A little while ago, I mentioned the topic of urban heat islands as an example of a dead horse that shouldn’t be flogged any further. But no topic in discussion today is as tired as that of ‘political correctness’, dragged up in today’s Oz by Les Murray.
Australian users of this phrase betray their ignorance, since the term ‘politically correct’ was never used in Australia until people like Les imported it from American right-wingers campaigning against its alleged tyrannical sway over public debate. The equivalent term in the Australian Left was ‘ideologically sound’.

More significant is the fact that the term ‘ideologically sound’ was almost invariably used ironically, as a gentle criticism of those on the Left who were more concerned with getting verbal formulations of policy precisely right than with actually getting anything done. As far as I can tell the same was true of ‘politically correct’, before the Right got hold of it.
One aspect of this focus on words rather than deeds, more pronounced in the US than here, was the belief that appropriate use of language would automatically bring about desirable social change – for example that attitudes to less developed countries would change for the better if they were referred to as ‘developing’.

This idea was the subject of much well-deserved parody – the invention of terms like ‘gravitationally challenged’ in place of ‘fat’. The obvious implication of this kind of parody was the one that left-wing users of terms like ‘politically correct’ had already drawn – that practitioners of this kind of verbal gymnastics were unlikely to pose any serious threat to capitalism, or to anything else except the English language (which has, however, shown almost infinite resilience in the face of misuse by lawyers, bureaucrats and others).

Yet the right-wing critics of political correctness sought to make exactly the opposite claim. Somehow, a handful of leftists playing verbal games were elevated into a tyrannical dictatorship, posing a fundamental threat to freedom of speech. Thus, in Australia, we have had the absurd and continuing spectacle of a government which has not only a tightly controlled House of Representatives and a publicly-funded official media machine, but also the editorial support of most newspapers and a vociferous claque of commentators in electronic and print media, posing as an underdog fighting against an entrenched ‘elite’. The situation in the US is similar, but even more laughable because of the absence of anything even faintly resembling an organised political left.