ABSTRACT
The Political Correctness (PC) wars—particularly their avatar as media blitz—happened because when some people claimed that the world was turning upside down, many others heard them against the background of their own uneasy experience of change, displacement, and instability. The image of the individual defined by the "Western tradition" to which the Right appealed in the PC wars was stabilized over a long conflictual history of class and gender oppression in the United States and it has solidified during the past two decades of conservative domination. In the PC wars the reactionaries tried to cast progressives in the university as dominant and as radicals. Despite some heavy bystander involvement as the result of insistent media hype and some really cynical political manipulation, at bottom the battles over "political correctness" hardly extended beyond some low-circulation opinion rags, some middle-brow talk shows, and some melodramatic skirmishes within the academy. Fundamentally conservative and reactionary positions within American politics still dominate.
