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it seems like you break a norm by having an individual violate it in a very public manner as a way of testing the strength of a consensus--that is, you force enforcers of the norm to make good on threats against violations, or show that they no longer can, because . . .
. . . a public demonstration of a willingness to violate the norm gives people who privately disagreed with it to publicly oppose it, and if enough do this then you get a preference cascade away from the old equilibrium that quietly rotted away.
(Naturally, new norms can be created if you demonstrate publicly that you can fuck someone up for violating what was previously acceptable behavior, and people who disagree with the new norm are cowed into silence, generating a different preference cascade.)
Some technological developments that seem likely to have facilitated this: 1. Mass media. One person can violate a norm and be seen very broadly very quickly. Mass media is usually seen as a homogenizing force but it's not necessarily a stable homogeny
2. Discoveries that undermined the practical underpinning rationale for many old norms (eg, the pill) all at once; with many such changes, discarding norms became a norm itself 3. Refinement of norm violation as a political tool. Eg, lunch protests in the segregated South
. . .in the Before Time, left-leaning groups were the main practitioners of norm violation as a tool or lifestyle, while conservatives (almost by definition) were custodians of existing norms. I see this situation as reversed today.
The cultural left seems mostly focused on establishing and reinforcing novel norms. This is perhaps an unexpected turn of events, but perhaps less-so when you look at what has happened in the past after successful cultural revolutions. Meanwhile,
cultural conservatives are left without many norms to defend, all of them being effectively undermined by novel physical and social technologies and those old equilibria stomped out. Trying to revive dead norms really probably is best called reaction rather than conservation.
My hunch is all of this is especially unpleasant for many of my older readers I imagine a disproportionate number of you, like me, are repulsed by ideological norms enforced by social . . . well, force, and so probably didn't think much of conservatives in the old days
So, you know, explicitly countercultural forces had a certain appeal And it's reaaaaally uncomfortable watching the counterculture rapidly shifting gears away from undermining old dumb norms to undermining them indiscriminately while inventing new ones at a ferocious pace. end