52% say there’s too much prejudice in the country vs. 48% who say there’s too much political correctness.
Most people, including those who said there’s too much political correctness, said they feel free to express their views on hot-button issues such as race and sexuality.
But 75% of adults say the current climate prevents open political discourse.As the face of the United States continues to undergo rapid demographic and cultural change, the fervor against “political correctness” grows even more potent for many Americans who feel that their political, cultural and social power in the country is waning.
The backlash to so-called PC culture unites conservatives, many of whom argue that their First Amendment rights to free speech are under attack by the left.
But as the debate over political correctness gains prominence in modern politics, a new Morning Consult analysis, gathered from a survey of more than 13,000 U.S. adults, shows “free speech” is not necessarily an issue: A majority of PC culture critics feel that they are free to express themselves on a variety of issues -- from more abstract subjects concerning identity to hot-button topics that have featured prominently in the news cycle during the past few years.
Instead, the findings suggest that views of race- and gender-based privilege and discrimination, not free speech, serve more as a dividing line in the political correctness culture war, which has devolved into debates over which words we can and can’t use: Those who say there is “too much prejudice” are three times more likely than those who say there is “too much political correctness” to say discrimination, racism and sexism aren’t taken seriously enough.
A data experiment within the survey also indicates feelings about free speech are contextual: People are more willing to police certain types of speech if that derogatory language is aimed at groups they consider to be part of their tribe.
One common question in public opinion polling is whether there is “too much prejudice” or “too much political correctness” in the country today. Morning Consult has posed this question several times over the past two years, and the latest finding mirrors past results: Americans are closely divided on the issue.
Responses to this question strongly correlated with political ideology, but they aligned even more with sentiment toward President Donald Trump.
Those who said that there is “too much political correctness” are disproportionately white, male, Republican and supportive of Trump, who has characterized political correctness as a problem for the country.
Notably, there are no significant generation, education or income divides between Americans who said there’s “too much political correctness” and those who said there’s “too much prejudice,” although those on the former side were slightly more likely to be wealthier.
Nearly half of those in the “too much political correctness” camp are white men.
In an effort to understand what people mean when they say there is “too much political correctness,” the people who sided with that response were broken out to see how they responded to other parts of the poll. The same thing was done for those who picked “too much prejudice.”
The survey found that while there were significant differences among those two groups when it came to attitudes toward speech, even healthy majorities of the respondents who said that PC culture in the country had run amok also said it was acceptable for them to express themselves on a range of sensitive topics, such as race, gender, sexuality, immigration, religion and people who are different from them.
Even with issues that have proven especially divisive in the past two years, such as Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement, most of the anti-PC respondents said they felt comfortable expressing their opinions -- although to a slightly lesser extent than the “too much prejudice” camp.
While most of the people who viewed PC culture as too pervasive in American society generally felt free to express themselves on the aforementioned topics, they were also overwhelmingly more likely to express confusion about more abstract questions concerning the state of the country’s discourse.
Large swaths of these respondents agreed that the “rules” about what they can and cannot say are changing so fast it's difficult to keep up, that people are offended too easily these days and that the current climate prevents some people from saying what they believe because others might find it offensive.
But these were sentiments also shared with a majority of the poll’s broader population, suggesting that when it comes to free speech, Americans are not as nearly divided as some would argue.
