As I've observed politics and social discourse over the past 25 years or so, the thing that I think unsettles me most is the increasing prevalence of alignment shift. I'm not talking about a mechanical problem in the front end of your car, nor about changing alliances. I'm talking about "alignment" as the word is used in Dungeons & Dragons.
For those unfamiliar with the game, Dungeons & Dragons is a role-playing game where players assume the role of a character which they guide through an adventure of fighting monsters and searching for treasure, guided by a "dungeon master" who serves as part story-teller, part referee. Each player has a paper called a "character sheet" that lists their character's skills, equipment, and basic characteristics. Among these characteristics is one called "alignment" that describes the guiding values by which a character tells the difference between right and wrong. There are nine possible alignments, plotted along two axes. One axis is good-evil, and the other is lawful-chaotic. This means a character may be one of the following: lawful-good, lawful-neutral, lawful-evil, neutral-good, true neutral, neutral-evil, chaotic-good, chaotic-neutral, or chaotic-evil.
This acknowledgement of a difference between conformity and morality was one of the novel features that set the game apart from others that simply cast players as either heroes or villains. Robin Hood, who broke the law to commit acts of justice and mercy, would be a well-known example of the chaotic-good alignment, while a government official who strictly enforces the letter of the law to cause pain and suffering would be an example of lawful-evil.
In politics, people's worldviews are often described by a similar, two-axes method, with one axis being left-right, and the other being authoritarian-libertarian. In my youth, leftist authoritarians were practically non-existent in this country. From what I could see at the time, the leftists were hippies. They wanted to exist outside of systems of authority, in egalitarian communes where everyone could "do their own thing." They saw themselves as rebels against "the Establishment" or "the System" or "the Man," because at that time, the centers of power were all controlled by people acting on conservative, right-wing values. The people trying to hang onto old, traditional views and the people using violence, poverty, and prison to oppress minorities were one and the same. It went without saying at the time that if someone believed in empowering minorities, they also took a casual or even oppositional approach to rules and mores. The idea of a leftist being a totalitarian was alien, something that existed only in other countries or before my time. If we were taught about them at all, it was only to tell us that they were bad and scary.
As the Boomers grew older and took control of those centers of power, things started to change. The same hippy-leftist vs. totalitarian-right narrative was still dominant, because that's how the people controlling the message saw the world. But at the same time, these hippies-cum-power-brokers started to edify their worldview through force of law. Laws were passed to punish those who made life hard for anyone the left saw as an underdog. Feminism and political correctness became the official orthodoxy on college campuses. The environment was protected, not just by protests and boycotts anymore, but by government agencies wielding power.
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And that's where I abandoned this post over nine months ago, for whatever reason. Anyway, in Dungeons & Dragons, there's a little-known monster called an aleax that a character's god can send to punish the character for straying off alignment. Say an evil character had started being much too kind, helpful, heroic, and self-sacrificing for good causes. The evil deity that character worships would send this "angel of punishment" called an aleax to attack the character. It looks exactly like the character, and only the character can see or touch it. The aleax would fight the character to the death, as I remember. If the aleax killed the character, that was that. They were dead and presumably punished in the afterlife. If the character prevailed, though, and killed the aleax, they'd be given a second chance. I think the lore was that the character would be taken into the realm of their god to serve them for a year or something like that. Then they'd return to the mortal realm supposedly reformed and ready to play in a manner consistent with the alignment listed on their character sheet.
What I was getting at here was the idea that these hippies-turned-tyrants need the hippie god to send some aleaxes down to smite their asses and put them back on the love, peace, and do-your-own-thing path.
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