Is political correctness speeding up?

One of the most influential and popular ideas of the post-war era was that of the Authoritarian Personality, which linked fascism with a number of personality traits, including conventionalism, anti-intellectualism and prudery. Conservatism, in other words.

It has become popular to believe that being right-wing is synonymous with being authoritarian. Society may have no common culture or religion or body of literature, but everyone knows who the Nazis are. So as Nazism has pushed out everything else in the collective memory, it has become an attractive weapon against conservative ideas.

And yet authoritarianism is probably found both equally on the left and right; it just manifests itself in different forms. One example is the way progressives tend to see deviant political views. The response is often similar to how conservatives view crime, alternative lifestyles or other transgressive behaviour. This intolerance is usually termed ‘political correctness’, although it’s an imperfect phrase, because it applies both to a code of politeness (much of which I agree with) and also a method of enforcing orthodoxy.