A moralistic ideology acting holier than thou is nothing new. In the 80s (and for sure time after) evangelicals had their "Moral Majority."
But nobody really cares until an ideology starts regularly driving harmful actions, at which point there starts to be a lot more push back.
https://paulgraham.com/say.html
This is top to bottom a more thoughtful, nuanced take on essentially the same topic. The main difference is that saying stuff like "class of bureaucrats pursu[ing] a woke agenda" and "woke mind-virus" is fashionable among SV elites today, and it was not in 2004.