How and why did Political Correctness evolve into the vindictive protectiveness of trigger warnings and microaggressions?
Childhood itself has changed greatly during the past generation. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can remember riding their bicycles around their hometowns, unchaperoned by adults, by the time they were 8 or 9 years old. In the hours after school, kids were expected to occupy themselves, getting into minor scrapes and learning from their experiences. But “free range” childhood became less common in the 1980s.
[...]
The flight to safety also happened at school. Dangerous play structures were removed from playgrounds; peanut butter was banned from student lunches. After the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado, many schools cracked down on bullying, implementing “zero tolerance” policies. In a variety of ways, children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well.
These same children grew up in a culture that was (and still is) becoming more politically polarized. Republicans and Democrats have never particularly liked each other, but survey data going back to the 1970s show that on average, their mutual dislike used to be surprisingly mild. Negative feelings have grown steadily stronger, however, particularly since the early 2000s. Political scientists call this process “affective partisan polarization,” and it is a very serious problem for any democracy. As each side increasingly demonizes the other, compromise becomes more difficult. A recent study shows that implicit or unconscious biases are now at least as strong across political parties as they are across races.
So it’s not hard to imagine why students arriving on campus today might be more desirous of protection and more hostile toward ideological opponents than in generations past. This hostility, and the self-righteousness fueled by strong partisan emotions, can be expected to add force to any moral crusade. A principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds.” Part of what we do when we make moral judgments is express allegiance to a team. But that can interfere with our ability to think critically. Acknowledging that the other side’s viewpoint has any merit is risky—your teammates may see you as a traitor.
Social media makes it extraordinarily easy to join crusades, express solidarity and outrage, and shun traitors. Facebook was founded in 2004, and since 2006 it has allowed children as young as 13 to join. This means that the first wave of students who spent all their teen years using Facebook reached college in 2011, and graduated from college only this year.
Such messy text when it is so simple…
The Left has only one Cause: Power.
To achieve Power it has to guilt others to neutralize them. Guilt is the best way to neutralize anyone. It takes a page of religion sins.
To be able to guilt, it creates or takes ownership of Causes. They are all false causes. The Left doesn’t care about Racism, Poverty, Climate, or anything else besides Power. They are only blaming instruments to be employed when convenient. To blame it needs to have offended groups, to create victims.
Political Correctness is a sort Leftist Sharia or Orwellian Newspeak. It is in fact the creation of a sophisticated blaming environment.
The teenage students obviously learned from their Leftist teachers how to guilt others to get power.
Lucklucky,
Well said. Control of language is control of everything. Thus the left creates offenses where none existed and creates victims they can rescue, all for power. Standing alone as a free-thinking individual brings derision and abuse — guilt warfare.
There are always people too dumb for college in college. They require easy A’s. Nowadays that’s Pop Sosh and Eng Lit. They require simple rhetorical tricks to stand up to smarter people. How do you win an argument with someone smarter? You show that you are more loyal to some higher power. In science, an idiot with better data can beat a genius with crap data. In politics, an idiot with stronger loyalty from clout can beat a genius nobody sent from clout. Political Correctness is a display of stronger loyalty to the Democratic Party’s clout.
You are too American-centric, or better party-centered. Political Correctness came from Marxism’s “useful idiots”. Of course, the current world center of Marxism is the USA, not China, Cuba, North Korea, or elsewhere, so it is important. Marxists are taking over the Democratic Party — same here in Europe in traditional Left parties; look at Labour radicalisation in UK, the birth of Syriza, Podemos, etc. The Communists and the “institutional” Left that used without qualms the “useful idiots” for propaganda proposes, now are being defeated by them. The “useful idiots” won the Left, because they dominate speech, language. and subject via journalists, the media, cinema, and the educational complex.
1/2 Lucklucky.
The Demobrats have been Marxist for what, 100 years? More?
I am not American, and my knowledge of the Democratic party is not as deep as it should be because pf that. I know about the progressives, eugenic movement in the first half of the 20th century. So I would say that the Democrats have a Marxist group. Now what matters is how strong it is.
These comments are a good example of demonizing the other side. Do you truly believe that liberal people don’t “care about Racism, Poverty, Climate, or anything else besides Power”? Do you know any liberals personally? The ones I know care deeply about those issues.
First they are not Liberal. They hate Freedom.
Leftists don’t care one iota about Racism, if they cared they will not have made USA into an Apartheid state with enforced racial – and now sexual- discrimination as a way to perpetuate racial grievances.
If they cared about poverty they wouldn’t have put the American blacks as an inferior race and fostered a culture of dependency, perpetual racial blame and treat them like children. If they cared about poverty they wouldn’t write “white trash” in Leftist mainstream newspapers.
If they cared about blacks they would have been up in arms about inter black violence.
Because they don’t care if blacks die unless those deaths are useful and can be used in the Political Arena where votes are decided.
If Leftists cared they would put hands over their faces about violence in cities they rule.
“Care about climate”? What hell does that mean? No one knows the cloud-cover levels 70 years ago.
What a Leftist care is Power. And what a Leftist hates more is that an individual achieves something that they have not been part of. That is why they want to control and be part of everything.