The transgressive style is not without precedent on the formally political conservative right, either. The Federation of Conservative Students in the UK famously shocked with a poster saying “Hang Nelson Mandela” and criticized Thatcher for her soft touch, perhaps an early version of the “cuckervative” jibe. They also had libertarian and authoritarian wings of thought, but certainly constituted a break from the decorum of the Burkeans, adopting some of the harder edge of the Thatcher era, even flirting with far-right ideas. The reformist-left writer Christopher Lasch applied the Freudian conception of transgression as anti-civilizational to his critique of the vacuous nihilism and narcissism of post-sixties American consumer society.

But since the sixties, the norm has until now been that critics of transgression have generally come from the right. Theorist of post-industrial society Daniel Bell lamented the transgressive ethos of the sixties and warned of its “obsessive preoccupation with homosexuality, transvestism, buggery, and, most pervasive of all, publicly displayed oral-genital intercourse.” The transgressive irreverent style of the sixties counterculture was everything the right hated in previous culture wars. The “adversary culture” bemoaned by conservative anti-feminists like Phyllis Schlafly and the neocons of Commentary magazine warned against the destructive impulses of the transgressive sensibility.

Feminism’s relationship to the cultural politics of transgression is more complicated still. When the second wave of feminism burst forth in the sixties, captured in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, it was regarded by the right as part of the broader sexual revolution and the transgressive culture that was going to destroy the U.S. family, moral restraints, and tradition. In the battle over Roe v. Wade and Phyllis Schlafly’s war on the Equal Rights Amendment, feminism was very much on the side of the transgressive tradition of de Sade, as it sought to destroy moralism and free the id. However, for some feminists the id of their transgressive male peers proved a little too free. Criticisms of the inequities of “free love,” and the hypocrisies and inequalities experienced by women in anti-war and other activist movements in the sixties and seventies, started to emerge from feminist writing as a kind of critique of the counterculture. The pornified culture produced by the sexual revolution soon came under its harshest criticisms from feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon by the eighties, and soon the war-on-porn feminists even aligned with conservatives, who had previously denounced feminism as central to the debauchery of the sixties.

As Lasch understood, for progressive politics anti-moral transgression has always been a bargain with the devil, because the case for equality is essentially a moral one.

During the recent online culture wars, and their spillover into campus and protest politics, feminists have tried to embrace transgression with the Slut Walk movement and sex- positive pro-trans, pro-sex worker and pro-kink culture that was central to Tumblr. However, like the right, it has run up against a deep philosophical problem about the ideologically flexible, politically fungible, morally neutral nature of transgression as a style, which can characterize misogyny just as easily as it can sexual liberation. As Lasch understood, for progressive politics anti-moral transgression has always been a bargain with the devil, because the case for equality is essentially a moral one.