"Arthur Koestler described how such purity tests worked during his days as a Communist. “We groped painfully in our minds,” the author of Darkness at Noon wrote, “not only to find justifications for the line laid down, but also to find traces of former thoughts which would prove to ourselves that we had always held the required opinion.”
It’s no longer enough to be ideologically pure by current standards. One must always have held the proper beliefs.
Of course, such tortuous moral standards can only lead to lying. In a recent paper titled “Keeping Your Mouth Shut: Spiraling Self-Censorship in the United States,” political scientists James L. Gibson and Joseph L. Sutherland reveal that self-censorship among Americans has soared. In the 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism, 13.4 percent of Americans reported that they “felt less free to speak their mind than they used to.” In 1987, the figure reached 20 percent.
By 2019, 40 percent of Americans reported that they did not feel free to speak their minds.
This isn’t a partisan issue. “The percentage of Democrats who are worried about speaking their mind is just about identical to the percentage of Republicans who self-censor: 39 and 40 percent, respectively,” Gibson and Sutherland report."
https://www.city-journal.org/self-censorship
It’s no longer enough to be ideologically pure by current standards. One must always have held the proper beliefs.
Of course, such tortuous moral standards can only lead to lying. In a recent paper titled “Keeping Your Mouth Shut: Spiraling Self-Censorship in the United States,” political scientists James L. Gibson and Joseph L. Sutherland reveal that self-censorship among Americans has soared. In the 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism, 13.4 percent of Americans reported that they “felt less free to speak their mind than they used to.” In 1987, the figure reached 20 percent.
By 2019, 40 percent of Americans reported that they did not feel free to speak their minds.
This isn’t a partisan issue. “The percentage of Democrats who are worried about speaking their mind is just about identical to the percentage of Republicans who self-censor: 39 and 40 percent, respectively,” Gibson and Sutherland report."
https://www.city-journal.org/self-censorship