from Hacker News

Why Grievances Grow

by randomname2 on 3/10/19, 10:50 AM with 28 comments

  • by tomlock on 3/10/19, 9:17 PM

    > A full 80% [of US] believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” … The woke are in a clear minority across all ages. … Progressive activists are the only group that strongly backs political correctness: Only 30% see it as a problem.

    This is because the definition of "political correctness" is different from person to person. It conveniently drifts so people can think they're against some common problem when in reality some people use it to veil homophobia, and others to complain about postmodernism.

    It's a convenient term, but useless. You call someone politically correct and they'll say no. You learn nothing about their position, you only get to engage in some petty name calling. Feels good, right? Maybe we should stick to the factual matters, the specifics of what legislation and culture is too "politically correct" for you.

  • by tptacek on 3/10/19, 10:25 PM

    This piece opens with quotes from Yascha Mounk's Atlantic story which itself digests the "Hidden Tribes" report from More In Common. I think Mounk's article misrepresents the study; its lede is that large majorities of Americans disfavor "political correctness", but that term is never defined in the study. Meanwhile, according to the same study, a large majority of Americans --- every segment, including the politically disaffected and "traditional conservatives", excluding only the Trump-supporting "devoted conservatives" --- supported limiting dangerous and hateful speech. Notions of "white privilege" and sexual harassment and Islamophobia also find healthy support among segments that sum up to the majority of the study --- you only starkly lose support for them (in the study) among the 25% of the survey that are "conservative".

    I would say that the report is actually pretty muddy on what Americans as a whole think about PC culture (no surprise, both because the term isn't well-defined and, more importantly, because studying PC culture wasn't the point of the Hidden Tribes study).

    I would thus say it's pretty dangerous to try to extrapolate from Mounk's extrapolation of Hidden Tribes to conclusions about "grievance" politics.