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I mean it seems like the basic difference here is that a much larger percentage of the population thinks the latter has some sort of moral authority to make lectures, even if those lectures are often unpleasant and they’re not going to change their behavior.
Not any more. What percentage of people goes to church compared to college or works in a corporate environment with HR lectures?
As I've heard it told, the culture war battles of the '80s with the Moral Majority didn't confine themselves to the pews. The likes of Tipper Gore and Jack Thompson were at least perceived as coming for your Black Sabbath CD's, Natural Born Killers on VHS, and Grand Theft Auto games because they were influencing corruptible young minds to commit school shootings (several of those examples pre-date Columbine) and other acts of mayhem.
Although from my chair here today, that historical kulturekampf feels almost quaint.
The striking thing about those battles is about how badly they failed. Wokeness got all the confederate flags removed in an instant, Cops and Roseanne canceled, and Dr. Seuss unpublished, and didn't even break a sweat doing it. The peak bipartisan efforts of the PMRC got a label on records saying "Buy this, your parents will hate it".
You're comparing the successes of woke in its ascendancy compared to the final days of the nagging god-botherers regime. I would say in the US you could chalk up Prohibition at least as an example of their powers of priggishness and moral busybodying, but I'm sure there are a lot more if you bother to look back.
Prohibition was as much feminism and public order as it was religious though. Probably more.
The main complaints about alcohol were that drunks were beating their wives, neglecting their wives, and/or being disorderly on the street and slovenly at the workplace.
Indeed, and there was a lot of overlap between the Prohibitionists and the suffragettes.
The Women's Christian Temperance Union was pretty powerful at its zenith. From what I can gather of the zeitgeist, it aligned with the Progressivism (the original one) of the era pretty well.
Yep. It's not like religious conservatives can't be oppressive, of course. It's just that you have to go back to pre-Revolutionary times to find the really good examples, because they lost power soon after. The usual example of the Moral Majority is weaksauce. Better later examples might be the Hays code and the Comics Code Authority, and moral regulation of broadcast media. Mostly they succeeded because they got in early; they lacked the power of woke to dominate that which was already solidly established.
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