Prigs Pivot When Taboos Fade

When traditional moral domains (for example, religion or sexual mores) liberalize among elites, people who derive status from enforcing morals redirect their policing impulse to new, more arcane rule sets (for example, social‑justice language and etiquette). Those new rule sets spread most easily where politics mixes with interpretation—notably humanities and social‑science departments—and later diffuse into corporations and media. — This explains why new moral panics and etiquette regimes repeatedly emerge and why institutions (universities, firms) are common launchpads for that spread.