Table Of ContentPC WORLDS
Loose Can(n)ons
Editor: Bruce Kapferer, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of
Bergen, and Honorary Professor, University College London
Loose Can(n)ons is a series dedicated to the challenging of established (fash-
ionable or fast conventionalizing) perspectives in the social sciences and their
cultural milieux. It is a space of contestation, even outrageous contestation,
aimed at exposing academic and intellectual cant that is not unique to anthro-
pology but can be found in any discipline. The radical fire of the series can po-
tentially go in any direction and take any position, even against some of those
cherished by its contributors.
Volume 1
Starry Nights
Critical Structural Realism in Anthropology
Stephen P. Reyna
Volume 2
PC Worlds
Political Correctness and Rising Elites at the End of Hegemony
Jonathan Friedman
Volume 3
Heading for the Scene of the Crash
The Cultural Analysis of America
Lee Drummond
Volume 4
On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification
Allen Chun
PC WORLDS
n
P OLITICAL CORRECTNESS
AND RISING ELITES AT THE
END OF HEGEMONY
Jonathan Friedman
berghahn
N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D
www.berghahnbooks.com
First published in 2019 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2019 by Jonathan Friedman
All rights reserved.
Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes
of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Friedman, Jonathan, author.
Title: Political correctness and rising elites at the end of hegemony / Jonathan
Friedman.
Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2019. | Series: Loose can(n)ons ;
volume 2 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017020017 (print) | LCCN 2017038986 (ebook) | ISBN
9781785336737 (e-book) | ISBN 9781785336720 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Political correctness. | Political anthropology. |
Political correctness—Sweden. | Political anthropology—Sweden.
| Sweden—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. |
Multiculturalism—Sweden.
Classification: LCC HM1216 (ebook) | LCC HM1216 .F75 2017 (print) |
DDC 306.09485—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020017
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78533-672-0 hardback
ISBN 978-1-78533-673-7 ebook
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Introduction. Why Political Correctness? 1
Chapter 1. PC Worlds: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly 10
Chapter 2. The Rhinoceros II 36
Chapter 3. Rhinoceros II: Proof of the Pudding 67
Chapter 4. Umeå: Nazism in the Far North 92
Chapter 5. Three Years Later: La Lutte Continue 102
Chapter 6. Changing Places: A Curious History of Swedish 126
Political Culture
Chapter 7. Aspects of the Inversion of Ideology 145
Chapter 8. The New Respectability 184
Conclusion. U nderstanding the Context and Logic of Contemporary 208
Political Correctness
Postscript. Weekend Update 239
References 267
Index 277
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Figures
Figure 2.1 Th e force field of essentialization 63
Figure 2.2 E ssentialist production of the category “racism” 64
Figure 6.1 Th e Prime Minister’s new manor 136
Figure 6.2 Social democracy and fascism compared 141
Figure 7.1 Th e continuum of identification in the nation state 147
Figure 7.2 Oppositional structures of ideology 150
Figure 7.3 I dentity space of modernity 151
Figure 7.4 Modern identity imploded 152
Figure 8.1 D iametric to concentric dualism 203
Figure C.1 H egemonic cycles, social positioning, and cultural 217
identification
Figure C.2 Hierarchical cosmopolitics and mobility 235
Figure PS.1 Nordic countries’ asylum seekers 2014 249
Figure PS.2 V iolence grouped by perpetrator characteristic, 258
Europol TE_SAT 2014
Introduction
n
W hy Political
Correctness?
Oh no! Not another book on political correctness! The
past decades have seen massive output on this subject,
primarily from the United States but increasingly in
Europe as well. Isn’t the issue exhausted by now? The many people who hate
the concept would like to think so. But this is not just another book taking
sides for or against a particular manifestation of PC, as almost all publications
have done until now. Nor is it about the American campus issues of feminist,
post-feminist, and anti-racist politics, although the content of those debates
is very much a focus of the analysis to follow. Written from a perspective on
Sweden, it concerns incidents that occurred there in the late 1990s. At the time
the notion of political correctness was hardly understood in Sweden, even in its
American trappings, but it has since become a problem arousing the passions
of many.
Although I take a clear position against what I define as political correct-
ness, I emphatically do not define it in terms of its particular contemporary
content, be it feminist or multiculturalist. Rather, I define it in structural terms,
arguing that multiculturalism is part of a rising elite identity and that the dis-
course of political correctness has played a significant role in its establishment.
The structural relation between the content of PC discourse and its formal
properties is significant, but it is not an analytical relation—the one cannot be
deduced from the other. Instead, the relation is one that connects the insecure
identity of rising or falling elites with the need to establish or maintain dom-
inant ideologies and a clear moral order. The moralization of the social world
derives from this anxious situation, but the particular content of the ideology
imposed can vary greatly, very much more so than envisioned by most of those
who have participated in the PC debates.
The literature on PC has tended to conflate the content of PC with its
form, so that the issues have been reduced to conservatives versus liberals,
right versus left.1 Even a sociolinguist, D. Cameron (1994), has simply assumed
2 PC Worlds
the political content of political correctness, perhaps influenced by her own
engagement in the concrete issues. Her analysis, however, does focus on the
general issue of the political nature of language, a point that is made more
vociferously by those directly inspired by Foucault (Choi and Murphy 1992).
Cameron uses the expression “I am not politically incorrect” to show how the
notion itself has changed, how it once was internal to the left and meant simply,
“I am committed to leftist/feminist causes, but not humorless or doctrinaire
about it” (15) but has now been refigured to mean that one was party to a new
dichotomy defined by conservatives.
To say yes was to claim for yourself a definition constructed by conservatives for
the express purpose of discrediting you; to say no was to place yourself among
those conservatives. (16)
This change was orchestrated by the right itself, in an example of “the
politics of definition” (16). While Cameron does not consider this to be part of
the PC phenomenon itself, in our analysis the politics of definition is the very
core of politically correct thinking. Her focus is on the politics of linguistic
usage—its role in political action—and from this perspective, it is progressives
who are trying to change society for the better by attacking older, accepted
categories and arguing for a political intervention into language itself. Since
language influences thinking and action, its transformation can help bring
forth new political realities. Thus the word African-American is an improve-
ment over Black.
Someone who claims African American is a euphemism because it makes no
reference to skin colour is implicitly asserting that a description of people by skin
color is a value-neutral description. (28)
In associating PC with a particular political strategy, she falls into the same
kinds of arguments that are used in the defense of PC. The above example is
truly exemplary in this respect. The preference for the term African American
assumes that reference to skin color is intrinsically less value-neutral than ref-
erence to geographical origin. And why should this be the case? As another
chapter in the same collection (Appignanesi 2005) makes clear, in France the
use of skin color terminology is not understood as demeaning (although a PC
argument might tend to attribute this to unconscious racism). Any anthropol-
ogist ought to grasp that if there is anything that is relative, it is the connota-
tions of semantic categories. The argument ends in a statement of the need to
democratize language, to break down categories in a general strategy of giving
voice to the formerly silenced. PC is primarily about a politics of semantic and
thus political deconstruction.
The most general statements of PC claim to represent a politics of plu-
ralism in all senses. Western rationality, national identity, monoculturalism,
Introduction 3
essentialism are all seen as conservative or even reactionary, destined for de-
construction and dissolution, ultimately to be replaced by a truly pluralist
world. A philosophical version of PC identifies conservative ideology as the
entire edifice of modernist Western science and philosophy, objectivism, and
foundationalism (Choi and Murphy 1992). The position that Choi and Murphy
associate with PC is simply “the postmodern alternative.” Their text is heavily
influenced by Stanley Fish and radical constructivism. The notion that the cat-
egories of language, like those of the rest of social life, are products of human
creative action and have to be practiced to exist is not necessarily post modern,
but it has become an identifying characteristic of the position. Thus even such
a diehard modernist figure as Bourdieu is incorporated into the project, al-
though he himself was very critical of postmodernism. The reason is simply
that his approach to social practice, a variant of a certain Marxist tradition,
treats social categories and structures of language as socially constituted in
practice. What is perhaps more specific in their work is the proposition that
there are no autonomous properties of reality that are not reducible to lan-
guage, which implies the further crucial proposition that rational argument in
which statements are compared to, or tested against, “reality” is impossible. In
the end the establishment of “regimes of truth” is entirely a matter of power,
the power of imposition.
For Stanley Fish, one of the key figures of the political correctness move-
ment, the politics of definition is a major instrument in the establishment of the
good and true. No arguments are necessary nor even interesting. Being thor-
oughly interwoven with postmodernist categorizations, multiculturalism and
post-feminism form the basis of the new ideology, so they may indeed seem
inseparable from the need for a politics of definition and the ensuing moral
categorization that divides the world into good guys and bad.
My aim in the following is not to enter into these discussions and to take a
stand for or against the above positions. It is rather to analyze the PC phenom-
enon as a particular social reality—a reality that is a diagnostic of a particular
state of social existence that harbors serious dangers (in the factual, not the
moral sense) for the maintenance of the critical rational arena that is the core
of much of modern existence.
Why Me?
This book was inspired by a series of incidents in my own life. It might and will
be said that this fact distorts the entire content of a study that should never
have seen the light of day. Some of my colleagues have said as much. But of
course that content did see the light of day in the Swedish media and spread
