80s liberalism vs 90s "political correctness"

A personal recollection (Part 4)

Liberals as an “endangered species” in a satirical 80s comic strip

Note: this article is part of a larger work that I am currently composing. Here are links to Part 1 , Part 2, and Part 3.

In 1991, I was a 20-year old student completing my sophomore year at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

As with many young people from a somewhat privileged background, my head was full of dreams and aspirations, but possessed of very little common sense. I had become an English major because I loved literature and wished to be a writer, but I had no real idea of how I would ultimately make my daily bread once the college years were over. I figured, with fatal naivety, that things would simply “fall into place” eventually.

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At the time, my mind was in ferment, and I was questioning much of what I had believed in my late teenage years, when I had been a generally unreflective liberal-leftist. I say “unreflective,” because though I thought of myself as an intellectual, my political allegiances had been formed mostly out of rebellion against my surroundings.

Please, kind reader, do not judge my teenage self too harshly. After all, if you had grown up in a predominantly white suburb of the American South in the 1980s, and you felt utterly out of place and were a social reject, you would have likely gone down the “liberal” path as well. In 1980s America, where Ronald Reagan won two landslide presidential victories in 1980 and 1984 and George Bush Sr. won a similarly resounding victory in 1988, it was easy enough to see liberals as the underdogs.

Emperor Rondaldus “Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus!”

Not to mention that in the 80s, liberalism presented a far more palatable veneer than it does today. Generally speaking, to be liberal in the 80s meant to be pro-free speech, anti-war, anti-coercion, and anti-authoritarianism. (Contemporary liberalism— also known as neoliberalism— resolutely takes the opposite side on all of the aforementioned issues.)

To be liberal in the 80s meant enjoying genuinely irreverent art and music and rejecting fare was stale, bland, and commercial. An 80's liberal embraced free thought and opposed every species of fundamentalism. Eighties-style liberalism didn’t pride itself on conforming to what were deemed to be “acceptable” opinions and beliefs (as is the case on the Left today); instead, its imperative was to resolutely challenge all that which was deemed “acceptable,” including at times its own presuppositions and sacred cows. (For an amusing example, see left-wing 80s punk band Dead Kennedys’ song “California Uber Alles,” in which Jerry Brown, the liberal hippie governor of California, becomes a fascist leftist dictator, who rounds up “uncool” people and sends them to death camps.)

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Strange as this may seem today, in the 80s, it was well-nigh impossible to conceive of the liberal-left ever being tyrannical, or priggish, or harsh, or shaming, or sanctimonious, or browbeating, or censorious, or cruel.

At least, it was impossible for me to conceive of it in such a way. With hawkish Republican presidents perennially recapturing the White House, and the so-called “religious right” conspicuously empowered (especially in places like the American South, where I lived), “greed is good” philosophies pervading the culture, and “yuppies” widely held up as heroes, it seemed that the forces of repressive authoritarianism, relentless warmongering, and mindless consumerism would forever have the upper hand. To be “liberal,” in the 80s, meant to be a mocked and embattled dissident.

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Or so I believed at the time.

So when I first encountered “political correctness” as a college boy in the early 90s, I felt quite flummoxed. Here, I found, was everything I despised about what I thought it meant to be conservative, yet here, apparently, was the new face of… liberalism!

Yet how could this new and inexplicably ubiquitous cultural force truly be liberal? After all, “PC” was extraordinarily repressive, close-minded, and militantly coercive. It brooked no dissent, and sought to destroy all those who challenged its claims. Yet the causes it championed and the mores it promoted seemed undeniably to be in line with left-leaning politics.

What I encountered, then, in political correctness, was what had struck me as patently impossible just a short time earlier. It seemed a contradiction in terms: in effect, an illiberal liberalism.

I disliked PC from the start, but my rationalization, or “cope,” was to say that political correctness in effect amounted to a betrayal of true liberalism. There were many self-identified liberals at the time who took the same outlook concerning PC, and in point of fact (alleged “cope” notwithstanding), I think that we were actually correct; there was a clear contrast between the spiteful and punitive vibe of PC, and the gentle and generous spirit of what could be titled “Liberalism with a capital L,” or “classical liberalism.”

Still, being right on this point was of little consequence; it did nothing to check the rising tide of this patently totalitarian mindset that was “PC.”

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Given that the emergence of political correctness proved to be such a dismally momentous event in recent cultural history, it is strange that I don’t have a clear memory of when I first encountered it.

I do recall that it came to my attention during my sophomore year of college, the 1990-91 school year. I also remember that as soon as I sniffed it out, I pledged to flout its dictates at every turn. I refused to use “inclusive language” in my college essays, found excuses to call young women “girls,” referred to “man” and “mankind” whenever possible, etc.

Yet as much as I despised PC— and my hatred was equaled by that of numerous others—I little grasped its significance. I did reckon, as most other detractors did at the time, that political correctness was no mere nuisance, but a positive blight. But we figured it would eventually run its course and then fade away, as most trends do. And we never wondered why it had suddenly sprung up, seemingly out of nowhere, or why it had grown to such prominence so quickly, when so many people found it utterly appalling.

Even in the very early days, that is, people were often muttering that “Political correctness has gone too far,” a phrase that would keep getting repeated, ever-more emphatically, year after year, ever since PC’s inception, but one which has never succeeded at preventing its metastatic spread through every major and minor institution of our culture, which in turn testifies to the fact that its clout has from the start been fixed from above.

Like a dictator with an indominable army always at his beck and call, political correctness/wokeness may be hated and loathed, but it always manages to avoid being deposed, and only seems to grow more powerful the more it is detested and reviled.

(to be continued)

Andy Nowicki is the author of several books, most recently The Insurrectionist, Muze, and Love and Hidden Agendas, as well as the just-published The Rule of Wrath. Visit his YouTube channel.