Two thousand ten marks the twentieth anniversary of the entry of the term “political correctness”—in its contemporary, “multiculturalist” sense—into the popular vocabulary. There is a splendid irony to the fact that this dubious boon to the language should have been conferred upon it by Newsweek, now a self-conscious pioneer of what it hopes will be a new, politically correct form of journalism, in a sensational cover story to its issue of December 24, 1990. The old, un-PC Newsweek, which raised in this connection the specter of an Orwellian “Thought Police” and “a new McCarthyism” of the left, was drawing on an article by Richard Bernstein (“The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct”) that had run in the old, less-PC New York Times a couple of months previously—which itself drew heavily on the work of this journal’s editor, Roger Kimball. His book Tenured Radicals, first published in 1989 and now available in a handsome new edition from Ivan R. Dee, had identified the phenomenon as reaching out from politicized universities staffed by 1960s-era student radicals to the larger culture, where it has since made ever greater inroads, especially in the media, the law, and politics itself.

Politically correct politics, it might be objected, is a contradiction in terms. Political correctness is in fact the death of politics—politics, that is, of the democratic sort—which by definition presupposes difference, division, and partisanship. If only one side of the political debate is “correct,” and