There is one surprising fact about the latest outbursts of public vulgarities that deserves to be noted. Back in the 1960s, occasional vulgarities were associated with the political Left: student revolutionaries often used common language to emphasize their contrast to official politics with its polished jargon.
Today, vulgar language is an almost exclusive prerogative of the radical Right, so that the Left finds itself in a surprising position of the defender of decency and public manners. Politeness (manners, gallantry) is more than just obeying external legality and less than pure moral activity. It is the ambiguously imprecise domain of what one is not strictly obliged to do (if one doesn’t do it, one doesn’t break any laws), but what one is nonetheless expected to do.
We are dealing here with implicit unspoken regulations, with questions of tact, with something towards which subjects have as a rule a non-reflected relationship, something that is part of our spontaneous sensitivity, a thick texture of customs and expectations woven into our inherited substance of mores. Therein resides the self-destructive deadlock of Political Correctness: it tries to explicitly formulate, legalize even, the stuff of manners.