It is the central argument of our time, the centre of political disagreement, heavily debated in the United States, largely ignored in the United Kingdom in public space. This post is to open up the debate.
There was a time when one neo-evangelised in the face of slavery and dictatorship and in the name of liberal democracy. Subsequently, this questioning of reality led to a post-modem deconstructionist philosophy known to some as political correctness and which is now at the centre of the culture wars in the United States.
Its proponents believe that censorship is a necessary evil which act as a preventative measure to avoid discrimination against disadvantaged group. They believe that people who vilify political correctness do so, so that white, heterosexual, Christian males can maintain their privilege.
Its opponents believe that it is a "paradox of tolerance"; promoting tolerance to such an extreme that these actions become another form of intolerance, a kind of cultural oppression, "cultural Marxism", something similar to Stalinist, Maoist or Nazi regimes. It is noteworthy that such regimes had a concept of political criminal offenses and judicial punishments which is entirely in keeping with political correctness. The also had propaganda news organisations which propagated their state propaganda much the same was as political correctness is propagated by the BBC.
The death penalty was possible in these regimes for transgressors, however Western political correctness has not stooped to this level yet, but it is not far off. Various entities sponsor terror groups like Antifa to commit violence against disbelievers in our culture and these groups are largely tolerated by society because they portray themselves as "fighting Nazis". Such groups launched numerous attacks upon Trump supporters. One could argue that society uses these groups as a form or physical punishment against transgressors. One can only pray that there is a special place in hell reserved for such people.
The liberal movement in the 1950s centrered largely on opposing authoritarianism, for example in Theodore Adorno's book the Authoritarian Personality which analysed authoritarian traits of American whites became one of the central works in the Social Sciences and Humanities in the 1950s in the States. The movement was dominated by a number of other postmodern academics such as Derrida (two states can exist at the same time), Foucault, Gramsci (a march through the institutions) and Herbert Marcuse.
The criticism of this club involves the allegation that they became a mirror of that which they opposed. They reject criticism, the argue for a transformational nature of language to alter attitudes and beliefs, and in some cases disciplinary or criminal action against those which transgress against their doctrine.
In recent study conducted by Jordan Peterson and Christine Brophy of the University of Toronto's Department of Psychology, it would found that political correctness (and its followers) can be generalised into two distinct groups, PC-Egalitarians and PC-Authoritarians. PC-Egalitarians tend to find a cultural basis for group differences, for example they often attribute group differences to social injustices. They want to change language and beliefs to compensate from what they see as inequalities caused by culture. PC-Authoritarians tend to attribute biological differences to group differences. Given that biology is immutable and unchangeable to humans (with the exception of certain practises such as genetic modification e.g. GM foods), PC-Authoritarians attempt to form a more autocratic form of governance that PC-Egalitarians to achieve uniformity. PC-Authoritarians press for harsher punishments and sentences as justice for transgressors; to rain hellfire on innocent people simply because they disagree, in some cases injuring or maiming them.
Both groups have in common that "offense sensitivity" is the detector of transgressors and used to identify and measure PC offenses which need to be punished.
Liberal left authoritarians account for significant amounts of political violence in the United States today, yet right wing violence accounts for a small fraction of a percentage of political violence. Due to the prejudices levies by political correctness, the perception has been altered to see the largely well behaved right wing of politics as the perpetrators of violence.
The suggestion is that large parts of the liberal left have adopted "pathological altruism". This is where extreme compassion is combined with a faulty sense of right and wrong, a propensity to pass judgement and the use of double standards between groups, forgiving all transgression of in-groups and acting highly aggressively towards those in the out group.
It is suggested that this information may greatly help to heal the political divide in the West today.