Political correctness is a new form of prejudice

The argument

Political correctness originally served to eliminate casual prejudice from public discourse, but it has evolved into a new form of prejudice of its own. The mechanism is that a norm intended to protect people from being marginalised has itself become a standard against which people are sorted: our culture's political correctness has led to the marginalization of those who do not conform to a rigid standard, and rigidity is the operative word, since a norm that admits no deviation ends up identifying offenders rather than persuading them. The effect on discourse is silence rather than agreement. People who hold politically incorrect views feel threatened by those who disapprove of their perspectives, and so they say nothing, fearing that a controversial opinion will result in outrage. What this produces is not the disappearance of such views but their withdrawal from the conversation, where they can no longer be challenged or defended. The penalties involved are what make the fear reasonable. In our society it is common to hear of individuals being "canceled" — public shaming and the withdrawal of support, directed at people for voicing politically incorrect opinions, and capable of ending in the loss of a job or an educational title. Those are material consequences, imposed without any process, for speech rather than conduct. That is why the phenomenon has come to resemble the thing it set out to cure. Prejudice means treating people as unacceptable on the basis of a category they fall into, rather than on the merits of what they have said; and by harshly policing political incorrectness, our culture has created exactly that — a new form of prejudice against people who hold unconventional opinions.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Political correctness strictly limits what people can or cannot say while maintaining a positive reputation. However, this is not a harmful thing. Politically incorrect comments belittle the existence of other people. In our society, no one should be allowed to disrespect entire demographics. For this reason, political correctness is justified. It is not a new form of prejudice, it prevents people from sharing their prejudice without criticism.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] "Evolved into a rigid standard" carries the argument and is asserted rather than traced. The premise grants that the practice began by removing casual prejudice from public discourse, so it owes an account of what changed and when; without one, the claim rests on a contrast between an unspecified earlier version and an unspecified present one. [Rejecting P2] Calling this a new prejudice stretches the word past its use. Prejudice is prejudgement of people by group membership, whereas consequences that follow from something a person said are responses to conduct; collapsing the two removes a distinction the argument needs elsewhere. The premise also supplies no measure of scale — how often silence follows, or how often a job or title is actually lost — while the cases that circulate are, by their nature, the visible ones. [Rejecting C] The conclusion moves from a cost borne by some speakers to harm to society as a whole, which requires netting that cost against whatever the norms achieve. The premise's own opening line concedes there was something worth removing.