POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

“For conservatives, for about the same period of time [past 35 years], the main worry has been what is broadly called ‘culture,’ by which we really mean the anger and resentment felt by older white Americans about the fact that the country is no longer ‘theirs’ and that their former status and authority no longer seem what they once were. This rubric takes in a number of issues—immigration, especially illegal immigration; same-sex marriage; a black president in the White House; all the things that conservatives bundle under the reviled label ‘political correctness.’ In their minds it is some sort of taint that has infected every institution in this once-great nation and is destroying it daily before their eyes.

Michael Tomasky, “The Dangerous Election,” in the New York Review, March 24, 2016, pp: 4-6.