Is political correctness destroying liberalism from within?

Tyler Cowan:

Imagine the perfect political and intellectual weapon. It would disable your adversaries by preoccupying them with their own vanities and squabbles, a bit like a drug so good that users focus on the high and stop everything else they are doing.

Such a weapon exists: It is called political correctness. But it is not a weapon against white men or conservatives, as is frequently alleged; rather, it is a weapon against the American left. To put it simply, the American left has been hacked, and it is now running in a circle of its own choosing, rather than focusing on electoral victories or policy effectiveness. Too many segments of the Democratic Party are self-righteously talking about identity politics, and they are letting other priorities slip.

Of course there is a lot of racism out there, which makes political correctness all the more tempting. Yet polling data suggests that up to 80 percent of Americans are opposed to politically correct thinking in its current manifestations. Latinos and Asian-Americans are among the groups most opposed, and even 61 percent of self-professed liberals do not like political correctness.

The PC weapon reared its head again this week when Senator Elizabeth Warren made a big show of her genealogical test showing she is some small part Native American. To someone immersed in the political correctness debates, this obsession with identity might seem entirely natural. But the actual reality is more brutal.

The reality is that many Americans already think that the Democrats talk too much about identity. Warren would have done better to drop the topic altogether, as both right-wing and left-wing critics agree. Instead, she has kept the identity issue in the limelight, and reminded Americans that elite, mostly Democratic-leaning institutions, such as Harvard, like to pat themselves on the back for their diversity in ways which seem phony to most of the rest of us.

So if you are a right-wing, conservative, or perhaps libertarian thinker, and you consider yourself an opponent of political correctness, I have a message: Political correctness, as a movement, is a winning issue for you. It is disabling some of the ideas you don’t like. You might want to celebrate in secret, but celebrate you should.

Here’s another ugly truth. The biggest day-to-day losers from the political correctness movement are other left-of-center people, most of all white moderate Democrats, especially those in universities. If you really believe that “the PC stuff” is irrational and out of control and making institutions dysfunctional, and that universities are full of left-of-center people, well who is going to suffer most of the costs? It will be people in the universities, and in unjust and indiscriminate fashion. That means more liberals than conservatives, if only because the latter are relatively scarce on the ground.
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The suit against Harvard's affirmative action program that discriminates against Asians is a case in point.  But Harvard's ties to Warren and her disputed claim of ties to "native Americans" i.e. early migrants to America should be a serious embarrassment that demonstrates the corruption that comes from identity politics instead of a merit-based system.