Ta-Nehisi Coates offered this through provoking statement  in response to a statement of Andrew Sullivan’s:

There’s a lot here that I agree with. (I’m against hate-crime laws for instance.) But I think any sort of conservative intellectual critique of liberalism and minority rights, really has to reckon with American conservatism’s appalling record on that front. 

Put differently, I think there’s something to be said about political correctness on the Left, about hate crimes legislation, about affirmative action etc. But these are problems that American conservatives don’t have to answer for, in large measure, because they’ve been utter cowards in the face of some of the greatest moral issues of our time.

Moreover they have used a skepticism of change, to mask a defense of institutional evil. 

Coates here identifies what may be the single greatest weakness of conservatism: its resistance to any and all change and its history of embracing retrograde attitudes about race.  Modern conervatism was created by a small group of people in the mid-twentieth century.  It cut its teeth defending racial segregation in the South and Franco’s reign in Spain.  It has traded in both overt and covert racism, sexism and heterosexism, it has traded in fairly overt xenophobia and the tribalism for decades.  Confronted with serious problems, conservatism has chosen to valorize the past, to whitewash the problems of the present and attack advocates of reform as agents of destruction.  The conservative track record of being wrong far more often than right would have taught caution to anyone else.

Liberalism, by contrast, has a long and coherent history in the west; Jefferson and Madison, though two of the great liberal thinkers, were inheritors of a political tradition; they were students of Locke, too his ideas and expanded on them.  They were products of the Enlightenment (now being attacked by conservatives in Texas).  Liberal politics represent an intellectual orientation toward ongoing reform and away from authoritarianism.  Liberalism is simultaneously an intellectual proposition and a programmatic response; although its fair to argue that progressivism is programmatic liberalism.  Liberalism has been right far more often than it has been wrong on important issues. 

Twentieth century American liberalism grew naturally from earlier liberalism.  It took seriously the Enlightenment view of “all men created equal” and the value of science and learning.  In addition, it rejected it’s previous embrace of laissez-faire economics, recognizing that human dignity also required a level of material security that such economics could not provide; it adopted a variety of regulatory systems to create stronger economic stability and widespread prosperity.  In international affairs, it created and embraced multi-lateral, international relationships – exemplified by the UN and NATO (it’s interesting to me that American liberalism’s greatest failure was Vietnam - the one time it engaged in actions counter to its core values).  At a policy level, Twentieth Century liberalism succeeded beyond anyone’s imagination – following the Great Society, poverty in the US fell to its lowest level ever, strides were made in achieving racial equality, economic inequality declined. 

At a social level, American liberalism sought to uphold individual dignity by addressing bigotry and bias.  That meant, in practice, recognizing that many commonly used terms were not merely offensive, but dehumanizing; historical usage of certain terms matters and some behaviors and lagnuage do not, do not, belong in civilized society.  It’s not just swear words, but epithets are damaging, dismissive of human value.  Liberalism has, as part of its centuries’ long evolution, sought ways to increase human freedom by removing barriers to freedom – political economic and social.  In practice, this has meant laws against discrimination, support for things like minimum wages and unionization, universal public education and universal health care.

The policy positions taken by various institutions and organizations may be flawed, but they represent an attempt to recognize and redress social problems.  They are part of an attempt to improve human dignity.

Whatever it’s failings, the much maligned political correctness was grounded in an attempt to treat with respect persons for whom respect had been lacking in our society.

Coates offered this thought:

And yet through it all, blacks have allied themselves, in the main, with liberals. They haven’t done this because they support the entire liberal agenda, or because they think liberalism is an implicit cure-all for racism. They’ve done it because because reconciling the country to its own diversity is at the core of modern liberalism–it’s the foundation to the house, not the paint-job. This is about history. Lyndon Johnson didn’t simply look for black people to window-dress existing policy, he expanded existing policy in a way that showed a policy commitment–at great political cost–to healing the country’s oldest wound, and, in the process, he purged the party of people who had vested interest in jabbing at the wound.