"Bambi-Nazis", along with "Joylessly Accusatory", are the best new terms of this equally new decade.
What happened? How did a status-marker of the left-liberal counterculture come to be abandoned? There were two reasons. The first was the rise of middle-class feminism, which has always been innately hostile to anything unseemly or raucous or improper. All those prim whitebread Little Miss Muffets reading Ms. Magazine loathed salty language, which they associated with machismo, sexuality, and roistering. There has always been a prissy neo-Victorian strain in American feminists. That’s why they are the most boring people on the planet. Here in New York we call these rigid, moralistic vanilla feminists “Bambi-Nazis,” which is a perfectly apt phrase for the mix of Walt Disney and Heinrich Himmler that characterizes their thinking. Bambi-Nazi feminists were instrumental in returning the parameters of public discourse back to where they had been in 1920.
The other reason was the rise to respectability of many of the counterculture’s representatives. Protesters at Berkeley and Columbia grew up and became lawyers, investment brokers, publishers, politicians, journalists, and—most prominently of all—academics. Radical types like Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin and John Kerry metamorphosed into well-heeled members of the left-liberal establishment, and establishments by their very nature are pompous, priggish institutions. They breathe an air of corporate self-importance. Salty language does not comport with prestige, prominence, and fat bank balances.In my experience, the worst of the Bambi-Nazis are Prot clergy.