What Remains of “PC Attitudes”
Our civic conduct, where decency should NOT be an exotic virtue
Every few years, the phrase political correctness gets hauled back into the public square like an artifact from a culture war museum—held up, mocked, defended, misunderstood. Yet when Trueman and Triola sit with the idea, letting the heat drain away, something quieter and more durable comes into view. Beneath the slogans and counter‑slogans, there remains a set of instincts most people still recognize as good.
What persists is not the jargon or the policing of language but the underlying decency: the belief that people deserve to be treated with respect, that cruelty is not a civic virtue, that our shared life is richer when more of us feel welcome in it. Even those who bristle at the term “PC” often find themselves nodding at its moral core—fairness, inclusion, the refusal to demean someone for traits they did not choose.
There is also a lingering awareness, almost intuitive now, that words matter. Not in the brittle sense of walking on eggshells, but in the older, Whitmanesque sense that language can either widen the circle or shrink it. Most people still want to widen it. They want their children to grow up in a world where difference is not a pretext for mockery, where the vulnerable are defended rather than exposed, where belonging is not rationed.
In this way, what survives of “PC attitudes” is less an ideology than a civic reflex—a small but steady commitment to empathy. It is the part of us that resists humiliation as a form of entertainment, that recognizes the dignity of strangers, that senses how fragile the social fabric becomes when contempt is normalized.
Trueman and Triola would say this residue matters. It is evidence that beneath the theatrics of outrage, the country still carries a moral memory of how we ought to treat one another. Not perfectly, not consistently, but earnestly enough to keep the democratic experiment from collapsing into pure antagonism.
If anything, the endurance of these instincts suggests that the culture wars have obscured more consensus than they’ve revealed. Most people still want a society where decency is not an exotic virtue. They want a public life that feels less like a battlefield and more like a shared home.
And perhaps that is the quiet work ahead: to notice the places where our better impulses still flicker, and to build from there—not with slogans, but with the everyday practice of respect.