I like the juxtaposition of these two emails in response to today’s column, they came within seconds of each other. From a liberal longtime reader:

“But when traditionalists talk the language of decency and morality, the Left hears bigotry and theocracy. And when liberals talk about sensitivity and white privilege, the Right hears something totalitarian. The result is that the two sides hold separate conversations. And when they do talk to each other, each side is listening for hidden agendas.”
You’re 100% right!
Except that the Left hears bigotry and theocracy because there really is such an undercurrent, as history demonstrates and as an occasional slip-up on the Right confirms (e.g., Trent Lott’s comments about Strom Thurmond, Pat Robertson’s comments about the true cause of 9/11). On the other hand, the Right is just hearing things. ”Totalitarian”? Surely not Stalin’s footsteps. That would be ludicrous. Indecency and amorality, certainly, but that’s all the Left is spewing — there’s no hidden agenda.

And from another longtime reader, this one not so liberal:

Are you sure you’ve been paying attention, Jonah?
Europe is now replete with thought crimes. And Canada is right there
too.
In the UK a “gay slur” — which could be virtually any wisecrack with a
gay theme to it or open opposition to “gay marriage” — gets you a visit
from the real police, who are now also handling thought policing duties.
Oriana Fallaci. You know that story, I’m sure.
Just a day or so ago the EU made Holocaust denial a crime, taking on the
German and Austrian guilt for the whole of the continent. The
totalitarian disease is taken as the cure. It’s already flipping into a
double-bind over there: “Can’t deny the Holocaust because the Jews are
evil.” Talk to Denis Boyles.
And you clearly haven’t been following what goes on in American public
schools nowadays. Christina Hoff Sommers has written extensively about
what you might call emasculation training.
The public schools and the universities are flooded with political
correctness alongside liberal orthodoxy, such that when those blinds get
fully closed no light whatsoever will enter.
People are not being educated, they’re being re-educated.
Talk to Tammy Bruce about the networks of enforcers who try to silence
and intimidate the people they don’t like.
This is the most serious situation the West faces. Not just the meaning
of things being destroyed, but meaning itself, what B16 astutely called
the dictatorship of relativism. When meanings and rules are just made
up, they can be changed overnight. “Political correctness” is the very
opposite of manners; it’s anti-manners, where old women of both sexes
and all ages keep watch day and night for the slip of a tongue, any sign
that there could be “a problem.”
Real manners smooth over the rough edges of our coarser impulses. They
are not codes of enforcement, meant to make people believe what the
enforcers demand.
And the Imus matter was a huge trophy; obnoxious as he was, his show was
one of the last places where people actually said what was on their
minds. I miss the rotten bastard already. Even though I could barely
take his brownnosing any longer, there were indeed signs of life in that
studio, and much hilarity.

Me: Obviously, I’m somewhere in between but a bit closer to the second guy. In response to the first reader, I love it when someone says I’m “100% right” and then proceeds to tell me where I am completely wrong. I don’t think something has to be Stalinist to be totalitarian. It seems to me, for example, that any system whereby you are sent to psychological reeducation — or “sensitivity training” — for a slip of the tongue or unpopular statement is a form of totalitarianism. And that is the sort of thing the true PC crusaders push for all the time on college campuses.

As for the second reader, I agree that there’s something pernicious going on in the “name” of political correctness (the quotation marks are necessary because few people actually claim to speak for PC). Maybe in a subsequent column we could distinguish between “hard” PC and “soft” PC. But I think my basic point stands. The leftwing zealots try to use political correctness — i.e. “sensitivity” and “tolerance” talk as a Trojan horse for a lot more sinister agendas. But I don’t think the average American who agrees to say “African-American” instead of “black” is necessarily buying into all of that in the process.