Language policing is still big in dem circles.
And when you zoom in on specific linguistic struggles, you often find that it's less a matter of one side being the police and the other being the anarchists, or cerebral philosophers accurately reckoning with the hazard of losing some ideas in a wide-ranging territory of thoughtful discourse, and more two sides with competing values they understand are promoted or eroded with certain language. For example, there's no "freedom" side in the fight over "Merry Christmas" vs "Happy Holidays" (however much inflated), just two forms of "policing" with different implicit values.
Sometimes, of course, you do find topics where one side of a struggle is much more about restraint and the other side is struggling against restraint itself. See, for example, people who are upset that they can't tell racist jokes anymore without someone getting offended.
> Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness
> Progressive activists are the only group that strongly backs political correctness: Only 30 percent see it as a problem.
> So what does this group look like? Compared with the rest of the (nationally representative) polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are. With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country.
(I should caveat this by saying I’m in the apparently 18% of Asians who doesn’t think political correctness is a problem. But there is a huge class/education divide.)