purity spiral
From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Etymology
Used by sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning.
Noun
purity spiral (plural purity spirals)
- The situation in which members of an ideological group become increasingly zealous and intolerant, eventually turning on other members.
- 2016, Matthew Sheffield, Rise of the alt-right: How mainstream conservatives' obsession with purity fueled a new right-wing radicalism:
- [T]he American right has been caught in a purity spiral — a form of vicious circle in which successive elites compete among each other over who is the “true conservative.”
- 2020, Ed West, Small Men on the Wrong Side of History:
- This institutional slant has become most pronounced in universities, which have for several years gone through a 'purity spiral' as conservatives left the field, culminating in a sort of collective meltdown in the mid-2010s.
- 2020, Joseph P. Laycock, Speak of the Devil, page 74:
- Many of TST's critics did frame the issue in terms of purity and contamination. In a debate on Facebook, one critic responded to Greaves's essay on purity spirals, "There's an old saying I like 'If there's a Nazi sitting at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 nazis.'"
See also
Further reading
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