Language policing is big in every human circle where people realize language has impacts, whether it's a religion that has prohibitions on the name of God, a disgust-sensitive subculture that finds some words too vulgar, or a political culture that insists the United States is "A republic, not a democracy."
And when you zoom in on specific linguistic struggles, you often find that it's less a matter of one side being the police and the other being the anarchists, or cerebral philosophers accurately reckoning with the hazard of losing some ideas in a wide-ranging territory of thoughtful discourse, and more two sides with competing values they understand are promoted or eroded with certain language. For example, there's no "freedom" side in the fight over "Merry Christmas" vs "Happy Holidays" (however much inflated), just two forms of "policing" with different implicit values.
Sometimes, of course, you do find topics where one side of a struggle is much more about restraint and the other side is struggling against restraint itself. See, for example, people who are upset that they can't tell racist jokes anymore without someone getting offended.
And when you zoom in on specific linguistic struggles, you often find that it's less a matter of one side being the police and the other being the anarchists, or cerebral philosophers accurately reckoning with the hazard of losing some ideas in a wide-ranging territory of thoughtful discourse, and more two sides with competing values they understand are promoted or eroded with certain language. For example, there's no "freedom" side in the fight over "Merry Christmas" vs "Happy Holidays" (however much inflated), just two forms of "policing" with different implicit values.
Sometimes, of course, you do find topics where one side of a struggle is much more about restraint and the other side is struggling against restraint itself. See, for example, people who are upset that they can't tell racist jokes anymore without someone getting offended.