The Conservative Obsession with Political Correctness

Conservatives also love PC Culture and it’s dangerous.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

For decades now, there has been a frustrating conversation around the concept of political correctness. The narrative that we hear repeatedly is that certain Americans, usually liberals and leftists, are trying to censor what the rest of us say in our day-to-day lives. Those arguing against political correctness claim that “liberals” want to track our language for implicit biases and microaggressions and cancel us if we say or do anything wrong.

There have been a string of studies, articles, and exposes claiming that Americans hate political correctness. It seems to be one of the few things that many people agree on both the right and the left. “Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture,” goes the title of an article by Yascha Mounk in 2018 for The Atlantic. “Bill Maher on the perils of political correctness” begins another article by David Marchese in The New York Times.

This branding, however, belies the fact that political correctness is not an exclusively leftist concept. It’s a term with a complicated history that has changed dramatically over the centuries. Yet, even if we were to accept its more modern definition, it’s not something done by the Left alone. Nearly every political ideology adheres to it, and conservativism is by far the biggest offender.

Conservativism is an umbrella term describing a general reverence for social traditions and institutions. It is an ideology that encompasses many different types of people (e.g., Christian fundamentalists, pro-business globalists, libertarians, war hawks, white ethnonationalists, etc.), and unsurprisingly, there is no universal agreement among them or even really a clearcut divide between these groups. For example, while the 48th Vice President of the United States Mike Pence was fervently religious, 45th President Donald Trump was decidedly less so, secretly mocking religious believers while in office. Yet, they both served side-by-side.

Despite some noticeable differences, some unifying norms bring these disparate camps together. Specifically, they all hate similar types of things. The most obvious is a disdain for multiculturalism. Whether it's former president Donald Trump calling Mexicans ‘drug dealers, criminals, [and]…