"[14] Stuart Hall suggests one way in which the original use of the term may have developed into the modern one: According to one version, political correctness actually began as an in-joke on the left: radical students on American campuses acting out an ironic replay of the Bad Old Days BS (Before the Sixties) when every revolutionary groupuscule had a party line about everything.
They would address some glaring examples of sexist or racist behaviour by their fellow students in imitation of the tone of voice of the Red Guards or Cultural Revolution Commissar: "Not very 'politically correct', Comrade!
[8][29][30] Professor of English literary and cultural studies at CMU Jeffrey J. Williams wrote that the "assault on ... political correctness that simmered through the Reagan years, gained bestsellerdom with Bloom's Closing of the American Mind".
[37][40] In May 1991, The New York Times had a follow-up article, according to which the term was increasingly being used in a wider public arena: What has come to be called "political correctness", a term that began to gain currency at the start of the academic year last fall, has spread in recent months and has become the focus of an angry national debate, mainly on campuses, but also in the larger arenas of American life.The previously obscure far-left term became common currency in the lexicon of the conservative social and political challenges against progressive teaching methods and curriculum changes in the secondary schools and universities of the U.S.[10][42] Policies, behavior, and speech codes that the speaker or the writer regarded as being the imposition of a liberal orthodoxy, were described and criticized as "politically correct".
[17] In May 1991, at a commencement ceremony for a graduating class of the University of Michigan, then U.S. President George H. W. Bush used the term in his speech: "The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land.
Two articles on the topic in late 1990 in Forbes and Newsweek both used the term "thought police" in their headlines, exemplifying the tone of the new usage, but it was Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991) which "captured the press's imagination".
[8][17] Herbert Kohl, in 1992, commented that a number of neoconservatives who promoted the use of the term "politically correct" in the early 1990s were former Communist Party members, and, as a result, familiar with the Marxist use of the phrase.
He argued that in doing so, they intended "to insinuate that egalitarian democratic ideas are actually authoritarian, orthodox, and Communist-influenced, when they oppose the right of people to be racist, sexist, and homophobic".
[4] During the 1990s, conservative and right-wing politicians, think tanks, and speakers adopted the phrase as a pejorative descriptor of their ideological enemies, especially in the context of the culture wars about language and the content of public-school curricula.
[8][18][50] Jan Narveson wrote that "that phrase was born to live between scare-quotes: it suggests that the operative considerations in the area so called are merely political, steamrolling the genuine reasons of principle for which we ought to be acting...".
[61] "Political correctness" is a label typically used to describe liberal or left-wing terms and actions but rarely used for analogous attempts to mold language and behavior on the right.
This usage was popularized by a number of articles in The New York Times and other media throughout the 1990s,[34][35][36][39][41][64] and was widely used in the debate surrounding Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind.
[8][28][29] The term gained further currency in response to Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals (1990),[8][17][46] and conservative author Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 book Illiberal Education.
[69][70] The theory originated with Michael Minnicino's 1992 essay "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness'", published in a Lyndon LaRouche movement journal.
[74] Robert Novak, in his essay "Political Correctness Has No Place in the Newsroom", used the term to blame newspapers for adopting language use policies that he thinks tend to excessively avoid the appearance of bias.
[78] According to author John Wilson, left-wing forces of "political correctness" have been blamed for unrelated censorship, with Time citing campaigns against violence on network television in the US as contributing to a "mainstream culture [that] has become cautious, sanitized, scared of its own shadow" because of "the watchful eye of the p.c.
police", protests and advertiser boycotts targeting TV shows are generally organized by right-wing religious groups campaigning against violence, sex, and depictions of homosexuality on television.