David French makes a good point about the way victims of PC attacks sometimes lose potential allies who recoil from any behavior on the part of the individual that was less than perfect before he went public. French is referring specifically to the less than perfect way the PC victims might have handled their cases before they decided to litigate them, but there is a larger, almost metaphysical dimension to what he says.

A couple of plays about PC when it was still in its relatively early stages (the early 1990s) that are uncannily perceptive about the whole psychology of political correctness on all sides–perpetrators, victims, mediators, bystanders–are David Mamet’s Oleanna and A.R. Gurney’s Another Antigone.

What these plays suggest, among other things, is that human imperfection being a constant, there is often some flaw manifested or mistake committed by the individual, harmless enough at the time, that is then used by the thought police to blow the whole episode way out of proportion. In normal times, such difficulties might be called misunderstandings and handled quietly, but the mechanisms of PC make it possible for those interested in asserting power, or deflecting attention from their own shortcomings, to exploit such moments in order to tighten the reins over others. And sometimes the rattled individual is so unnerved by the forces against him that he may behave more offensively than he ever would have before.

Both of these dramatists effectively portray the irrationality of PC. No one seems to be writing about it anymore, at least not in this kind of depth.