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When it comes to our moral panics, it sometimes feels like the 1980s and 1990s never ended. We find ourselves at the tail end of a panic about “cancel culture” and “wokeness” in the U.S., which has—minus a mention of social media here and of #MeToo there—the longer it has gone on simply recycled the earlier panic about “political correctness.” But part of the feeling that we’re stuck in the forever ’80s is that, recycled or not, the panic clearly worked. (Barely) reheated “PC” discourse though it may have been, the freakout over “wokeness” likely helped Donald Trump retake the White House. It’s not just the purveyors of this kind of rhetoric who are stuck in time—we’re all there with them.
What many Americans likely don’t know: Countries the world over enthusiastically adopted the panic over “PC” in the 1990s and adapted it to their own local needs. Stories of censorious undergraduates and ridiculous newspeak in the U.S. found grateful consumers in French, German, and U.K. media. And since 2018, these other countries have begun importing stories about cancel culture.
I trace that process in my new book, The Cancel Culture Panic. Fears of “PC” and “cancel culture” took varied paths in the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, South America, Turkey, or Russia. But at least in most democratic countries, they wind up in a remarkably similar place.
By Adrian Daub. Stanford University Press.
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By far the most bizarre bits of detritus from this panic I encountered in my research were the “dictionaries” of political correctness that proliferated across various countries and languages. Even though they were far more prevalent outside of the U.S. than domestically, these fascinating documents sum up the “PC” panic rather well. This goes beyond the snarky entries about “dreadlocks” and “gender,” or “homophobia,” even beyond the tired anecdotes (here’s a thing a foundation wrote on its website, or a thing a college professor was yelled at over). It’s about the particular kind of broad brush with which this discourse painted, about its pretense at playfulness and irony, when it was actually pretty indignant about old hierarchies eroding, and about its unwillingness to admit just how right wing it really was.
As part of my research, I read my way through more than a dozen of these in four languages: English, French, German, and Spanish. There was a veritable wave of these in the mid-’90s, including in Germany, France, the U.K., and Spain, with only a drip of new releases in the years since. Still, Carlos Rodríguez Braun’s Diccionario Políticamente Incorrecto has gone through three editions since 2005, and two German dictionaries that came out in 1994 and 2007 published (slim) second volumes in 2001 and 2022 respectively.
There are a handful of “cancel culture” dictionaries today—similar projects that use updated culture-war language. Australian political commentator Kevin Donnelly had the misfortune of publishing A Politically Correct Dictionary and Guide in 2019, just as a new, shinier vocabulary was becoming available. Undaunted, he published The Dictionary of Woke three years later. But in a way, these books do belong to the “PC” era, when bookstores were still plentiful and national newspapers relatively robust. You could imagine one of them placed in a decorative basket on the back of a toilet, ready for a pre-smartphone visitor to browse, or given as more or less welcome gifts to a graduate, or a younger family member, by elders out to torment.
These strange relics allow us to understand a lot about what the contemporary fear of “cancel culture” among right-wingers and reactionary centrists is really about. For one thing, they suggest why the U.S. was due for a new version of “PC” worries after #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, and why this new version both warned about and fundamentally relied on social media. These books register nothing so much as the writer’s outrage that there is an evolving social consensus the writer doesn’t share. The authors of these books regarded the fact that other people had become sensitized in their language use as at best a personal affront and at worst a conspiracy. And even well before the social media age, they were horrified to have to watch other people speaking differently. No wonder the PC dictionary was a global export that went viral before we had virality.
These books were both local and part of a global phenomenon. Most of their examples (and most of their entries) drew on developments in the U.S.. In the one French dictionary that I found that actually had footnotes, those consisted of about 20 percent references to U.S. anti-”PC” literature. These books reflected an evolving media system that today nurtures global fears of “cancel culture”: international newspaper readers who love to hear about the latest linguistic outrages perpetrated by Oberlin sophomores or the Berkeley City Council. At the same time, the same book most frequently cited French articles about American anecdotes—meaning that these stories reflected a common consensus back at an audience that was already extensively exposed to that consensus.
In the hands of a French or German writer, these anecdotes clearly expressed a leeriness about the U.S. and its global influence. This is the fear expressed by continental writers that a “woke wave” is crashing upon French shores, that France, as Emmanuel Macron warned in 2020, is being subverted by “certain social-science theories entirely imported from the United States.”
That, as the title of a 2022 book by Anne Toulouse has it, “France will be contaminated” by “wokeism.” The fear that “American conditions” were “now” coming to Australia, the U.K., France, or Germany is common to these books, in spite of the fact that their publication is spread across 30 years. And it is, of course, odd that they verbalized these fears by simply importing wholesale a hacky discourse from the U.S.
As various authors tried to localize a U.S. culture war for their hometown audience, there was a pretty serious description creep. Maybe this was simply owed to the demands of the book form—how many ways can you find to say “animal companion,” the supposed PC term for “pet”? Nigel Rees’ The Politically Correct Phrasebook from 1994 has a list of dozens of variations on the formula “xyz challenged,” and several of them—“hygienically challenged” and “orthographically challenged”—get their own entries. You have to fill the 150 pages of this kind of book somehow, I suppose.
But at other times, the forced breadth authors must adopt in order to satisfy the dictionary format makes for unintentionally revealing reading. Philippe de Villiers’ French PC dictionary includes the euro (yes, the currency, which seems to have represented a collective Europeanism offensive to his nationalism), the word Indians, AIDS, and “Franco-German unity.” Fellow Frenchman André Santini has an entire entry on Kevin Costner, who was supposedly the politically correct movement’s favorite Hollywood hunk. This because one of his films argued that maybe hunting bison to extinction was suboptimal, and another “introduced a Black man into Sherwood Forest.” (I don’t know if Santini has seen Yellowstone, but if so, he might need to write to Costner to apologize.) Director Robert Altman said he’d leave the U.S. if George Bush was reelected but didn’t actually leave? “Political correctness”! Climate change used to “explain a flood or a drought”? “Political correctness”! A war described as “senseless”? Bingo.
I’m not the first person to note the strange mobility with which the term wokeness has detached itself from specific concerns around Black civil rights and became a bizarre catchall for various reactionary complaints, such that the “anti-woke” position is actually more sharply defined than anything “woke.” In reading these dictionaries, you can see how the impulse to say everything’s “woke” is a case of reflexes rehearsed in the 1990s springing back to life.
The books all traded on a simple but extremely questionable premise. “Political correctness” wasn’t something we all engaged in at one time or another. No, there were “the politically correct” and there were the few, the proud, the politically incorrect—among them, presumably, the heterodox thinkers who had heterodoxically decided to blow money on a dictionary of political correctness. There were those repulsed by the kind of language parodied in these books, and those who forced everyone else to speak this way.
It’s worth noting that both of these propositions seem wrong. No one refuses all language change; people who keep noting that they don’t know what xyz group “wants to be called now” somehow managed to learn what email was, or TikTok. Conversely, most of the language change these books freaked out about, no one actually engaged in. Unless “parentally disadvantaged” is indeed, as Rees claims, “the preferred term for an orphan,” and I somehow missed it.
Another parallel to today’s freakout about “wokeness”: None of these books seemed very interested in understanding “the politically correct.” There is little coherence to the projects these books ascribe to the politically correct, except the coherence conferred by their dislike. Some terms they list are bureaucratic newspeak, some are leftist jargon, some have to do with Black culture, and others—like the Costner thing—seem simply to reflect cultural phenomena the particular writer happened to dislike.
These books necessarily had to cast their net very wide. Some of the entries are what you’d expect (“Genders”! Sometimes more than two!), others seem frankly made up or based on a single anecdote. André Santini’s book includes an entry for Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, which a cellist in an amateur orchestra in Northern California apparently claimed was anti-wolf. Some of them refer to specific culture war grievances, others are incredibly broad. Klaus Rainer Röhl’s German-language dictionary includes an entry on a pork schnitzel with a questionable name and another on the word acceptance.
Meaning: There’s almost no aspect of contemporary discourse that doesn’t come in for some criticism. These books seem upset by nothing less than the fact that different people talk differently, or that the way people talk changes with time. Or rather: that the ways they themselves like to speak are not as uncontested as they maybe once were. De Villiers’ dictionary, for instance, opens his entry on the term “homosexual couple” with the sneering sentence fragment: “The future of man.” What convinced de Villiers that being in a gay couple would soon be mandatory? Not any legislation (France didn’t legalize gay marriage until 2013). No, a single municipal clerk in Saint-Nazaire (pop. 72,000) had issued marriage licenses to a few gay couples.
It’s not always clear how panicky this moral panic ever was—or is, for that matter. Its warnings, then as now, certainly sound extremely serious—McCarthyism, witch hunts, and gulags are no laughing matter. But there were, in many of these dictionaries, a good deal of unseriousness to the apocalyptic warnings. Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf, who wrote The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook in 1992, were both National Lampoon alums. The cover for Rees’ book is bright yellow, with a humorously labeled peg-legged pirate. But by the time the book came out in the U.K., the cover was a somber gray, and the peg-legged pirate was gone and had been replaced with the ominous (and vaguely conspiratorial) subtitle: “What they say you can and cannot say in the 1990s.”
An odd thing happened as the format began to travel the globe. It became less funny. Where the American and British books came from people who were professionally funny (even if they seemed to have written the books on their off days), the Spanish, German, and French editions came from politicians, “serious” journalists, and political pundits. They were still meant to be humorous, of course. But a different kind of humorous: a humor barely hiding its simmering resentments, its sharp sense of who is worth listening to and who isn’t.
This cuts to the heart of the “PC” phenomenon. People who freaked out about “PC” told themselves they were being humorous, when in fact they were being perfectly serious. Meanwhile they imputed to “the politically correct” a humorlessness that the very existence of the term “PC” (which originated as a piece of leftist self-irony) would seem to belie. And where they cast themselves as merely reactive, they were, in fact, being quite creative.
As John Wilson pointed out in the 1990s, “PC” was a discourse that inspired readers—and above all, thousands of would-be stand-up comics—to come up with their own “PC” newspeak. Their inventions—“animal companion” instead of “pet”! “Womanhole covers” instead of “manhole covers”!—often enough entered the churn as more fodder for outrage down the line. Some of what got later cited as examples of PC newspeak originated, in fact, as parodies of supposed PC newspeak.
Warnings about “cancel culture” have the same tendency to deflate their own seriousness when pressured. “Political Correctness Used to Be Funny,” New York Times columnist Pamela Paul titled a column last year. “Now It’s No Joke.” Of course, the fact that “PC” was a joke would have come as a surprise to whatever designer put the giant words “Thought Police” on the cover of Newsweek in 1990. Or the Time article that called it “totalitarian.” Or the many stories that compared it to witch hunts. The unseriousness was always there, of course. But you didn’t dwell on it while you were still able to frighten people with these stories. Once they’d gotten wise, you had, of course, been kidding all along. Which allowed you to then—like Pamela Paul—talk about the new thing, which supposedly truly was frightening. What the boy who cried wolf couldn’t make work, this brain trust has somehow figured out.
Dictionaries of “political correctness” were a global phenomenon, written by a strange cast of characters ranging from a few dyed-in-the-wool leftists (though with a strong culturally conservative streak) to a bunch of sort-of-conservatives, to basically fascists. And that range is, to some extent, the point of these books. Their posture of complaint allows them to elide some pretty serious differences.
“This lexicon gives a humorous and precise overview of the most important words and phrases of politically correct newspeak,” the back cover of Klaus Rainer Röhl’s Politisch Korrekt von A bis Z from 1995 promises. The book explains “the language of concern (Weizsäcker-German), the jargon of post-68 politicians and media people (Tuscany German), feminist slang, autonomous [Marxist] cant, alternative dialects” and “musli-German.” This is an incredibly scattered list, combining autonomous Marxist punks, left-liberal intellectuals, and Germany’s longtime President Richard von Weizsäcker.
You might wonder whether these people all speak the same language—whether a conservative politician in the 1990s would talk about “sexual harassment,” for instance, or whether a punk would use the euphemism “high earners” for rich people. Well, they only do in one respect, and that seems to be Röhl’s main fixation: They’re all associated with attempts to work through and do penance for Nazi Germany’s crimes.
Sure, Röhl complained about gendered language or changing names of food items, but the only consistent throughline in his book is the idea that “PC” Germans are people who somehow think Germany has something to apologize for regarding its conduct during the 1930s and 1940s. Which—to be clear—by 1995 was something many Germans believed who might otherwise have more conservative views about what food should be called. Threaded throughout the hacky bits about lady pilots and names for food is an earlier jargon of historical revisionism—one that, if served straight, would have been easily recognizable as pretty far right. The trick was, when this same meal is served up in a dictionary alongside a bunch of phrases that, well, yes, you do find kind of annoying, it becomes easy to miss.
The language wars around “PC” were—and there’s reason to suspect complaints about “cancel culture” remain—a meeting ground. A place where people can agree that you “can’t say anything anymore” but can have two very different sets of “anything” in mind. A place where you can agree that certain things, habits, ideas are simply better, but you don’t have to spell out exactly what makes them so. Where you can be a little wishy-washy in whether you think the established hierarchies in society are God-given, or a reflection of biological superiority, or, goshdarnit, just the way we’ve always done it.
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