Nothing terrifies contemporary conservatives more than the thought that their woke-progressive enemies will bring the regulatory weight of the federal government — in alignment with Big Tech and the economic and cultural powers that dominate civil society — to drive them out of the public square and severely penalize them in their personal lives.

Some have taken to calling this nightmarish vision of official conservative persecution “soft totalitarianism,” but that’s at once hyperbolic (invoking visions of Nazi Germany and Soviet communism) and oxymoronic (what’s next, cozy torture and cuddly concentration camps?). Others prefer the similarly paradoxical moniker “pink police state.”

But the simplest and more accurate descriptor is probably the one that’s been attached to China’s efforts at using the latest advances in digital technology to enforce draconian rule by the Chinese Communist Party: a social credit system. Such a system works by rigorously monitoring speech and behavior, with those who conform to the party line rewarded and dissenters punished. The former are systematically granted, and the latter denied, access to top jobs, prime housing, easy credit, and freedom to travel. A society with such a system would be strictly divided into good citizens and bad. Play along and you thrive; violate official expectations and you get blacklisted, moved to the back of every line, and even excluded altogether from a range of social privileges.

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