Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, as with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to look carefully at our assumptions, there are twenty rabble-rousers whose real motive is a desire for power over others. The fact that they see themselves as antiracists or feminists or whatever does not make them any less rabble-rousers.
Doris Lessing, “Unexamined Mental Attitudes Left Behind By Communism,” in Edith Kurzweil and William Philips, editors, Our Country, Our Culture: The Politics of Political Correctness (Partisan Review Press, 1994)