The three-colored flag?

Liam Julian, "Putting Fowler back in Fowler's" (2009) presents a perspective that used to be more common that it is today, I think: linguistic prescriptivism as (a particular kind of) cultural conservatism, in explicit association with right-wing politics. Julian wrote:

Burchfield, in his preface to Fowler’s third edition, called the first edition “this extraordinary book, the Bible of presciptivists.” But in the early 20th century, when Fowler was writing the extraordinary book, the trend was away from prescriptivism and toward a descriptive, academic linguistics that, like Burchfield himself, observed rather than decreed.1 Burchfield stressed the extent of “the isolation of Fowler from the mainstream of the linguistic scholarship of his day” and highlighted “his heavy dependence” on English school textbooks and the classics of ancient Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, and post-Renaissance English literature. For Fowler, Burchfield wrote, these influences composed “a three-colored flag” that “was to be saluted and revered, and, as far as possible, everything it represented was to be preserved intact.”

I described “James Kilpatrick, Linguistic socialist” (3/28/2008) as a political conserative with a somewhat different idea about where linguistic prescriptions should come from. And there have been many other examples of right-wing prescriptivists (see e.g. "English Gramar: Not for debate", 9/11/2010).

Of course there have been plenty of famous prescriptivists from other regions of the politico-cultural space, like E.B. White and George Orwell. But the recent prominence of the Classical Learning Test suggests that the right-wing  brand of prescriptivism might be on the rise.