COLUMN LEFT : ‘PC’--Another Red Herring From the Right : Political correctness is a problem only insofar as it fuels reactionary paranoia.

This is anti-PC season. PC, in case you have been living in a cave, stands for “political correctness.” The idea, which fermented in the minds of authors like Allan Bloom and Dinesh D’Souza, is that there is a sinister leftist conspiracy on the nation’s campuses to impose attitudes that are considered “politically correct”; the aim is to eliminate free speech and, ultimately, Western civilization.

Even the President, aided by his new head speech writer, Anthony Snow, formerly of the Moonie-owned Washington Times, has got in on the act. In a graduation speech on May 4 at the University of Michigan, he decried campus “political extremists” who “treat sheer force . . . as a substitute for the power of ideas.”

To a European, all this has an oddly familiar ring. In Britain in the mid-1980s, the enemy was called the “loony left” rather than the politically correct; the battleground was less the universities than the grade schools; and the vehicle was Britain’s sleazy tabloids rather than America’s more outwardly respectable conservative pundits.

But the themes are identical: Dark forces, obsessed with sexism, racism and homophobia, are brainwashing the young. Similarly, both campaigns crystallized around a handful of lurid anecdotes. Here, it’s a college’s code of conduct that would ban “inappropriately directed laughter.” There, it was “Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin,” a textbook about a gay couple that was alleged to be mandatory reading in a London school district controlled by the left wing of the Labor Party. It turned out that the book was Danish, that there was a single copy in one local teachers’ library to which children had no access, and that no reader had ever borrowed it. But facts did nothing to deter the crusaders.

I talked last week to students from some of the campuses where the PC debate has raged most fiercely. At Stanford, which gave birth to the catchy chant, “Hey hey, Ho ho, Western culture has to go,” a bemused sophomore said he had no idea what the fuss was about. For him, the only impact of multiculturalism was that he read “The Tale of Genji” in his introductory literature course, which seemed no bad thing. I asked a young woman at the University of Michigan whether she felt any pressure to be PC. Not really, she said, except from the large number of students who were hostile to any expressions of dissent over the Gulf War.

One of the conservatives’ central charges is that the PC conspiracy is masterminded by radicals from the 1960s who have quietly risen to positions of power on campus. This notion of the mole burrowing from within is a timeworn theme in American politics. In the 1950s, the subversive was international communism; in the 1960s, it was the paid agents of Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro.

It was nonsense then, and it’s nonsense now. Battered survivors of the New Left, contemporaries of mine who went into academia, seem bewildered by the PC phenomenon. They report hostile encounters with tense young men and women who litter their speeches with words like deconstruction and intertextuality and half-digested phrases from French theorists like Jacques Derrida--rather as we, the students of 20 years ago, used to spout the French Marxists whom we dimly perceived, through clouds of Gauloises, as our role models.

The second thing that baffles my academic friends is that the PC students are in many ways so conservative. A generation ago, we viewed university authorities with the deepest suspicion. Today, the tendency is to restore them to their 1950s role in loco parentis . Students worried by the unholy trilogy of racism, sexism and homophobia are likely to take their cue from a litigious society and seek redress in the university tribunal and the official code of conduct.

The larger question here is what kind of orthodoxy and extremism we’re encouraged to fear. In England, there was indeed one earnest left-wing councilman who proposed a non-racist version of the nursery rhyme that would say “Baa Baa Green Sheep.” But there was also a right-wing councilor who declared that he would like to “gas 90% of the queers.” He was treated, to the degree he was noticed at all, as a marginal eccentric. And for every American student who issues humorless lectures about sexism, there is a posse of beery louts on spring break with obscene messages on their T-shirts and rape in their hearts--but their behavior is smiled upon as necessary youthful rites of passage.

Politically correct students may not be everyone’s choice as dinner guests. But are their detractors really concerned with preserving free speech, or merely with imposing their own brand of orthodoxy?