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I am old enough to remember the 80s and 90s, and your history is inaccurate. Sure, Fredric Wertham and Tipper Gore were flagbearers, there have always been liberal activists crying "Think of the children!" But I also remember the Moral Majority. I also remember who was railing against D&D: it wasn't liberals, it was conservative Christians. Same with rock and rap, Tipper Gore and Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment notwithstanding. (Liberals complained about "violence" but that's about it.) Clinton complained a lot about right-wing talk radio and disinformation, but he didn't quash anything.
Authoritarians are very pro-censorship, and authoritarianism is not really a left/right phenomenon. Hardly a novel observation. But in the U.S., historically it's more often been the right pulling the censorship levers. That's reversed today, but I think you are the one looking at things with a revisionist lens.
The Christian right might have been trying, but they accomplished nothing. Even at the time. It wasn't just a long term loss, they lost all the short term battles as well. The major media outlets all ignored them and kept pushing left wing ideas the entire time.
That's not true: TV shows, comic books, radio stations, and yes, schools and universities, all were pressured by right-wingers and often censured teachers and classes, took programs off the air or refused to play certain episodes or songs because of (largely) conservative Christian complaints. "D&D panic" was definitely a thing, with some schools outright forbidding D&D books on campus. It's true there were few outright "bannings," but then, there are few outright bannings today. What is materially different today is social media, where it's much more visible when the people running the companies are kicking famous individuals off their platforms.
During that whole period I could walk into a bookstore and see all the D&D books lined up, ready to be bought. Show me the bookstore selling "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street"
Do you think this is the first time in American history that a publisher discontinued publishing titles or stores and libraries stopped shelving them because of political or social pressure?
I am not asserting a one to one equivalency between today and the 1980s, I am asserting that the claim that the right wing never "successfully" censored anything is false.
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I'm not sure why you are implying that "not conservative republicans" = progressives, since the most conservative politicians in that period were southern Democrats (there were, of course, essentially no elected Republicans from the deep South in that period; see here, here, here and here )
As for the Comics Code, it grew out of the 1954 investigation by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. The subcommittee members during the hearing were : Robert Hendrickson (R-New Jersey),Estes Kefauver (D- Tennessee), Thomas C. Hennings, Jr. (D-Missouri), and William Langer (R-North Dakota). By the time the linked report was issued, Olin D. Johnston (D- South Carolina) and Alexander Wiley (R-Wisconsin) were on the committee, but they did not participate in preparing the report.
Anyhow, the idea that moral censoriousness around images of sex and violence is the sole province of progressives, rather than conservatives, is very odd: Moral objections to that sort of material is pretty much a part of the definition of being "conservative" in the USA, and certainly when you look at efforts to remove books from schools and libraries, the pattern is clearly that liberals object to books that are ostensibly racist, and conservatives object to books that depict sex, nudity, or violence. And, of late book challenges are most common for the latter reasons.
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I wonder at the extent to which this is true. I remember William Bennett and Joe Liebermann handing out "silver sewer" awards to "cultural polluters". I likewise seem to remember support for obscenity laws and public decency standards among the Red Tribers of my youth. I don't remember a lot of legislative action, but I do seem to recall a fair amount of cultural pressure.
What's the model, here? Did Red Tribe never care about corrupting content or public indecency? Did they merely never care about it from a legislative angle? This seems like a thesis worthy of a deeper dive.
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