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If you grew up in a lefty college town, things like the "Amen/Awoman" Congressional prayer or fruity Kwanzaa messages have a familiar ring, the difference is in who is saying them...Which suggests either there's been a broad shift in culture or a disappearance in opposing forces.
(This also goes for CDC experts expressing "level the playing field by letting the old white people die" views, too: the change is not so much in these views being expressed at all, but that the new setting for these views has become core, previously staid national institutions.)
The social media explanation would suggest that the shift, even if not population level, is broad enough that there are millions of people who now think, say "Latinx" is important to making people feel included & those millions are especially influential in how politicians behave
The "vanishing opposition" explanation suggests that ordinary, small-c conservative expectations about values (call it the "Hallmark channel" view)have suddenly disappeared from elite circles or become sufficiently low status to express that the center of gravity rapidly shifts.
A third explanation, however, is more process/institution oriented. Rather than the center of gravity of elite or popular opinion moving rapidly, the incentives of policy-makers have suddenly altered such that purity spirals are more important than broad-based popular appeal.
Public statements to the media used to be an alternative to private channels, and be tailored for broad appeal, while social media and lost guarantees of confidentiality in private means that the main way elites communicate is now through these public statements and gestures.
More ominously, one suspects these public statements and gestures are themselves the main mechanism for decision-making, while the formal institutions of governance and electoral accountability are now atrophied and either sufficiently corrupted or powerless so as to be ignored.
While making a big deal out of Kwanzaa and ignoring or demeaning Christmas, or "Amen and awoman" or whatever, is in itself fairly meaningless, it's a statement to other elites that the person is committed to the purity spiral even at the costs of appearing ridiculous.
When it comes to CDC vaccination priorities, of course, this same pattern of purity spiral-based statements that count "equity" over such minor plebian concerns as saving lives (or even feasibility of roll-out) is highly consequential- but perhaps effective in-group signaling.
Most darkly, the broader patterns of lockdown hypocrisy, from protective holiness of protests to jetting off to Cabo or dining at French Laundry after outlawing such for the plebes, might be closer to a feature than a bug, by announcing that the same rules don't apply to all.
When such hypocrisy is exposed (or trumpeted in the case of protests),if not followed by any kind of accountability, simply reinforces the toothlessness of supposed popular rule, and underlines to elites that they must and should care only about impressing one another above all.
