Never forget that critiques of “wokeism” started with white men nominally on the center-left - often liberals in good standing - and ended here. https://twitter.com/secpompeo/status/1351537398564286466?s=21

This is what the anti-PC stuff was always about. The intellectual arguments about freedom of speech and so forth were a stalking horse for a bunch of critiques whose appeal wasn’t WHAT THEY SAID but WHO THEY TARGETED: minorities, women, young people, progressives.

There’s a reason these anti-PC ideas were so irrepressible on op-ed pages for so long, even while so much else happened. They were a socially acceptable way to tap into reactionary resentment felt, most often, by white men, and to attack groups that white men resented.

White male social resentment goes beyond ideology. The threat from America’s growing diversity and changing social order hits on a reptile-brain level, which is why, if disguised as an argument about free speech or whatever, even liberals happily jumped on the anti-PC train.

Over time "anti-PC" migrated to the far right, where it increasingly blurred with open bigotry, like Pompeo's reference to "multiculturalism" above. That's always where it belonged though - the right, unlike the center-left, just didn't pretend this was all about core principles.

It's also worth noting that the same complaints about "wokeism" have also spread to the far left, although in a slightly different form: lefty guys complain about "identitarianism" and mock politicians for touching racial inequality instead of the true faith of economic justice.

Regardless of where it crops up - left, right, or center - anti-PC rhetoric thrives not because of the validity of its facial arguments, but because it lets people attack a bunch of social groups, like women and racial minorities, that are lower on the social pecking order.