The French football team. Credit: Matthias Hangst / Getty
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The consensus on political correctness was that it was a way of expressing things that everyone – or at least all the right people – took for granted. For progressives it was the same thing as good manners, an argument that was often presented in just those words. Many thought that political correctness would come to an end as a result of being pushed too far, and in a way that’s what happened.
Not, however, in the way we expected. There has been no revulsion against its excesses, nor at its far-fetched and impossibly exacting conclusions. It has become pointless not because it has been applied to ludicrous ideas nobody believes in, but because it is applied to everyday notions in support of any and every belief.
People still believe in it, but the ideology has become useless – precisely because it’s become pervasive and all-powerful. It can be used to argue for anything; as a result its proponents have started to splinter into opposing groupings and factions, always a prelude to schisms, like those that used to be notorious among Marxist groups.
Consider what happened when the French national team won the World Cup. The polemic that followed was rather more surprising than the outcome on the pitch. Rushing to score political-correctness points, some commentators noted that most of the players were of African descent.
After all, what better way to celebrate racial equality than to point out the achievements of African players? And what better way to celebrate immigration than to note that without its African players, France would never have won.
The progressive position here is that we want to be recognised as equals, but also want to be valued as individuals with unique selves. Otherwise, equality will feel like self-sacrifice, served in unequal doses, because the point of arrival is much farther away for those with the ‘wrong’ skin colour or the ‘wrong’ accent.
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