"PCism...is about manipulating public doctrine for private ends. The form it takes depends on the nature of national values. In America, PCism derives from three unchallengeable ideals. The ideal of equality is used to promote the interests of women and racial minorities, often ending in very inegalitarian provisions such as quotas. Collective moral improvement is used selectively to deny people what will supposedly harm them, formerly alcohol, soon tobacco. The sanctity of the individual is interpreted to demand parity of esteem for unconventional lifestyles, especially homosexuality, and can be exploited in all sorts of ways through the new sexual harassment industry. In Britain, the pattern is different. None of these things have gained nearly as much ground as in the United States, but the same technique of making a sectional self-interest unchallengeable and using totalitarian methods to inhibit criticism is used in favour of regional cultures against metropolitan culture; used in our endlessly various class war by plebeians against patricians, and, especially, used in that strange crusade of denigration of our national institutions."
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University of Cambridge alumniUniversity of Cambridge facultyUniversity of Oxford facultyHistorians from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
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'All hail our politically incorrect Prince', The Times (6 May 1994), p. 18
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._C._D._Clark
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J. C. D. Clark
Jonathan Charles Douglas Clark (born 28 February 1951) is a British historian of both British and American history. He was an undergraduate at Downing College, Cambridge. Having previously held posts at Peterhouse, Cambridge and All Souls College, Oxford into 1996, he has since held the Joyce C. and Elizabeth Ann Hall Distinguished Professorship of British History at the University of Kansas.
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