech has never been more free or less intermediated. Anyone with internet access can create a profile and write, tweet, blog or comment, with little vetting and no hurdle of technological skill. But the targets of this growth in the means of expression have been primarily women, minorities and LGBTQ+ people.

A 2017 Pew Research Center survey revealed that a “wide cross-section” of Americans experience online abuse, but that the majority was directed towards minorities, with a quarter of black Americans saying they have been attacked online due to race or ethnicity. Ten per cent of Hispanics and 3% of whites reported the same. The picture is not much different in the UK. A 2017 Amnesty report analysed tweets sent to 177 female British MPs. The 20 of them who were from a black and ethnic minority background received almost half the total number of abusive tweets.

The vast majority of this abuse goes unpunished. And yet it is somehow conventional wisdom that free speech is under assault, that university campuses have succumbed to an epidemic of no-platforming, that social media mobs are ready to raise their pitchforks at the most innocent slip of the tongue or joke, and that Enlightenment values that protected the right to free expression and individual liberty are under threat. The cause of this, it is claimed, is a liberal totalitarianism that is attributable (somehow) simultaneously to intolerance and thin skin. The impulse is allegedly at once both fascist in its brutal inclinations to silence the individual, and protective of the weak, easily wounded and coddled.

This is the myth of the free speech crisis. It is an extension of the political-correctness myth , but is a recent mutation more specifically linked to efforts or impulses to normalise hate speech or shut down legitimate responses to it. The purpose of the myth is not to secure freedom of speech – that is, the right to express one’s opinions without censorship, restraint or legal penalty. The purpose is to secure the licence to speak with impunity; not freedom of expression, but rather freedom from the consequences of that expression.

The myth has two components: the first is that all speech should be free; the second is that freedom of speech means freedom from objection.

The first part of the myth is one of the more challenging to push back against, because instinctively it feels wrong to do so. It seems a worthy cause to demand more political correctness, politeness and good manners in language convention as a bulwark against society’s drift into marginalising groups with less capital, or to argue for a fuller definition of female emancipation. These are good things, even if you disagree with how they are to be achieved. But to ask that we have less freedom of speech – to be unbothered when people with views you disagree with are silenced or banned – smacks of illiberalism. It just doesn’t sit well. And it’s hard to argue for less freedom in a society in which you live, because surely limiting rights of expression will catch up with you at some point. Will it not be you one day, on the wrong side of free speech?

There is a kernel of something that makes all myths stick – something that speaks to a sense of justice, liberty, due process and openness and allows those myths to be cynically manipulated to appeal to the good and well-intentioned. But challenging the myth of a free speech crisis does not mean enabling the state to police and censor even further. Instead, it is arguing that there is no crisis. If anything, speech has never been more free and unregulated. The purpose of the free-speech-crisis myth is to guilt people into giving up their right of response to attacks, and to destigmatise racism and prejudice. It aims to blackmail good people into ceding space to bad ideas, even though they have a legitimate right to refuse. And it is a myth that demands, in turn, its own silencing and undermining of individual freedom. To accept the free-speech-crisis myth is to give up your own right to turn off the comments.

A t the same time that new platforms were proliferating on the internet, a rightwing counter-push was also taking place online. It claimed that all speech must be allowed without consequence or moderation, and that liberals were assaulting the premise of free speech. I began to notice it around the late 2000s, alongside the fashionable atheism that sprang up after the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion . These new atheists were the first users I spotted using argumentative technicalities (eg “Islam is not a race”) to hide rank prejudice and Islamophobia. If the Guardian published a column of mine but did not open the comment thread, readers would find me on social media and cry censorship, then unleash their invective there instead.

As platforms multiplied, there were more and more ways for me to receive feedback from readers – I could be sworn at and told to go back to where I came from via at least three mediums. Or I could just read about how I should go back to where I came from in the pages of print publications, or on any number of websites. The comment thread seemed redundant. The whole internet was now a comment thread. As a result, mainstream media establishments began to struggle with this glut of opinion, failing to curate the public discussion by giving into false equivalence. Now every opinion must have a counter-opinion.

I began to see it in my own media engagements. I would be called upon by more neutral outlets, such as the BBC, to discuss increasingly more absurd arguments with other journalists or political activists with extreme views. Conversations around race, immigration, Islam and climate change became increasingly binary and polarised even when there were no binaries to be contemplated. Climate change deniers were allowed to broadcast falsehoods about a reversal in climate change. Racial minorities were called upon to counter thinly veiled racist or xenophobic views. I found myself, along with other journalists, regularly ambushed. I appeared on BBC’s Newsnight to discuss an incident in which a far-right racist had mounted a mosque pavement with his car and killed one of the congregation, and I tried to make the point that there was insufficient focus on a growing far-right terror threat. The presenter then asked me: “Have you had abuse? Give us an example.” This became a frequent line of inquiry – the personalisation and provocation of personal debate – when what was needed was analysis.

It became common for me and like-minded colleagues to ask – when invited on to TV or radio to discuss topics such as immigration or Islamophobia – who was appearing on the other side. One British Asian writer was invited on to the BBC to discuss populist rage. When he learned that he would be debating Melanie Phillips – a woman who has described immigrants as “convulsing Europe” and “refusing to assimilate” – he refused to take part, because he did not believe the topic warranted such a polarised set-up. The editor said: “This will be good for your book. Surely you want to sell more copies?” The writer replied that if he never sold another book in his life as a result of refusing to debate with Melanie Phillips, he could live with that. This was now the discourse: presenting bigotry and then the defence of bigotry as a “debate” from which everyone can benefit, like a boxing match where even the loser is paid, along with the promoters, coaches and everyone else behind arranging the fight. The writer Reni Eddo-Lodge has called it “performing rage”.

Views previously consigned to the political fringes made their way into the mainstream via social and traditional media organisations that previously would never have contemplated their airing. The expansion of media outlets meant that it was not only marginalised voices that secured access to the public, but also those with more extreme views.

This inevitably expanded what was considered acceptable speech. The Overton window – the range of ideas deemed to be acceptable by the public – shifted as more views made their way from the peripheries to the centre of the conversation. Any objection to the airing of those views would be considered an attempt to curtail freedom of speech. Whenever I attempted to push back in my writing against what amounted to incitement against racial or religious minorities, my opponents fixated on the free speech argument, rather than the harmful ramifications of hate speech.

I n early 2018, four extreme-right figures were turned away at the UK border. Their presence was deemed “not conducive to the public good”. When I wrote in defence of the Home Office’s position, my email and social media were flooded with abuse for days. Rightwing media blogs and some mainstream publications published pieces saying my position was an illiberal misunderstanding of free speech. No one discussed the people who were banned, their neo-Nazi views, or the risk of hate speech or even violence had they been let in.

What has increased is not intolerance of speech; there is simply more speech. And because that new influx was from the extremes, there is also more objectionable speech – and in turn more objection to it. This is what free-speech-crisis myth believers are picking up – a pushback against the increase in intolerance or bigotry. But they are misreading it as a change in free speech attitudes. This increase in objectionable speech came with a sense of entitlement – a demand that it be heard and not challenged, and the freedom of speech figleaf became a convenient tool. Not only do free speech warriors demand all opinions be heard on all platforms they choose, from college campuses to Twitter, but they also demand that there be no objection or reaction. It became farcical and extremely psychologically taxing for anyone who could see the dangers of hate speech, and how a sharpening tone on immigration could be used to make the lives of immigrants and minorities harder.

When Boris Johnson compared women who wear the burqa to “letterboxes” and “bank robbers”, it led to a spike in racist incidents against women who wear the niqab, according to the organisation Tell Mama, a national project which records and measures anti-Muslim incidents in the UK. Pointing this out and making the link between mockery of minorities and racist provocation against them was, according to Johnson’s supporters, assailing his freedom of speech. The British journalist Isabel Oakeshott tweeted that if he were disciplined by his party for “perfectly reasonable exercise of free speech, something has gone terribly wrong with the party leadership”, and that it was “deplorable to see [the Tory leadership] pandering to the whinings of the professionally offended in this craven way”.

Free speech had seemingly come to mean that no one had any right to object to what anyone ever said – which not only meant that no one should object to Johnson’s comments but, in turn, that no one should object to their objection. Free speech logic, rather than the pursuit of a lofty Enlightenment value, had become a race to the bottom, where the alternative to being “professionally offended” is never to be offended at all. This logic today demands silence from those who are defending themselves from abuse or hate speech. It is, according to the director of the Institute of Race Relations, “ the privileging of freedom of speech over freedom to life ”.

Our alleged free speech crisis was never really about free speech. The backdrop to the myth is rising anti-immigration sentiment and Islamophobia. Free-speech-crisis advocates always seem to have an agenda. They overwhelmingly wanted to exercise their freedom of speech in order to agitate against minorities, women, immigrants and Muslims.

But they dress these base impulses up in the language of concern or anti-establishment conspiracism. Similar to the triggers of political-correctness hysteria, there is a direct correlation between the rise in free speech panic and the rise in far-right or hard-right political energy, as evidenced by anti-immigration rightwing electoral successes in the US, the UK and across continental Europe. As the space for these views expanded, so the concept of free speech became frayed and tattered. It began to become muddled by false equivalence, caught between fact and opinion, between action and reaction. The discourse became mired in a misunderstanding of free speech as absolute.

As a value in its purest form, freedom of speech serves two purposes: protection from state persecution, when challenging the authority of power or orthodoxy; and the protection of fellow citizens from the damaging consequences of absolute speech (ie completely legally unregulated speech) such as slander. According to Francis Canavan in Freedom of Expression: Purpose As Limit – his analysis of perhaps the most permissive free speech law of all, the first amendment of the US constitution – free speech must have a rational end, which is to facilitate communication between citizens. Where it does not serve that end, it is limited. Like all freedoms, it ends when it infringes upon the freedoms of others. He writes that the US supreme court itself “has never accepted an absolutist interpretation of freedom of speech. It has not protected, for example, libel, slander, perjury, false advertising, obscenity and profanity, solicitation of a crime, or ‘fighting’ words. The reason for their exclusion from first-amendment protection is that they have minimal or no values as ideas, communication of information, appeal to reason, step towards truth etc; in short, no value in regard to the ends of the amendment.”

Those who believe in the free-speech-crisis myth fail to make the distinction between “fighting” words and speech that facilitates communication; between free speech and absolute speech. Using this litmus test, the first hint that the free speech crisis is actually an absolute speech crisis is the issues it focuses on. On university campuses, it is overwhelmingly race and gender. On social media, the free speech axe is wielded by trolls, Islamophobes and misogynists, leading to an abuse epidemic that platforms have failed to curb.

This free speech crisis movement has managed to stigmatise reasonable protest, which has existed for years without being branded as “silencing”. This is, in itself, an assault on free expression.

What is considered speech worthy of protection is broadly subjective and depends on the consensual limits a society has drawn. Western societies like to think of their version of freedom of speech as exceptionally pristine, but it is also tainted (or tempered, depending on where you’re coming from) by convention.

T here is only one way to register objection of abhorrent views, which is to take them on. This is a common narcissism in the media. Free speech proponents lean into the storm, take on the bad guys and vanquish them with logic. They also seem, for the most part, incapable of following these rules themselves.

Bret Stephens of the New York Times – a Pulitzer prize-winning star columnist who was poached from the Wall Street Journal in 2017 – often flatters himself in this light, while falling apart at most of the criticism he receives. For a man who calls for “free speech and the necessity of discomfort” as one of his flagship positions as a columnist, he seems chronically unable to apply that discipline to himself.

In his latest tantrum , just last week, Stephens took umbrage against a stranger, the academic David Karpf, who made a joke calling him a “metaphorical bedbug” on Twitter, as a riff on a report that the New York Times building was suffering from a bedbug infestation. (The implication was that Stephens is a pain and difficult to get rid of, just to kill the punchline completely.)

Stephens was alerted to the tweet, then wrote to Karpf, his provost, and the director of the School of Media and Public Affairs, where Karpf is a professor. He in effect asked to speak to Karpf’s managers so that he could report on a man he doesn’t know, who made a mild joke about him that would otherwise have been lost in the ether of the internet because – well, because, how dare he? The powerful don’t have to suffer “the necessity of discomfort”; it’s only those further down the food chain who must bear the moral burden of tolerance of abusive speech. Stephens’s opponents – who include Arabs, whose minds Stephens called “diseased”, and Palestinians, who are en masse one single “mosquito” frozen in amber – must bear it all with good grace.

Stephens has a long record of demanding respect when he refuses to treat others with the same. In response to an objection that the New York Times had published an article about a Nazi that seemed too sympathetic, he wrote: “A newspaper, after all, isn’t supposed to be a form of mental comfort food. We are not an advocacy group, a support network, a cheering section, or a church affirming a particular faith – except, that is, a faith in hard and relentless questioning.” He called disagreement “a dying art”. This was particularly rich from someone who at one time left social media because it was too shouty, only to return sporadically to hurl insults at his critics.

In June 2017, Stephens publicly forswore Twitter, saying that the medium debased politics and that he would “intercede only to say nice things about the writing I admire, the people I like and the music I love”.

He popped up again to call ex-Obama aide Tommy Vietor an “asshole” ( a tweet he later deleted after it was flagged as inappropriate by the New York Times). In response to a tweet by a Times colleague (who had himself deleted a comment after receiving flack for it, and admitted that it had not been well crafted), Stephens said: “This. Is. Insane. And must stop. And there is nothing wrong with your original tweet, @EricLiptonNYT. And there is something deeply psychologically wrong with people who think there is. And fascistic. And yes I’m still on Twitter.”

A dying art indeed. Stephens again deactivated his account after bedbug-gate, retreating to the safe space of the high security towers of the New York Times where, I am told, the bedbug infestation remains unvanquished.

Stephens is a promoter of the “free speech crisis” myth. It is one that journalists, academics and political writers have found useful in chilling dissent. The free-speech-crisis myth serves many purposes. Often it is erected as a moral shield for risible ideas – a shield that some members of the media are bamboozled into raising because of their inability to look past their commitment to free speech in the abstract.

T rolling has become an industry. It is now a sort of lucrative contact sport, where insults and lies are hurled around on television, radio, online and in the printed press. CNN’s coverage of the “Trump transition”, after Donald Trump was elected as US president, was a modern version of a medieval freak show. Step right up and gawk at Richard Spencer , the Trump supporter and head of far-right thinktank the National Policy Institute, as he questions whether Jews “are people at all, or instead soulless golem”. And at the black Trump surrogate who thinks Hillary Clinton started the war in Syria. And at Corey Lewandowski, a man who appeared on CNN as a political commentator, who appears to make a living from lying in the media, and who alleged that the Trump birther story , in which Trump claimed that Barack Obama was not born on US soil, was in fact started by Hillary Clinton.

In pursuit of ratings – from behind a “freedom of speech” figleaf, and perhaps with the good intention of balance on the part of some – many media platforms have detoxified the kind of extreme or untruthful talk that was until recently confined to the darker corners of Reddit or Breitbart. And that radical and untruthful behaviour has a direct impact on how safe the world is for those smeared by these performances. Trump himself is the main act in this lucrative show. Initially seen as an entertaining side act during his election campaign, his offensive, untruthful and pugnacious online presence became instantly more threatening and dangerous once he was elected. Inevitably, his incontinence, bitterness, rage and hatemongering, by sheer dint of constant exposure, became less and less shocking, and in turn less and less beyond the pale.

A world where all opinions and lies are presented to the public as a sort of take-it-or-leave it buffet is often described as “the marketplace of ideas”, a rationalisation for freedom of expression based on comparing ideas to products in a free-market economy. The marketplace of ideas model of free speech holds that what is true factually, and what is good morally, will emerge after a competition of ideas in a free, unmoderated and transparent public discourse, a healthy debate in which the truth will prevail. Bad ideas and ideologies will lose out and wither away as they are vanquished by superior ones. The problem with the marketplace of ideas theory (as with all “invisible hand”-type theories) is that it does not account for a world in which the market is skewed, and where not all ideas receive equal representation because the market has monopolies and cartels.

But real marketplaces actually require a lot of regulation. There are anti-monopoly rules, there are interest rate fixes and, in many markets, artificial currency pegs. In the press, publishing and the business of ideas dispersal in general, there are players that are deeply entrenched and networked, and so the supply of ideas reflects their power.

Freedom of speech is not a neutral, fixed concept, uncoloured by societal prejudice. The belief that it is some absolute, untainted hallmark of civilisation is linked to self-serving exceptionalism – a delusion that there is a basic template around which there is a consensus uninformed by biases. The recent history of fighting for freedom of speech has gone from something noble – striving for the right to publish works that offend people’s sexual or religious prudery, and speaking up against the values leveraged by the powerful to maintain control – to attacking the weak and persecuted. The effort has evolved from challenging upwards to punching downwards.

It has become bogged down in false equivalence and extending the sanctity of fact to opinion, thanks in part to a media that has an interest in creating from the discourse as much heat as possible – but not necessarily any light. Central in this process is an establishment of curators, publishers and editors for whom controversy is a product to be pushed. That is the marketplace of ideas now, not a free and organic exchange of intellectual goods.

The truth is that free speech, even to some of its most passionate founding philosophers, always comes with braking mechanisms, and they usually reflect cultural bias. John Milton advocated the destruction of blasphemous or libellous works: “Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy, that mans [sic] prevention can use.” Today, our braking mechanisms still do not include curbing the promotion of hate towards those at the bottom end of the social hierarchy, because their protection is not a valued or integral part of our popular culture – despite what the free-speech-crisis myth-peddlers say.

Free speech as an abstract value is now directly at odds with the sanctity of life. It’s not merely a matter of “offence”. Judith Butler, a cultural theorist and Berkeley professor, speaking at a 2017 forum sponsored by the Berkeley Academic Senate, said: “If free speech does take precedence over every other constitutional principle and every other community principle, then perhaps we should no longer claim to be weighing or balancing competing principles or values. We should perhaps frankly admit that we have agreed in advance to have our community sundered, racial and sexual minorities demeaned, the dignity of trans people denied, that we are, in effect, willing to be wrecked by this principle of free speech.”

We challenge this instrumentalisation by reclaiming the true meaning of the freedom of speech (which is freedom to speak rather than a right to speak without consequence), challenging hate speech more forcefully, being unafraid to contemplate banning or no-platforming those we think are harmful to the public good, and being tolerant of objection to them when they do speak. Like the political-correctness myth, the free-speech-crisis myth is a call for orthodoxy, for passiveness in the face of assault.

A moral right to express unpopular opinions is not a moral right to express those opinions in a way that silences the voices of others, or puts them in danger of violence. There are those who abuse free speech, who wish others harm, and who roll back efforts to ensure that all citizens are treated with respect. These are facts – and free-speech-crisis mythology is preventing us from confronting them.

This is an edited extract from We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent, published by W&N on 5 September and available at guardianbookshop.co.uk

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Blue Marble Review

Literary Journal for Young Writers

The Debilitating Effects of Political Correctness on Free Speech

By Kai Sherwin

“If the freedom of speech is taken away then the dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to slaughter.” 1 George Washington recognized how crucial free speech is to a successful democracy. Our contemporary society has no defined limitations on the freedom of speech; however, there is an insidious undertow threatening to erode this sacred principle: political correctness.

To comprehend how political correctness is shaping the privilege of free speech, one must first understand several major aspects of this concept. The basic premise is that if the pundits and intellectuals can influence how individuals think and act, then they can also influence what is socially “acceptable” language. By imposing their political views on any subject, they create a pressure to conform to these standards. But these standards begin to limit the freedom of speech and expression. Generally, people do not want be labeled as an objector of popular opinion, thereby forcing them to subject their own ideas to the prevailing ideology. The very definition of political correctness stands as, “conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated” 2 . But in reality, this term has almost nothing to do with politics.

Instead, political correctness has everything to do with the encouragement of group thinking and the pursuit of conformity. Through social intimidation, a diverse body of ideas and expressions no longer flourishes in the diminishing world of American free speech. In addition, a growing aspect of multiculturalism in our society only further contributes to this problem. Proponents of political correctness obsess over their belief that language should not be injurious to any ethnicity, race, gender, religion or other social group. They attempt to eliminate what they consider to be offensive remarks and actions and replace them with harmless substitutes that come at the expense of free expression. For example, a school in California, in an effort to maintain political correctness, sent five students home after they refused to remove their American flag t-shirts on Cinco de Mayo 3 . The school officials clearly regarded the actions of the five students as offensive. These unnatural filters on free language and expression constrict social exchanges by defining certain views as out of place. This acts as a direct suppression of free speech.

Political correctness is also used to discredit opponents of various ideologies by labeling them as violators of this code of conduct. For instance, my father is making a film about the early colonialists and their interactions with American Indians. But every time he speaks with an academic, he becomes uncomfortable with what defining terms are politically correct. Should he call them Indians, Native Americans, Americans Indians, or Natives? As a result, my father tries avoiding directly labeling these people because he is nervous about offending one group or another. Consequently, this narrows his potential range of conversation. This is a simple demonstration of how political correctness can put boundaries on free expression.

Declaring that some thoughts and phrases are “correct” while others are not is creating an ever-tightening noose around the freedom of speech. No matter how uncomfortable we are with particularly strident points of view, it’s crucial to recognize that this is a small price to pay to maintain a democratic system that promotes free speech as a basic pillar of society. While I am certainly not promoting inflammatory language, I believe that the channels of communication should remain unfettered from the burdens and limitations of political correctness.

(This essay was previously published on HuffPostTeen)

Kai Sherwin is a junior at a high school in Connecticut. He is very passionate about history and creative writing. In his spare time, Kai enjoys sailing and playing basketball.

Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Discrimination and Prejudice — Political Correctness

Essays on Political Correctness

Political correctness has become a hotly debated topic in recent years, with some arguing that it is necessary for creating a more inclusive and respectful society, while others believe it stifles free speech and leads to excessive censorship. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, it is clear that political correctness has a significant impact on our everyday lives, from the way we communicate with others to the policies and laws that govern our society.

The Importance of the Topic

The topic of political correctness is important because it affects nearly every aspect of our lives. Whether it's the language we use in the workplace, the way we interact with people from different backgrounds, or the policies that shape our communities, political correctness plays a role in shaping our society. By understanding the nuances of political correctness and its impact, we can better navigate the complex and ever-changing landscape of social interaction and public discourse.

Advice on Choosing a Topic

When choosing a topic for a political correctness essay, it's important to consider the various perspectives and arguments surrounding the issue. One approach is to explore the historical context of political correctness and how it has evolved over time. You could also examine specific examples of political correctness in action, such as controversies over language use, cultural appropriation, or the impact of political correctness on public policy. Another option is to delve into the philosophical and ethical implications of political correctness, considering questions of censorship, freedom of speech, and the balance between respecting others and expressing oneself authentically. Ultimately, the best topic for a political correctness essay will be one that you are passionate about and that allows for a thorough exploration of the complexities of the issue.

Political correctness is a topic that has far-reaching implications for our society. By understanding the nuances of political correctness and its impact, we can better navigate the complex and ever-changing landscape of social interaction and public discourse. When choosing a topic for a political correctness essay, it's important to consider the various perspectives and arguments surrounding the issue and to choose a topic that allows for a thorough exploration of the complexities of the issue. Whether you're interested in the historical, cultural, philosophical, or ethical dimensions of political correctness, there are countless avenues for exploration and discussion. With thoughtful consideration and careful research, you can create a compelling and insightful essay on the topic of political correctness.

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V Political Speech

• Published: March 2007
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One important question is whether it is right to treat political speech as more worthy of protection than other types of speech. To some extent this entails arguments similar to the arguments related to according freedom of expression special protection against government interference. Some of those arguments do suggest that political speech should occupy what is referred to in American constitutional jurisprudence as a ‘preferred position’; courts should be less prepared to countenance abridgements of political and social discussion than they should restrictions on literature, pornography, or commercial advertising. The implications of this differential treatment can be explored in four areas of political speech that are discussed in this chapter: sedition and related offences, racist hate speech, blasphemy and incitement to religious hatred, and disclosure of official secrets.

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24. Political correctness and freedom of speech

From the book handbook of language and communication: diversity and change.

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Chapters in this book (28)

Home / Essay Samples / Education / Learning / Political Correctness

Political Correctness Essay Examples

The problem of political correctness in america.

Political correctness is a problem in America. Everyday we hear the term PC on the news or on social media, and everyday new words gets turned into ‘’not acceptable‘’. Many people are having trouble keeping up with the rules of political correctness since they switch...

Family Ties and Political Dynasties in the Philippines

This is political dynasty in the Philippines essay in which this topic will be discussed. To start with, Filipinos could sometimes be overwhelming; with their intense and very authentic way of showcasing their deep-rooted relationship to their families as well as having a strong attachment...

The Undeniable Impact of Political Dynasties in Governance

It is evident that political dynasty existed and is still existing here in the Philippines, starting from national government to local government. In the last half century, the seven president of the Philippines came only to 5 families. This is political dynasty essay in which...

The Rise of the Political Correctness Movement in Australia

Language is what many consider to be a true reflection of society. Like its attitudes, language is consequently always changing to reflect the ideas of society. Language in all forms serves a purpose for humans to communicate. Like Ying and Yang, both are inextricably intertwined...

Discussion of Whether Political Correctness is Morally Correct

In the wake of Donald “I refuse to be politically correct.” Trump’s presidency, political correctness has become a pejorative in the media, under the belief that political correctness has ‘gone mad’ in instances where political correctness is exploited and no political change occurs, making it...

The Political Correctness Police: Warranted Or Overkill

Political correctness is defined as the avoidance of forms of expression or actions that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against. Political correctness, “PC”, stood for fairness and openness. People want to avoid offending certain...

Political Correctness: an Attack on the 1st Amendment

The definition of political correctness says, “The term political correctness is used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society.” (Merriam-Webster) Political Correctness is idealistic at best, but the problems with these...

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