ronburgundy
Contributor
You keep repeating this blatant untruth. PC was a term created in the early 20th century by more moderate leftists and socialists to criticize dogmatic Communists who mindlessly parroted the ideological (political) mantras without consideration of what was actually correct on either scientific or valid principled moral grounds.
From the Wiki on "Political Correctness":
[P]"The term "politically correct" was used disparagingly [around WW II], to refer to someone whose loyalty to the Communist Party line overrode compassion, and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in egalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance."[/P]
For example, liberal socialist-leaning Jews used the term to criticize communists who supported the Stalin-Hitler alliance in mindless support of the party line over actual socialist ideals.
Then in the 1970's, actual liberals made similar use of the term to criticize more extreme leftist whose revolutionary leftism began to take a more authoritarian anti-liberty tone.
[P]
"In the 1970s, the American New Left began using the term "politically correct". ...
Thereafter, the term was often used as self-critical satire. Debra L. Shultz said that "throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left, feminists, and progressives... used their term 'politically correct' ironically, as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts." ... In her essay "Toward a feminist Revolution" (1992) Ellen Willis said: "In the early eighties, when feminists used the term 'political correctness', it was used to refer sarcastically to the anti-pornography movement's efforts to define a 'feminist sexuality'."[/P]
IOW, the term was created and used for most of the 20th century in just the way that many critics of PC use it today, many of whom are very much liberals who value personal liberty, individualism, and rational thought and thus are critical of increasing leftists who endorse rhetoric or policies that are contrary to these things, including: speech restrictions, most affirmative action policies, claims that minorities cannot be racist, the mantra of "white privilege", attacks on those who use objectively correct terms like retarded or even "disabled", historically ignorant nonsense regarding "cultural appropriation", denial of the sound science related to general intellectual abilities or strong genetic influences on aggression and other generally undesired personality traits and behaviors, and a general dishonest hypocrisy in the application of legal, moral, and political principles depending on the race or gender of the people involved and whether it serves the party line of painting whites, males, and the imperial west as always being the bad guy.
Note that the liberals who whose PC in this critical way do not generally deny the reality of or need to fight against racism, sexism, bigotries, or the wrongs and harms done by Western nations, even against their own long term interests in allowing secularism to grow in the Middle East. Their critique is against extremist over-reactions and heavy handed top-down efforts that in the long run undermine the more basic principles that will allow for a more real and stable progression against these forces.
What is new is that over the last 20 years right-wingers have latched onto this term and used it to attack and dismiss all liberal ideas and policies, fallaciously equating and attacking as equally "politically correct" efforts like securing equal rights for gays to marry under the law (something that is morally correct and that liberals support) with efforts to restrict the right of an individual's access to publicly supported higher education due to their misfortune having been born race or gender that is deemed overly represented (something that many Affirmative action policies support and anyone with actual liberal/progressive values opposes).
This recent perversion of the use of the term by the right does not negate its much longer history and continued valid application by liberals and leftist against the more myopically strident and short-sighted extremists on the left.
