Feb 8, 2007 
Bill Scher discusses rightie aversion to political correctness..
…Michelle has become a “hate crime howler.”
Michelle is by no means alone in promoting a “Conservative Correctness” (see the War on Christmas, the Dixie Chicks, Dick Durbin’s torture speech) where if you say something impolitic about the president, the war, interpretation of scripture, etc. an attempt is made to shame the speaker, pressure associates and stifle debate.
The kind of thing conservatives used to complain about. (Actually, still complain about.)
I understand why most conservatives play this game. Because to them it is a game.
Because they’re hypocrites and bullies. Their interest in conjuring up a phony narrative of the nature of liberals, and the joy they derive in getting under the skin of liberals, supersedes any interest in intellectual consistency. …
… “Conservative Correctness” should be called out for what it is. Mischief making.
For whatever excesses have occurred under the umbrella of “P.C.,” at least the intentions were generally honorable — mainly, trying to rid society of debilitating bigotry.
“Conservative Correctness” is not well intentioned. It’s simply just about intimidating people who disagree with you. …
… C.C. is not guided by principle. It does not wait for an actual transgression. It is happy to selectively quote, distort and manufacture outrage.
Therefore, it is C.C. that needs to be dismissed and ignored, so our campaigns can be real debates over issues, and not a string of ridiculous distractions.
It’s important to understand that bigots don’t believe nonbigotry is guided by principle, either. Wingnuts practicing “C.C.” generally think they’re only doing to lefties what they believe lefties do to them.
White racists, for example, nearly always believe deep down inside that all other whites believe as they do, and whites who say otherwise are either kidding themselves or lying. I know this is true because I grew up among white supremacists in a segregated community, and I’ve seen social-psychological studies that confirm my observations.
The more overheated whackjobs sincerely believe that the only reason white liberals cozy up to minorities is to serve some larger and nefarious goal, such as (back in the day) instigating a communist takeover. I guess these days they think we’re trying to instigate an islamofascist takeover; I haven’t been keeping up.
Bigots generally are not the most nuanced thinkers on the planet. They’re more the “you’re either fer me or agin’ me” types. Anyone who doesn’t want to wipe out Muslims and spread Judeo-Christian hegemony throughout the planet hates America.
Social psychologists will tell you that bigotry is a strategy for “conserving cognitive resources” (I love that phrase). People do tend to be uncomfortable with others who are “different.” This may be something of a vestigial instinct, a holdover from those long-ago days when human civilization was all about fighting off other tribes who wanted to kill your tribe and take all your stone tools. From here, we liberals might define ourselves as people who have gotten over our instinctual fears of the “other” and instead find diversity stimulating and enjoyable.
Political conservatives are not necessarily bigots, but I think much of today’s right-wing extremism is fueled by irrational fears of the “other” and modernity generally. And because righties conserve cognitive resources by thinking in simplistic stereotypes, they aren’t capable of thinking through their fears and perceiving how irrational most of them are. They also find it inexplicable that there are other people living among them — us — who aren’t afraid of the things they are afraid of. To them, we’re the irrational ones, because we don’t understand that all those islamofacists are lurking just outside the cave and want to break in and murder us and steal our stone tools. Or else, we do understand it, and we’re working for the enemy tribe. They think we must be fixin’ to stab them in the back and invite the enemy into the cave for a mastodon barbecue.
When the phrase “political correctness” was first coined, as I recall, it was something of a joke, ribbing academics for going overboard creating “inclusive” language, like “physically challenged” for “disabled.” Wingnuts seized the phrase and turned it into an all-purpose explanation for why liberals say crazy things like “racial discrimination is wrong” — the standard response is “Oh, you’re just being P.C.” Meaning, “you don’t really mean what you say.”
But we really do mean what we say, and when righties conjure up some phony outrage in order to bash liberals, we get all caught up in answering charges, explaining logical fallacies, and pointing out hypocrisies. We do this because we assume they mean what they say. And, frankly, the more cognitively challenged among them probably do mean what they say, because they can’t critically think their way out of a wet paper bag.
But Bill’s hypothesis is that many of the opinion leaders among them — he discusses Michelle Malkin because he knows her personally — don’t mean what they say. They know good and well that many of the outrages they gin up to bash us with are contrived. They’re just trying to bully us, often because (deep down inside) they think we’re trying to bully them. So while we’re exhausting ourselves in a mighty intellectual struggle, they’re just playing tit for tat and barely working up a sweat.
And if this is the case, we’ve got to stop letting them jerk our chains. We should just dismiss their lunacy with “Oh, you’re just being C.C.”
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