Listen Up, Progressives: We Need to Be Smart in the Digital Age

In the 1990s, we often spoke of presidential elections in binary terms: this election, one of the early television pundits might say, is "about the economy." Of the next, the same pundit would sagely observe that the "culture wars" were driving national voting trends. At the time, the term "political correctness" was primarily associated with culture-defining policy prescriptions of the liberal variety.Affirmative action, gays in the military, a willingness to rewrite American history books to emphasize the fatal flaws of our forefathers: All of these were deemed "PC" positions inasmuch as they were the positions held by many liberals. For a policy to be deemed PC, however, it neither needed to be the subject of a present political debate nor, if the subject of debate, a policy on which the liberal viewpoint was generally considered "good politics." Merely being supported by the left wing of the Democratic Party was enough for a position to be denigrated as PC.Political correctness means something different now that television is no longer the dominant medium for mass communication. Moreover, the old conventional wisdom, which held all policy debates to occur under the sign of either "culture" or "the economy," has been replaced by a multipolar political sphere in which we must think of economics, culture, and socialization as discrete if interrelated political discourses.  Continue reading...