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Political correctness is a class mechanism used to justify the marginalization of a “deserving poor”. Two recent developments, one an event and one a trend, make this clear: the 2016 presidential election, in which Americans (a correspondent has suggested I specify: white Americans) without college degrees voted to an unprecedented extent as a bloc or “class”; and the furor around campus “free speech”, which has developed somewhat in response to real instances of academic and artistic censorship, but just as much in response to the imposition of intricate, inconsistent rules of etiquette which are impossible to deduce from first principles and almost as difficult to relate to the real and urgent material deprivations which still cause so much suffering in the world. Leftists should view political correctness very skeptically, not only for strategic, tactical, or epistemic reasons, but for moral reasons as well. I’ll draw on the philosophical literature about epistemic injustice to explain what I mean.

To its proponents, political correctness is a way of avoiding transgressions ranging from minor faux pas to serious “symbolic violence”. Increasingly activist analytic philosophers have classified many of these transgressions as forms of epistemic injustice, or harms against individuals in their epistemic capacities (as questioners, reasoners, knowers, etc.). In a 2007 book of the same name, Miranda Fricker claims that these transgressions are significant both ethically and epistemically: that hewing to epistemic justice also best serves epistemic rationality – that it’s the best way to find the truth. In turn, many opponents of political correctness suggest either that it is ethically insignificant (that the relevant transgressions cause only minimal harm) or that it is epistemically pernicious (that it makes finding the truth harder, or impossible). Here instead I want to argue that political correctness is ethically pernicious: that it itself leads to the sorts of transgressions that philosophers of epistemic injustice take seriously.

As a disclaimer, the fact that I’m mostly discussing Democratic, liberal, progressive, or leftist political correctness should not be taken to mean that I think Republicans, conservatives, reactionaries, and rightists are not guilty of insisting on political correctness on some occasions. In fact, I think of political correctness as an unfortunate tendency exhibited by almost every group of human beings. Nevertheless, provisionally, I want to say that there’s a reason to worry particularly about the currently dominant liberal political correctness more than similar conservative behavior, and the reason is precisely that the latter does not seem to rise to the level of injustice in the same way the former does. But as I indicated, this is just a provisional view.

The central, canonical form of epistemic injustice is testimonial injustice, the harm that accrues when prejudice or bias causes one person to disbelieve another person’s testimony. This can be seen as a kind of flip-side of standpoint epistemology, which urges that marginalized people be seen as relative “experts” on the conditions of their marginalization (people of color as experts on race, women as experts on gender, and so forth). It is easy to imagine the sorts of scenarios that inspired this concept: scenarios in which some woman is disbelieved because “women are hysterical”, for instance, or in which a member of some ethnic group is disbelieved because of a stereotype about lying.

Testimonial injustice has been a central feature of mainstream Democratic politics for years. This is the What’s the Matter with Kansas? school of thought: poor white voters just don’t know their own interests, can’t distinguish what’s good for them from what’s bad. In 2008, Barack Obama provoked gasps by saying out loud what many liberals (and centrist Republicans) believed: that voters in poor rural towns whose factories had closed “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them . . . as a way to explain their frustrations.” The expression of values which for some other group would simply be believed, if not always respected, here requires a diagnosis. In 2016, Hillary Clinton made it clear that the testimony of a quarter of the electorate, the “deplorable” half of Trump voters, was unreliable and unimportant due to the group’s biases. Nathan Ballantyne makes clear in “Debunking Biased Thinkers (Including Ourselves)” that the attribution of bias is as vulnerable to bias as any other discursive move. Even Bernie Sanders said at one point during the primaries that white people could not know what it feels like to be poor. Surely, a charitable listener thinks, he must not have meant to include, for instance, the white folks of McDowell County, West Virginia, and of similar places, many of whom were so excited by his candidacy.

Academic discourse being in many ways a rabid form of Democratic politics, it should come as no surprise that academia is rife with testimonial injustice as well. I will restrict myself to mentioning one instance, the notion of white fragility. White fragility is taken to be a phenomenon in which white people fall apart during discussions of race: they refuse to engage, become excessively defensive, fall back on (purportedly) discredited tropes like “colorblindness”, and so on. In any such discussion, statements by white people that fall into this pattern can be diagnosed “fragile” and thus discredited. What’s important to me here is not whether the theory of white fragility is true or false (an empirical question), but who, in particular, will exhibit this trait. First, older people are more likely to exhibit white fragility, since they hail from a time in which aspiring to “colorblindness” was still considered liberal or progressive. Second, neurodiverse people, like those with social anxiety or autism-spectrum disorders, are more likely to exhibit white fragility, due to the emotional difficulty and inherent awkwardness of such conversations and the seeming requirement that one suspend one’s own judgment and substitute another person’s. Third, the worse-educated are more likely to exhibit white fragility, as rebutting ideas like colorblindness actually takes extended and not always persuasive argumentation.

Testimonial injustice is a regrettable but hardly avoidable feature of human tribalism. What really troubles me is the hermeneutical injustice of political correctness. (Like “epistemic” and “testimonial” injustices, this is Fricker’s term.) Hermeneutical injustices are harms caused by the unequal distribution of shared epistemic resources, especially lexical and other linguistic resources, for making sense of our experiences. I want to point out two kinds of hermeneutical injustice: the hamster-wheel of redefinition and new vocabulary, and the insistence on intersectional complexity.

If a perfectly progressive person went into a coma two decades ago – even one, probably – they would wake up a reactionary. This is the case even if they were early supporters of gay marriage, transgender rights, reparations, criminal justice reform, or anything else. They would wake up a reactionary because the terminology used to express these positions is changing constantly, and in the modern scheme of political correctness one’s affiliations are determined as much by terminology as by party affiliation or platform. Someone who’d been at the forefront of trans acceptance would wake up reactionary for not knowing terms like “cisgender” or “genderfluid”. Someone passionate about the justice of reparations would wake up, express that passion, and find themselves viewed suspiciously for not knowing that “people of color” is in vogue. I myself have been castigated for mentioning the thesis that “race isn’t real” – I learned this growing up liberal as a mantra about biological race, but in some circles it’s now, apparently, viewed as an attempt to minimize the social importance of race.

Who’s harmed by this? The same three groups I mentioned before, for similar reasons – plus the people who simply lack the verbal-cognitive ability to adapt to constantly changing rules, and the people who don’t have time to learn. (Ironically, the book Charles Murray was actually invited to Middlebury to discuss, Coming Apart, proposes a thesis along very similar lines: that the rise of a “cognitive elite”, to his mind more or less genuinely meritocratic, on America’s coasts and in America’s colleges is harming those who don’t meet the standard.) The elderly more and more lose track of the new terms, and the young more and more pretend not to understand the old ones. Think, for example, of the slew of articles about college students refusing to spend Thanksgiving with their families, or of the Harvard placemats that literally scripted Thanksgiving conversations about social justice. And those with autism-spectrum disorders are far more likely to prefer clear, precise denotations, and to miss out on the connotations and signaling apparatuses on which political correctness places greater importance. As for the less-educated – well, academic terms and definitions are learned in academia! If, as I often heard my college peers say, one cannot be “a good person” without reading Frantz Fanon, or Gayatri Spivak, or Said, Butler, Crenshaw, Coates, or whomever, then what progressives normally see as a sign of disprivilege – the lack of a college education – must morph into a sign of low moral character.

Intersectional complexity has similar effects. By intersectional complexity I mean not the implications for social science of the original 1980s-era theory of intersectionality, but the less sophisticated and more popular notion that more or less all political issues and social justice struggles are interconnected. Hillary Clinton (or, no doubt, a staffer) actually tweeted an incomprehensible diagram in this vein during the 2016 primary season; another prominent example is the perplexing contention from an organizer of the Women’s Strike that the central issue it concerned was solidarity with Palestine. My favorite example of this lay sense of intersectionality is a piece of artwork a college friend of mine drew during Occupy Wall Street. No doubt intended to be inclusive in some sense, the unfortunate effect of insisting on such intersections is to make it impossible for people who have experience with or views on only one or a few issues to participate equally in conversations about them. But of course the only people with the time or wherewithal to learn about every such issue are activists and academics working in relevant fields.

It’s crucial to understand why Donald Trump’s political ascendancy, such as it was, is relevant. First, political correctness was a constant concern both of the campaigns themselves and of the discussion surrounding them, and understanding it as a form of epistemic injustice can help us to understand how it played such a huge role. In one model, attitudes toward political correctness were more helpful in predicting which survey-takers voted for which candidate than any other measure except party affiliation – and in the survey it used, over half of Trump voters gave the highest available score for their opposition to political correctness (Clinton voters were, on average, neutral toward it, with almost half expressing opposition). Second, the 2016 election was the first to see “class” appear as an educational category: what really united “lower-class” Trump voters was not wealth or income but the lack of a college degree. We should view the fervent and unified bloc of such voters as a statement, of whatever coherence or wisdom, about epistemic injustice.

Why do leftists, progressives, and liberals, the progenitors of ideas like epistemic injustice, seem unaware of, or unabashed about, their own systems of exclusion? Some people, like Peter Boghossian and John McWhorter, have theorized that social justice is an essentially religious movement, perhaps even with distinctly Judeo-Christian elements. Others, like Adolph Reed Jr., view it as an ideology that serves the interests of a professional-managerial class. Luckily, these analyses are not at all mutually exclusive. In fact, the great sociologist Max Weber already linked the two in his 1905 masterwork The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

The Protestant Reformation, Weber writes, was deeply unsettling to many people, because the Catholic Church’s conditional assurances of salvation had been replaced with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Paradoxically, the notion that one could never do anything to save one’s soul led people to compensate by working very hard – the sort of productivity necessary for early capitalism.

The same sort of paradox lies at the heart of much social justice rhetoric and practice: it is said to be impossible for white people to be non-racist or for males to be non-sexist, for instance, but rather than spurring some or another white and/or male aficionado to spend their time on things that aren’t impossible, this leads to endless spiraling examinations of the ways in which they are problematic. Within social justice, “work” takes on new meaning: it is not at all rare to hear a social justice advocate say, e.g., “I’ve been doing a lot of work on that issue,” by which they mean that they have attempted, internally, to confront and correct their own biases. Political correctness is the only means available for signaling that one is undergoing or has undergone such a process. But because a final salvation by works is impossible, there must always be another level of epistemic labor for the penitent to perform, another kind of privilege to check, another kind of behavior to apologize for.

Whatever one thinks of Weber’s Protestant ethic, the restriction of salvation-signaling hard work to the realm of the linguistic, academic, theoretical, etc. and the personal, internal, etc. should not be the sort of development leftists like. The timing of it, too, should strike us as suspicious. Right when American manufacturing, for instance, seems the most vulnerable to global trade pressures and the nascent possibility of automation, a new generation of woke college graduates – and professors – appears to tell us that real work, the kind that confers virtue and dignity, can never be done with one’s hands. Should it surprise anyone that centrist liberals think rural voters deserve to lose their health coverage, or that centrist conservatives think rural communities deserve to die, or that political philosophers think they shouldn’t even be able to vote? A leftist should know: it wouldn’t be a very good Spirit of Capitalism if it were to promote useless work or to forgive joblessness. But a leftist should also try to do better.

I’m sympathetic to Miranda Fricker’s sense that epistemic justice also serves epistemic rationality. One question my analysis raises, then, is: what sorts of knowledge or understanding might be precluded by the epistemic injustice of political correctness? The clearest example is illustrated by Lee Jussim’s work on stereotype accuracy. Jussim has tried to demonstrate that lay stereotypes about groups – the sorts of stereotypes all that social justice “work” is meant to shake off – are not just highly reliable, but often more reliable than the theories of academic social science. In other words, the prototypical ignorant citizen, who hasn’t labored toward the non-salvation of identity-capitalist wokeness, may make better predictions in many settings than the progressives and elites who scorn them – even if they’re experts.

Another example is the 2016 election, whose dynamics in both the primary and general election completely escaped the vast majority of coastal commentators. It’s no coincidence that Dilbert author Scott Adams got things right: no great intellect, Adams simply and intuitively grasped a comparison – also elucidated by Joan C. Williams – between the corporate-speak gobbledygook of his pointy-haired boss and the media’s clear preference for the political correctness of the message-less, confusing Clinton campaign, which seems in retrospect less a push to be elected President than a push to be promoted to President. Almost anybody outside the bubble could have told you clearly what Clinton’s faults were, but the bubble itself fawned over punditry denying that those faults existed.

Educated people, including educated liberals and progressives and especially educated leftists, must consider both the ethical side and the epistemic side of political correctness. The good news is that they can do so by returning with a renewed (or newly real) dedication to the sorts of principles they’ve always claimed to champion: inclusiveness and good listening, openness and free expression, empathy and care for the marginalized, thoughtfulness and respect for the truth. The bad news is that in doing so they may need to lose their religion, and its trappings of complex social theory, baroque conversational rules, and unstated hierarchies of authentic oppression. The journalist Chris Arnade has talked about the “front row” and “back row” of America. Professional progressives in politics, the media, and the academy must confront honestly the conflict between their class interest in remaining at the front and their deeply-held conviction that there shouldn’t be a back row at all.