Has the very online left, the bane of our times, been usurped by the very online right? It’s a poetically appealing idea, for sure – an amusing conceit. But I really don’t think so. Purity spirals and internecine denunciations have been a feature of the last decade or so in the era of woke. This seems to have been mainly fostered by women, for which Louise Perry persuasively makes the case here. Perry argues, convincingly, that a lot of the progressive censoriousness was female-led – or at least female-coded – and introduced using passive-aggressive HR ‘guidelines’, office politics, etc.
There’s recently been some concern that a similar mode of operations is emerging on the so-called ‘woke right’, but with a difference: that there are new resurgent reactionaries on the block who want to ban stuff – smartphones for kids, DEI initiatives, even TV – and that these tend to be men, and a lot more blunt in their tactics.
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