'Political correctness' used to be known as 'good manners'

[JHB]

4. IMO, it was also part of drumming up a new, post-Soviet boogeyman

Remember when the phrase first started getting wide play outside of lefty circles?

February 1992, after a speech by former Attorney General Edwin Meese at Harvard Law School, that was widely reported on and promoted, particularly on the Right.

Meese Speaks at Law School Forum
Stresses Importance of Ensuring Free Speech, Freedom of the Press
By Perry Q. Despeignes, CONTRIBUTING REPORTER February 11, 1992

Speaking at a Harvard Law School Forum last night, former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III defended federal restrictions on the content of Planned Parenthood consultations while warning of the danger that "politically correct" speech codes pose to First Amendment rights.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1992/2/11/meese-speaks-at-law-school-forum/

At the time I thought it was a little odd that they'd latch on to that particular phrase, but then I remembered something else:

This was:
1) almost a year after the Soviets had been absolutely sidelined in the response to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing Gulf War,
2) almost six months since the failed coup by Soviet hardliners to oust Gorbachev, and
3) about a month and a half after the Soviet Union was dissolved completely.

In other words, it featured prominently in a heavily-promoted speech at the precise moment in history when even the most dinosaurine Conservative couldn't maintain the fiction that Liberals and Lefties were "on orders straight from the Kremlin" without losing all credibility beyond a relative handful of true-believing goobers.

The Soviets had become useless as a means of painting liberals and lefties as fools, dupes and active agents of a foreign power ideologically driven to wreck the country. It got harder to make political opponents look line the advance team for the Big Bad Bear when the BBB keeled over and just lay there gathering flies.


So they shifted gears and cloudsourced it: goodbye slavishly following "orders from Moscow", in the new version there's just this weird ideological cloud of anti-Americanism that motivates Liberals and the Left. In some ways it works even better, because it's even more malleable: it can cover whatever you want it to cover as long as you keep thumping the drum.

That's not the sole reason, of course. If people didn't get ed up with "holier than thou" types that phrase wouldn't exist either. But by 1992 conservative media was already converted to running on bile and foam, and the new Terrible Thing to keep the audience juiced was really convenient timing.