The underlying factor is that the Private sphere has been eroded, and there are generations of people who have no concept of it. They exist in the Public sphere, and so the thoughts and conversations of others are suddenly subject to "accountbility." There is no conventional notion of what is ones business and what is not. As though for these atomized people with few close relationships and a lack of personal boundaries, that nothing is their business because they are not invited into intimate relationships means everything is because they don't know there is a difference between what is and what isn't.
Appelbaum says:
> A decade ago, I wrote a book about the Sovietization of Central Europe in the 1940s, and found that much of the political conformism of the early Communist period was the result not of violence or direct state coercion, but rather of intense peer pressure. Even without a clear risk to their life, people felt obliged—not just for the sake of their career but for their children, their friends, their spouse—to repeat slogans that they didn’t believe, or to perform acts of public obeisance to a political party they privately scorned.
Even Appelbaum, who wrote a scathing survey of this very phenomenon, hedges herself as not being overly sympathetic to wrongthink, lest she be expelled from the intelligentsia circles she works in for a lack of fervency. What bothers me is that even smart people like her are not seeing the forest for the trees, and how this is a managed phenomenon.
> Despite the right-wing rhetoric that says otherwise, these procedures are not being driven by a “unified left” (there is no “unified left”), or by a unified movement of any kind, let alone by the government.
While I can see why she would want to avoid risking the attention of the people behind this, it is in fact co-ordinated, and the "left," is only one of the hosts and funnels used for it.
Anyway, it's not a discussion or discourse. There is an entire generation of young people who understand attention as power, and any engagement at all is just an enabler. The solution is to form personal networks of intimate relationships based on establishing incremental trust, without permanently recording every second of it, and try to restore some of the Private sphere as an overall effect. If Anne Appelbaum has been cowed by these people, we are much further down the road to perdition than we know.