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I will maintain my position that the Right has always had its version of woke (meaning in this context, an impulse towards moralistic censorship*) and has always been fairly weak on free speech. Notably, basically every free speech advocacy group is staffed and supported overwhelmingly by liberals. Conservative groups will support conservative causes on 1A issues, but as far as I can tell there's no right-wing equivalent to the ACLU representing the Nazis and there's long been right-wing groups eager to wield social pressure (and state power) to suppress viewpoints and ideas they don't like.
Cancel culture was always a thing, but it became a Thing with the emergence of a faction of illiberal progressives that had the clout to actually apply pressure and a desire to do so. This inversion of the 'proper' order of things was deeply upsetting to the many conservatives who saw themselves as rightful hegemons of American culture.
Helpfully for RW culture warriors, they have something of an advantage in wielding social opprobrium and would probably be even more effective if they hadn't unilaterally retreated into a bubble. They tend to be appealing to a moral lowest common denominator against marginal targets, whereas progressives tend to be morally capricious and avant-garde (which makes them hard to support and leads to frequent circular firing squads).
Aside: Bork is a great example of how differences in perspective lead to mutual perceptions of 'defection'. The Republican view of Bork is that a perfectly qualified candidate was rejected for political reasons. The Democratic view of Bork is that he was utterly disqualified for his role in the Watergate scandal and the GOP was defecting by nominating him in the first place.
Which is why the cooperate/defect paradigm of political analysis is often heavily deficient. There's this tendency to treat political factions as unitary actors who might have different values and goals but at least have the same basic understanding of reality and the 'rules', but that is obviously nonsense. What one side sees as justified retaliation for some infraction, the other sees as unprovoked escalation that demands retaliation in turn.
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*censorship is being used somewhat carelessly here - this phenomenon is driven primarily by social pressure rather than actual censorship, though the state does occasionally weigh in
Losing hegemony was being mocked on every late night show as the party of schoolmarms and people who hated the poor. Utterly losing swathes of the academy and other important cultural institutions. Decisively losing a cultural issue like gay marriage and so on. It wasn't fun and people did complain.
When you declare such and such is beyond the pale and is not even to be seen let alone heard you're not denying them hegemony. You are denying that they should even have the same stake in the country and where its discourse goes.
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Have you heard of this group called "the Libertarian Party"? You may not think they are broadly on "the Right" and while calling them "conservative" is going to be a stretch, it is broadly correct to characterize them as being on "the Right" for most of their history. There is and has been a broad network of right-aligned "liberty" groups in the US for quite a long time.
Cancel culture has existed on the Right for a long time and until recently was pretty strong in being able to gatekeep groups and people from "the Right," from the John Birch Society to the Paleoconservatives to those who aren't sufficiently supporters of Israel, with figures like William F Buckley being key components of canceling (and gelding them into beautiful losers) on the right for many years. "Racist" has long been used to cancel and purge wrong-think from various institutions like the media and academia, but "Anti-Semite," has also long been used to purge people and groups from the Right.
Didn't the capital-L Libertarian Party have some rather ugly schisms and infighting in the last couple years? Did that ever get reasonably resolved? I stopped following them some time around then.
I haven't followed the Libertarian Party in quite a long time. My surface-level understanding I've absorbed through my social group is a group of Ron Paul people calling themselves the Mises Caucus took control of the party from beltway Libertarians, but then they lost the presidential nomination and the LP picked some left-coded covid hysteric who no one has heard of.
As far as I know, it wasn't resolved and most of the Mises Caucus people had no interest in supporting the covid hysteric. I think the Mises Caucus still controls the majority of national committee seats and the chair, but I'm not sure what that means in practical terms.
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I'm curious about this part. What do you mean by "conservatives saw themselves as rightful hegemons of American culture"? Are you talking about things like evangelical dominance during W Bush's administration?
Among other things, but not only that. My observation is that (some) conservatives are much more likely to try and 'gatekeep' Americanness and call things they don't like unamerican (progressives occasionally try, but their heart never seems to be in it); they often frame opposition to wokeness as 'reclaiming' or 'taking back' the country. In general, they seem much more inclined to pushing forward a prescriptive vision of American culture than other factions in American politics.
Some of this I will freely admit is a vibes-based assessment that a lot of conservatives were really disoriented and angered by being on the other side of the enforcer-transgressor dichotomy. By contrast, progressives were also disoriented by the flip, but had previously been quite comfortable in the transgressor role and often seem to prefer it.
A thought on this: the definition of 'conservative' is being on the enforcer side (the act of enforcement is tautologically conservative), and then you have the reformers and reactionaries on the other side.
Progressives have been under the pretense that they were in the transgressor role (and to a degree inherit a movement that is axiomatically transgressive, which is why they, and traditionalist-leaning reactionaries, erroneously call them 'liberals'), but transgression and entrenchment are indistinguishable to any faction that depends on entrenchment.
Progressives have had them beat on that front since at least before the Civil War. (Why else do you think the faction opposed to them still uses the stars and bars?)
It is useful to be able to point out that even classical liberals will act like conservatives once they manage to get into power. "Maximally correct" is not a viable political identity because as soon as the conditions are right to enable rent-seeking on what was a mostly correct answer, that is what gets entrenched, and it remains that way until enough social activation energy accumulates such that it is pushed back by a new truth. Which then entrenches, and like the tides, the cycle repeats.
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Having been made unwelcome or outright banned from virtually every hobby space I enjoyed since I was a wee child in the 80s by pure dint of being conservative, this is rich. Also requires ignoring Biden's rage speech where he repeatedly described "MAGA" as the greatest threat to America. IMHO describing the opposition party as a threat the nation ranks pretty high above merely describing their policies as unamerican.
Yes, but the Left is universalist. It wishes to push forward a prescriptive vision of Being A Decent Person™ which should apply globally. @Skibboleth was making the point that this is different from the Conservative focus on defining Americanness.
I would more or less agree with this, though part of my thesis is also that progressives are, if not happy, then at least comfortable with the idea of being outsiders (and indeed seemed to struggle with the idea that they had real power even when they were getting people fired), whereas conservatives viscerally hated it.
Conservatives were never really powerless. Even at the height of progressive influence, they still ran half the country, had their own parallel media institutions, etc... (It must be noted that the people most affected by progressive cancel culture were other progressives). But they were in a situation where mainstream cultural institutions gave virtually no deference to their sensibilities (a major change) and where expressing conservative opinions on sex/sexuality, gender, or race risked real social disapproval (not just having a blue-haired college student impotently yell at you). Illustratively, in a very short time frame you went from risking censure for being publicly gay to risking censure for being publicly anti-gay.
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Not in the 1960s, but FIRE today is somewhat right-coded and has taken over the old ACLU's mantle of representing without fear or favour.
FIRE is full of classical liberals. They are the political tribe that cares about freedom of speech as a principle. These days being a classical liberal means you caucus with the right. I think the last couple weeks have been eye opening to CLs(it was to me) that many right-wingers aren't really into freedom of speech either. They were/are just mad they were the bootee instead of being the booter
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