When Harvard political scientist, Yascha Mounk, wrote about the results of the study at The Atlantic, I felt a brief moment of hope for the future.

According to the report, 25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of Americans who don’t belong to either extreme constitute an “exhausted majority.” Their members “share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.”

Most members of the “exhausted majority,” and then some, dislike political correctness. Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.”

Maybe all is not lost, and the shrieking voices of the unduly passionate on social media and in academia don’t reflect the rest of America, the “exhausted majority” who’ve had enough of the crazy calls for criminalizing failure to use preferred pronouns? Then comes George Mason lawprof Ilya Somin to spoil the moment.

It’s a good thing that large majorities of Americans of different racial and ethnic groups believe that political correctness is “a problem.” But it does not mean that all of these people are principled, consistent opponents of censorship. Far from it, in fact.

As Somin shows, the problem with such surveys is multifold, starting with the imprecision of such phrases as “political correctness,” itself born as an inside joke of the progressive left.

Here are some examples from the Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins’ valuable work on on these issues. She too finds that a large majority (71%) decry “political correctness.” But that does not prevent results like these:

53% of Republicans favor stripping U.S. citizenship from people who burn the American flag.

51% of Democrats support a law that requires Americans use transgender people’s preferred gender pronouns.

58% of Democrats say employers should punish employees for offensive Facebook posts.

47% of Republicans favor bans on building new mosques.

And that’s just a sampling of a much broader problem.

In other words, political correctness isn’t so much a “thing” in itself, but a phrase to capture the parts of the “thing” with which people disagree, a useful epithet, but don’t include all the politically correct positions with which they do agree.

For many people (particularly conservatives denouncing the left), “political correctness” is just a pejorative term they use to denounce the types of censorship they dislike.They use more positive terms to describe their own preferred forms of repression.

By using the vague and subjective phrase “political correctness,” the study fell into the same trap that almost snares every study on campus sexual misconduct: it leaves itself open to the vicissitudes of its respondents. It’s not that 80% of respondents are against all censorship, but that they’re against censorship with which they disagree.

And, sadly, censorious left-wing political correctness is matched by what Alex Nowrasteh calls the “patriotic correctness” of the right. Would-be censors on the right and left differ in the objects of their repressive impulses. But they are united in believing that some types of offensive or dangerous expression need to be banned, even if they disagree on which ones.

Where does that leave the “exhausted majority”?

Such inconsistency between abstract opposition to “political correctness” and support for specific forms of censorship should not be surprising. Many people don’t reason carefully about their political beliefs, or make much effort to root out contradictions in their thinking.

Ilya has long been the wet blanket on our possession of sufficient knowledge, the ability to think with sufficient depth and the lack of bias to recognize irrational and inconsistent beliefs. This doesn’t mean that 80% of Americans are against political correctness, but that too many of us just don’t have the capacity to come up with a valid thought at all.

The only thing we seem to know well is that we prefer to believe that which agrees with us, until someone like Ilya Somin shows up to ruin it all.