Back in the ‘80s, my son once mocked me for never having heard the term. It was then that I asked him the question in the title.
That was a genuine request for information: to me, correct behaviour of any sort fell under the rubric of ethics, manners, social graces. What did politics have to do with any of it?
The intervening decades have clarified the issue, providing the true answer. Correctness is political because these days everything is.
Since democracy draws everyone into politics, everything becomes politicised. And when democracy acquires a liberal component, it turns every vociferous group into a jumped up political party with global pretensions.
All such groups enunciate some grievances. These usually deal with some nebulous ‘establishment’ violating the rights they claim and insist on reclaiming, by mass protests or, if necessary, even by violence.
The claims may be synchronic or diachronic, that is based on oppression presumably meted out at present or in the past, over centuries of history.
Thus, say, blacks may seek recompense for the slavery they suffered hundreds of years ago, homosexuals for having had their practice outlawed until 1967, women for not having got the vote until 1928, Muslims for the mediaeval Crusades or the more current disrespect of their customs, Indians for having been a British colony, transsexuals for the county fairs of yesteryear, where admission was charged for gawking at bearded women and men with breasts.
Every demand or appetite gets expressed in the language of human rights, inalienable yet oxymoronically alienated. And defenders of human rights are revolutionary politicians by definition, whether they write incendiary proclamations or, if need be, man the barricades. They seek not justice but a share of political power.
All political parties restrict their membership to those who swear allegiance to their cause, and the pseudo-parties of today’s malcontents are no exception. Ostensible qualifications don’t matter. Only ideological ones do. Metaphysics trumps physics yet again.
Thus, a proletarian in Bolshevik Russia wasn’t just, or necessarily, a factory worker, but any fire-eating Marxist explicitly committed to the role of the proletariat as the ‘gravedigger of capitalism’. Those striking Novocherkassk workers massacred by the KGB in 1962 weren’t proletarians, but the party apparatchiks who ordered the massacre were.
By the same token, in ‘liberal’ democracies, only women committed to feminism qualify as women and only virulent black campaigners rate membership in their race. In that spirit, rather than celebrating the first woman prime minister in British history, feminists refused to recognise Margaret Thatcher as a woman at all. And, once speaking to a black audience, Joe Biden said “If you vote for Trump, you ain’t black”, iandvertently letting the terminological cat out of the bag.
When ideology rears its head, it subsumes everything else. Come the revolution means perish anything that isn’t revolution, such is the binary mentality of today’s political movements.
Revolutionary parties typically don’t just want to put their members in power. They want to refashion the whole fabric of society, creating not a new government but a New Man.
The fanatics of human rights raised to an absolute are in that sense no different from the communists who reduced all human rights to one: being a communist, ideally a member of the party or at least, at a pinch, its sympathiser. Both groups believe that, until their arrival on the scene, society had been mired in filth and sin.
Now it has fallen upon them to purge society of its depravity, but it takes political power to do so. Both groups, old-style communists and today’s malcontents, are aware of this: an ideology can only ever triumph by political action.
The two are similar not only in their self-acknowledged mission, but also in the methods of achieving success. Mutatis mutandis, both rely on a combination of state coercion and private efforts, although the relative weight of the two differs in communist dictatorships and ‘liberal’ democracies.
In communist countries, the state is primary and the individual secondary; in liberal democracies, it’s the other way around. In the former, the state specifies the new garment to be cut out of the old fabric of society and then brainwashes the people to help along either actively (say, by snitching on their neighbours) or at least passively, by outspoken acquiescence.
In ‘liberal’ democracies, the loudmouthed activists lead and the state follows. Subversive pressure is applied upwards, not downwards, as it is in communist dictatorships. But the pressure is the same: out with the old, in with the new – whatever the new may be.
Since people tend to think in words, or at least enunciate their thoughts verbally, both communists and ‘liberal’ democrats attach an inordinate importance to words. Language is turned into a battleground of political struggle.
Both communists and today’s malcontents know that their war has to conquer language and hence thought if it’s to conquer at all. That’s the essence of what I call glossocracy, an attempt to dominate society by dominating its speech.
An offhand phrase that in traditional societies would have been dismissed as a trivial irrelevance is raised to the level of crime against society, or whichever of its subdivisions that feigns offence. Communists were, if anything, more liberal in that respect: only their creed was off limits for intemperate or disrespectful quips. Everything else was fair game.
By contrast, ‘liberal’ glossocrats are trying to tear social fabric into tatters from different directions. Each group of politicised malcontents has different desiderata and they all snipe at different targets. But all those groups are closely allied, brought together as they are by their commitment to recreating the world in their own image.
Thus, any word any member of the Malcontent International might see as objectionable will be instantly censured by another member even if his own bugbear is different. That’s why stand-up comedy is going out of fashion: it’s hard to be funny if every joke may conceivably offend someone, thereby infringing on his self-proclaimed rights and exposing the joker to a career-ending slap on the wrist.
While the ‘liberal’ democratic state is a latecomer to the party, it makes a grand entrance by supporting the malcontents with its own censorship, legislation and law enforcement. If in the process it has to become illiberal and undemocratic, then so be it. Words don’t matter – unless they are glossocratic words, in which case they matter more than anything else.
That’s why political correctness is an accurate term. It’s a form of political tyranny, which is in many ways more despotic than communism ever was. Communists relied on execution cellars and death camps to control the population, with glossocracy being only one of the arrows in their quiver. If one refrained from critical remarks, one was in the clear.
In ‘liberal’ democracies, glossocracy is just about the only, or at least the sharpest, weapon, and it attracts a much greater number of wielders. People aren’t just sold but agree to buy a new morality, new society, new definition of what is correct. And no tyranny is as successful as self-tyranny, nor any censorship as effective as self-censorship.
Such is the nature, and success, of political correctness, these days also going by the name of wokery. But tyranny by any other name smells just as putrid.