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Is liberalism dying?
I see frequently brought up on this forum that Mitt Romney was a perfectly respectable Mormon conservative that was unjustly torn apart by the Left. In response to this, the Right elected a political outsider that is frequently brazenly offensive and antagonistic to the Left, as well as many (most?) establishment institutions. I am seeing the idea "this is a good thing, because if the Left are our enemies and won't budge from their positions that are explicitly against us, we need to treat them as such", probably expressed in other words.
This frightens me, as it seems to be a failure of liberalism, in this country and potentially other Western liberal democratic countries. Similar to the fate of this forum, where civil discussion was tried and then found to be mostly useless, leading to the expulsion of the forum to an offsite and the quitting of center left moderates like TracingWoodgrains and Yassine Meskhout, the political discourse has devolved into radicals that bitterly resist the other side. Moderates like Trace seem to be rare among the politically engaged, leaving types like Trump and AOC. They fight over a huge pool of people who don't really care much about politics and vote based on the vibe at the moment, who are fed rhetoric that is created by increasingly frustrated think-tanks and other political thinkers. Compromise seems to not be something talked about anymore, and instead, liberalism has been relegated to simply voting for your side and against the other side. To me, this is pretty clearly unsustainable, since the two sides seem to have a coin flip of winning each election and then upon winning, proceed to dismantle everything the previous side did.
We see this in a number of other Western liberal democratic countries. Germany and France both had a collapse of their governments recently due to an unwillingness between the parties to work together and make compromises. Similar states that seem to be on the brink of exhaustion include South Korea and Canada, though I'm told things are not nearly as divisive in Japan. China, though having its own set of problems, seems to not have issues with political division stemming from liberalism, since it's not liberal at all.
I am seeing these happenings and becoming increasingly convinced that liberalism is on its way out. Progressivism and the dissident right both seem to be totally opposed to the principles. This is a bad thing to me and a cause of some hopelessness, since America produced a great deal of good things during its heyday, and even still is doing awesome things. It is predominantly America's technology companies settling the frontier, and recently they've struck gold with AI, proper chatbots, unlike the Cleverbots of old.
Is liberalism dying? If it is, is that a good thing or a bad thing to you? If it's a bad thing, what do you propose should be done to stop the bleeding?
Did America's heyday have anything to do with liberalism? When do you think the "heyday" of America even was, and why do you think liberalism was it's defining feature, so much so that it gets to own all that greatness?
I don't know man. I used to think we had things figured out in the 90's. If you're going to give any particular era to "liberalism", whatever that means, the 90's would probably qualify. Culture seemed to have definitively move away from a conception of The United States as a white Christian nation, and towards a multicultural melting pot. When I think back on my public school education, probably 50% of our assigned reading were polemics about racism, and the importance of not being mean or prejudging the blacks. It felt like we were getting more color blind in the 90's. Bill Clinton had his "Sister Souljah" moment calling out anti-white racism.
I now question whether any of that was sustainable. I question whether the 90's were just the brief period between when the radicals had pushed the overton to a fairly neutral feeling middle, and then further off a fucking cliff. Maybe liberalism was always doomed, merely a stalking horse used by radicals to destroy the "heyday" you romanticize. A lot of those 90's liberals have had a fuck of a mask off moment of late. The ones that seemed sincere have defected to MAGA. Or at the very least realize MAGA is the lesser of two evils compared to the DEI race essentialist.
As a fundamentalist Christian that slowly deteriorated into an agnostic, son of a right wing libertarian that later turned into a radical fascist, who still tends to think with conservative values, I am a product of liberalism. I do not share values with many people, given that I am agnostic and yet still right wing, and yet still holding disdain for a lot of the rhetoric thrown around by the current administration. If liberalism goes away, what will happen to me? If liberalism goes away, what will happen to gay furry skeptic centrists like TracingWoodgrains?
Have you checked out TW's twitter lately? He's all in on "we freaked the normies out going too hot and fast on the trans kids thing, we need to be more subtle next time." He's not aiming for liberalism, more like "wokeism with a human face, run by enlightened lawyers in policy think tanks rather than HR ladies"
I'm not logged in on this phone, but if you haven't been following him I can get you the choice quotes
This is, like most of your straw men about your enemies, written in bad faith and not at all accurate. I follow TW and he's posted nothing that could be fairly characterized in that manner. He's consistently liberal and partisan in the sense that he's anti-Trump and, more broadly, anti-GOP. He's never made a secret of that. But the idea that Jesse Singal's former assistant has ever been carrying water for trans activists is absurd on its face. The idea that the guy who broke the DEI FAA story, which has been retweeted by Elon himself and which gets Trace regularly called a Nazi, is "woke" is ridiculous.
You constantly prove you have no theory of the mind for people unlike yourself.
The hate Trace gets for being a liberal gay furry has always been kind of amusing to me. Instead of believing he is what he has always said he is, you need to invent hidden motives and masks to conceal his nefarious true agenda, when his true agenda is out there in the open. And ironically you show yourself as suffering from the same derangement and lack of theory of mind that his leftist crticics calling him a Nazi and a racist do.
Hard as this is for you to believe, people usually actually believe what they say they believe. Especially when they're arguing on the Internet, where there is little value or purpose in pretending to have beliefs or intentions different from your real ones. The only exceptions are people like, say, some of our Joo-posters, who are more or less honest about what they think of Jews but are not forthright about what they actually want to do to Jews.
Notice that KulakRevolt didn't go full mask-off while he was still on the Motte; once he got some traction on Substack and Twitter, he found the grift was more profitable when you stake out an extreme position and appeal to temporarily embarrassed basement-dwelling warlords. It's actual extremists (or grifters cosplaying as extremists) who hide what they really want to say here.
Trace, on the other hand, was never grifting. Much like Yassine, you can hate what he says, but he's saying the same things he always did.
You are unable to make these distinctions and so you are constantly constructing, and even fabricating, things the people you hate haven't actually said, done, or even hinted at.
No, TW is not a trans activist as generally understood, but I think its quite fair to say that the author of this objects on speed and methods rather than principle.
I think he was extremely obvious the whole time. If hes gotten into holocaust denial now, it certainly doesnt really change much for him.
I think TW is actually pro-trans in the same way that Jesse Singhal, the notorious Trans Enemy #2 is. Speed and methods are important.
He was obvious (and explicit) about wanting political violence the whole time. The Jew and race hatred he mostly kept under his hat until he moved to Twitter.
Yes, as in "we freaked the normies out going too hot and fast on the trans kids thing, we need to be more subtle next time." He literally says it every time he talks about the issue!
Except "speed and methods" would include whether or not kids should be transed at all. Your claim is that he agrees with trans activists about everything and just thinks they need to be sneakier about getting to where they can physically transition children and put trans women into women's prisons, etc. That is not what he "literally says."
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Wait, Kulak left? And he was grifting, and somehow became an extremist? Can you share a bit more context?
He technically still uses his account here, but only to post his substack links and argue in the comments. Guy got enough traction in the Twittersphere to make money, I guess.
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Technically not gone, but his most recent post was a rant about how we're all useless for not being out on the streets killing our political enemies right now. Meanwhile on Twitter, he's gone full Holocaust denier and RAHOWA, and his schtick is encouraging his followers to go out and kill their enemies and stop believing in fake gay things like governments and coexistence, tribal warfare is all that matters, and also please subscribe to his Substack.
I temper my sense of decency to ask, but... RAHOWA?
It's like NANOWRIMO but for the turner diaries but in Minecraft
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Short for Racial Holy War. Coined, as far as I’m aware, by Ben Klassen, the founder of the Church Of The Creator, and a prominent member of the early White Power movement.
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Wow damn what a twist. I remember him for his insightful posts. He was such a long-time member too, I wouldn't have expected this.
I think you definitely should've expected this. All he ever did when he was here was post about how Americans should undertake violence in order to fix what he saw as the evils of our country. That's pretty LARP-y at the best of times, but was even worse in his case since he's Canadian. Dude was never insightful, all he ever did here was post calls to violence. Now he does the same thing, just on another site.
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I agree with your criticism of Steve, but come on, Trace isn't what he always said he is. Trivially, he's not a "Lee Kuan Yew liberal" in any sense that doesn't make the label deceptive. His grievences with this forum also can't be taken at face value.
You do? Why? Other people have already linked half the evidence I was right. He outright says he just wants to go slow on pushing the "trans kids" thing until nature has been fully conquered with womb transplants. It's literally wokeist transhumanism but not bullying hard enough to cause a backlash. The same goals but managed by clever smooth-talking lawyers who can con people into surrendering instead of fighting.
It's the exact same thing you said you find creepy about him!
Because you told me to look at his Twitter, I did, and didn't come up with anything. I saw someone else post his Substack, but didn't read it yet. If you can post any links, I'd still appreciate it.
You know, that's a not-bad description of what I think about him, but I don't recall stating it like that with that amount of certainty. This may be what the issue is here, fairness demands that harsh judgements are withheld until you have evidence, or at least to qualify them them with an explicit acknowledgement that it's vibes-based.
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I don't know how much of a "Lee Kuan Yew" liberal he is, only knowing a little about Lee Kuan Yew, but if he ever called himself that (I don't recall), in what way is it deceptive?
What he says he is nowadays is a center leftist who favors the Democrats and dislikes Trump, but he also dislikes woke extremists. He's a gay furry with lingering Mormon sensibilities despite having left the church. That all seems very accurate to me.
I wish he had not left the forum the way he did, but I understand his grievances. Years later, he's still getting flack and being accused of being an entryist or something for starting the Schism. Now, I think the Schism was a bad idea and didn't like it at the time (and said so), but he was always pretty honest about his intent. I don't think it was a secret plot to destroy the Motte.
Calling him partisan just seems pointless and obvious. @FCfromSSC is a partisan too (and the proximal cause of TW creating the Schism). Like TW, FC is quite honest about his partisanship. People are still butthurt that Trace went off because of all the civil war fedposting that FC and a few others were doing at the time. (I think even FC admits he was not in a good headspace at the time.) But FC is popular here (I like him too, despite being much closer to Trace in my beliefs than FC) , and honestly, folks like @SteveAgain like fedposting. So Trace got endless shit and finally left.
I wish he hadn't and I wish he was less bitter, but I see no dishonesty or grift in his game, and he's certainly not, as Steve implies, telling his followers that actually the only problem with trans extremism is that it scared the normies.
Link some. Come on, put up
I don't mean you fedpost yourself -you like it when other people fedpost. Some people very consistently AAQC any "spicy" post no matter how low effort it actually is
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I mean, just do a search on his profile, it comes up quite a lot (1, 2, 3), and I don't know how you want to invoke his name without either implying authoritarian measures, or being deceptive... and I'm pretty sure Trace is not about to start advocating for the execution of drug dealers.
Yes. I don't care about him starting The Schizm (it was no worse an act than the spinoff of /r/CWR, and no more successful for that matter), nor do I care about him being a partisan (aren't we all?). What bothers me is that I feel like I've been played for a fool by taking his complaints seriously. Originally I understood his grievances were about being mistreated, "muh miserable scolds and ankle-biters", and as far as complaints go it's pretty valid. People got pretty jaded here, there's a background radiation of hostility to anyone with his views, fair enough I wouldn't want to hang out in an environment like that either, if the roles were reversed. So when someone raises an objection like that I try to hear them out, and see if there's a way individual users could do something to make posting here more tolerable (funnily enough I never seem to get much of an answer for the latter, or there's a clear implication of "no - get rid of the background radiation, or bust").
So now some time has passed and I mulled over some of the conversations with him, and my only conclusion is that the mistreatment was at most an excuse, and the grievance was actually about the ideological distance. "Oh noes, you guys didn't like my LOTT hoax (please forget that the B&R audience had pretty much the same reaction to it)", or "oh noes, FC doesn't want to live in the same country as me". When I do the role-reverso on that one I come up empty. If I could politely listen to him as he unironically defended surrogacy, I'm sure he can handle hot takes like "I don't want to share a political jurisdiction with people opposed to my core values".
"Porque no los dos?", you might ask, his issue might both the ideological distance and the mistreatment. Sure, and I'll even grant that the background environment here absolutely is an issue, the problem is that given who he picked to found his "better" alternative to the Motte, we know he doesn't really care about people with other viewpoints being mistreated. This leaves us only with the second complaint, which, as far as I'm concerned, leaves us with nothing. Now maybe it's all a big misunderstanding and I'm a big dum-dum for not noticing what the core of the issue was about, but like I said I feel like an idiot for taking the bait.
I know Trace personally and he is in fact in favor of executing drug dealers. Your inability to understand his politics makes me skeptical of your ability to psychoanalyze him.
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As someone roughly nearer the same pole as Trace and also subject to that hostile background radiation, I'll agree Trace seemed more sensitive to it, but I do think you're being unfair. He's spoken up against cancellation of right wingers, and he was a long time Motter - I don't believe he was against the principals of extending charity to his ideological opponents all that time. You know everything you've said about him has also been said about (and to) me. At a certain point you become jaded to people telling you you're an evil liar and you should die (yes, I do sometimes get that too), or else you decide you've had enough and you leave.
And also to be fair, FCfromSSCs original posts went beyond "I don't want to live in the same country as you," but to me read more like a near declaration of war.
I realize I'm defending Trace a lot here when I also disagreed with a lot of his stunts (the Schism, the LOTT prank, etc.) But man am I tired of everyone left of center being accused of being a closet Stasi. Yes, I know everywhere else on the Internet everyone right of anything (even to the degree Trace and I are) gets accused of being a Nazi.
I aspire to better for the Motte, but if you saw our mod queue (and especially the "contributions" of people like Steve), it's clear a lot of people don't really object in principal to boots stomping on human faces, only to being the stompee and not the stomper.
Fwiw, I am anti-stomping, and I do believe Trace is too.
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I do check his Twitter. In fact, he's just about the only main reason I visit the site, because I value what he has to say. If you can link it, I would appreciate it, though I don't think it's the whole story, since he clearly supports Jesse Singal and thought it was a mark against Bluesky that they were trying to kick him off.
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He only pops up when people I follow get into a spat with him. I scrolled for a while looking for words to this effect, but I can only scroll so far, so if you could get those quotes I'd love to see them.
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