"A myth is not a falsehood: It doesn't mean it's a lie. He adds that the word "myth" in the title of his book is important to understanding how it became a phenomenon. "There are all these right-wing foundations and books that were published that made a lot of money promoting this idea." "It is an industry," John Wilson, author of the 1995 book The Myth of Political Correctness, says. This national obsession didn't just bubble up organically. Where there's outrage, there's economic opportunity The idea was everywhere: from comedy shows like Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect to cartoons like Beavis and Butt-Head and even current events shows like Firing Line on PBS. By 1994, the archive shows more than 10,000 hits. In 1989, the phrase "politically correct" appeared fewer than 250 times in print. "And they're acting as if this term really was a kind of litmus test for political correctness, which it never had been."Ī search of newspapers and magazines in the archive Nexis shows just how rapidly the term expanded beyond its original scene. "It felt like, 'Oh, my God, they're using this against us,' " Perry says. Then, right-wing think tanks and conservatives started to use the term as a form of attack in both the media and academia. "The term was always used ironically," Perry says, "always calling attention to possible dogmatism." "Politically correct" was a kind of in-joke among American leftists - something you called a fellow leftist when you thought the person was being self-righteous. So how did an effort to hold people accountable for their actions become politicized and get so out of control? To understand the uproar over cancel culture, it may help to examine the past.Ĭode Switch 'Politically Correct': The Phrase Has Gone From Wisdom To Weapon The fear of being "canceled" has caused some everyday people to be more aware of - and at times, concerned about - what they say and post online. Now, she says, "conservatives have picked it up not to just mean boycott, but rather to say: Our value system is under threat by these people who want to monetize or de-platform us because we have unpopular opinions."īut it's not just conservatives figures who think cancel culture has gone too far. "I do think that 'cancel' in particular is something that was invented sort of by young people, and it actually just kind of means boycott, right? It means 'Do not support this thing,' " Holliday says. The idea of being "politically correct," having the most morally upstanding opinion on complicated subjects and the least offensive language with which to articulate it, gained popularity in the 1990s before people on the outside weaponized it against the community it came from - just like the idea of "canceling" someone today.
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