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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?
Trace may be moderate for a democrat but he is a naked partisan for his side, waging the culture war and openly promoting total democrat conquest over the other side. He just believes that the most extreme fringe of his party needs to be reformed in order to achieve this victory.
This sort of contrasts with most of the grey tribe motteposters who might happen to align with one party or the other, but argue with the kayfabe of neutral facts and logic. This may be part of a broader schism in the rat-adjacent-sphere, where Scott and similar types are more explicitly aligning with the left wing, and steering away from topics that may be politically inconvenient. This place only exists because Scott kicked us (and our obsession with inconvenient facts) out of his place.
What inconvenient facts can you post here that you can't post in the comments to a relevant ACX post?
You should ask what couldn't you post on SSC back when the relevant containment measures and splits were taking place.
There was a time when controversial issues got contained first in the Culture War thread on /r/SSC, and then got split off to the Motte. ACX came much later, and Scott was a lot more careful with controversial takes himself.
I don't have a clear memory of the creation of the CWT, but I remember posting in it and the split - I thought Scott wrote fairly clearly in his RIP Culture War Thread that he appreciated the CWT and was sorry to disassociate himself from it, but the hecklers were engaging IRL to veto it and it ultimately wasn't a wise battle to pick.
Right, but it still answers your question, and reaffirms his statements that we're here because Scott kicked us out.
"Scott kicked us out" seems like a dysphemistic way to describe (presumably characteristically nicely) asking the moderators of an independent subreddit named after his blog to stop doing something in association with that name, making this a bit "no true liberal." The top level comment was Is liberalism dying? Scott changed his life to be more liberal online, so, if anything, his online conduct is a pro-liberal trend.
I don't see anything dysphemistic about it. The moderators theoretically being able to defy him doesn't detract from the fact that he wanted to cut himself off from certain opinions, some of which he held and holds himself. If nothing else, your original question "what can (/could) you say here that you couldn't say on ACX" is 100% answered.
Is it more liberal? I've just been told by someone else that any act of repressing information is the fault of illiberalism. You're right it all feels very "no true liberal", but probably not in the way you intended.
What would Scott have had to do to avoid being perceived as illiberal?
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Are you new here? In the past, he specifically banned HBD, to give one example.
When was that? I started reading in 2017, but I didn't read the comments, so I just knew he had a 2/3 kind, necessary, correct rule that allowed Steve Sailer to post Steve Sailer things. The subreddit was a different story.
At one point we were reduced to talking about "muggle realism" and "Horrible Banned Discourse" in the Slate Star Codex comment section when Scott banned the strings "HBD" and "Human Biodiversity" (the former was a play on an earlier euphemism of "Death Eaters" for Neoreactionaries, because Scott, hypocrite that he is, also banned that word after he wrote his posts on Neoreaction).
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How is this distinguished from just advocating for his preferred policies and outcomes, exactly the same way as everybody else?
Is there anyone who isn't a partisan for their own side, or promoting total conquest of their own side?
By noting that he's in favor of voting for one party, regardless of whether it promises to implement his stated preferred policies.
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Contrarians will flip when their side starts winning too hard.
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I think you're basically right. His voting preferences are indistinguishable from something like an anarchist voter just trying to push the Overton window left. I think he is deceiving himself when he says he's a centrist and believes he has a better chance of tinkering with the Democratic Party to make it into what he wants than he does any other alternative. He's pretty clearly blue at heart.
Given his priorities lately on hammering the left about how it handles education and how it's handled the FAA hiring scandal, it aligns with his stated goals and makes him not the ideologue that I think he is perceived as here, but he has serious blind spots, like Scott Alexander, but perhaps less severe.
John Grillington, lifelong center-right suburbanite, has voting preferences indistinguishable from a literal neo-nazi. One shouldn't draw overly strong conclusions from that. I can understand why Trace writing the right off might be annoying, but it doesn't make him a fake centrist.
I actually think this is backwards, both specifically and in a more general sense. The rat-left are mostly pretty moderate and hold normie center-left policy preferences. They like meritocracy, institutions, pluralism and tolerance, etc... They hold some odd beliefs, but those are orthogonal to their politics. The rat-right, such as it is, is far more prone to fairly radical political beliefs (e.g. neoreaction, HBD).
Tbh there’s a pretty good chance he voted Obama at least once.
While he is a fictional archetype, he is representative of a number of people I know in real life. The general pattern is that he has fairly moderate (albeit nebulous) policy preferences but doesn't engage with politics very much and is strongly negatively polarized against anything vaguely left-wing. He definitely didn't vote for Obama.
Yeah, at least 50% of the people I run into who meet that description voted for Obama in ‘08. Granted, this could be filter bubble effect- having ‘moderate’ policy preferences is much more left wing than average round here. But also, mathematically, Obama had to get votes from plenty of these people to win Indiana and North Carolina.
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It rather does. As a matter of category, a centrist is a balance of left and right. If they write off on half the political spectrum, they are not a centrist.
If your definition of centrist is 'even 50/50 split in preference for prevailing political parties', perhaps, but that is an unreasonable standard and also a faintly ridiculous one. It would require ignoring actually existing politics in favor of maintaining a dubious notion of balance. Intellectual alignment is not partisan alignment and you don't get to vote for what you want; you get to vote for what's on offer. One can have authentically centrist preferences and still feel one party consistently offers something more aligned with your preferences than the other.
One may also align with one party or the other for more basic reasons. TW has been pretty unambiguous about why he's not aligned with the American Right, and it's not because he's actually a doctrinaire leftist; it's because the American Right thinks he deserves fewer rights and preferentially wouldn't exist.
The location of a center does not care if you think it's unreasonable or ridiculous. A center is a relative state, and it is relative to elements adjacent to it as a whole, not what someone wishes those elements would be. Trying to claim an 'authentic' center is just a No True Centrist fallacy in the making.
TracingWoodgrains is not a centrist because they disagree with both elements the Left and the Right. They are a fake centrist because they are not in the center. That they quibble with the left on matters of tactics is irrelevant.
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Should we not though?
I know from experience that DR3 ie "Democrats are the real racists" is a widely disparaged take here but when the voting preferences of literal neo-nazis are functionally identical to those of the woke left, shouldn't that give you pause?
Who's accusing who of "fascism" again? I cant help but notice parallels between the origins of national socialism durring the inter-war period, (seizing the means of cultural production) and the rise of the woke left over the last 20 years.
No. People have widely disparate reasons for voting for a party. The fact that a conservative centrist and a neo-nazi both have strong preferences for Republicans doesn't imply that the conservative centrist is actually a neo-nazi or the neo-nazi is actually a centrist.
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What makes you say that Scott is explicitly aligning with the left wing, beyond continued displays of his longterm predilections?
The man came out defending HBD. I can't think of many things less leftist.
Perhapse this is an issue of different cultures, but within the specific context of US politics HBD tends to get lumped in with race-essentialism as a subset of collectivist/identity politics, which is in turn closely associated with the US Left, and the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party in particular.
This is extremely typical of your output. You use vague passive-voice terms such as “tends to get lumped in with” and “closely associated with” in order to avoid having to explicitly delineate why one thing is, on a granular practical and analytical level, similar to the other. Literally zero of the people I know who enthusiastically promulgate HBD research are progressive. Not one.
The logical implications of HBD (both on a group level and an individual level) are simply not compatible with American-style progressive ideological commitments. Progressivism doesn’t mean “collectivism” or “identity politics”. Those things are, at best, orthogonal to progressivism. They have no inherent connection to the Democratic Party. “Atomized American-style meritocratic liberty-maximizing liberal democracy” is not the default human ideology against which all other ideologies should be measured. You are noticing that two wholly different ideologies differ from yours in the same way, and declaring them the same thing based on that.
In your mind, the only thing that matters in defining an ideology is “how distant is it from mine on the specific axis of ‘focus on population groups instead of individuals.’” But there are a great many other axes of ideological measurement that we can care about!
Identify politics is absolutely a progressive ideology and its proponents (in the US at least) are almost all either current or former progressives.
Similarly the people most vocally in favor of privileging "inate group differences" over individual differences/merit tend live in "blue" counties and voted for either Kamala Harris or a third party, whereas the people opposed to racial sinecures and Identity-Politics voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
You may not like it, but this is what an accurate map of the current US political landscape looks like.
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His motivated reasoning justifying transgenderism arguments is mostly what I think of, but to be honest, I have a limited amount of exposure to Scott Alexander. I found Scott Alexander through this forum (which I in turn found through rdrama.net), not the other way around as I assume was true for many here. Until recently, it was the consensus that he stopped being the firebrand he was in the 2010s, and I found what I saw of his new stuff significantly less interesting than the original Slate Star Codex blogs that were linked here, so I wasn't particularly motivated to disprove the consensus. I prefer the monthly AAQCs to his new stuff.
I'm afraid you're out of the loop, Scott has been been broadly supportive of trans people for about as long as he's been blogging and it's been a subject thrust into the societal limelight. Even when he tackles questions like its potential classification as a mental illness, autogynephilia and so on, he's always advocated for compassion, understanding and tolerance of trans people, even if he's lukewarm about the ideology. He's been remarkably ideologically consistent for the ~decade I've been reading him, so he's not really more leftist than he ever was, and I would peg him as firmly grey tribe, not that it's a very fixed category.
He has been less radical, at least in the eyes of many of his longterm readers, but as he speculated in a post addressing that topic, it might simply be that discourse outpaced him. I consider his recent posts somewhat of a return to form. Even old Scott wouldn't outright endorse HBD, at best he wrung his hands about it, and would avoid it where possible. You're correct that it was his squeamishness (and pressure from his social circle) that made him deplatform the thriving discussion threads of CWR or even some topics in the comments of his blog.
(I'm surprised people come here from Drama. Not that I judge, I lurk for the lolz and did so while it was still a sub. Adversity makes for strange bedfellows, because I can't imagine a forum that has a more polar-opposite culture and discussion norms than /r/Drama when compared to us)
I'm not surprised people come here from Drama considering it's a place where smart people can go and pretend to be stupid, much like SomethingAwful (and its ultimate successor, Kiwifarms) and (depending on the day) 4chan.
People wouldn't really come here from Reddit or Twitter, for those are generally places where stupid people go to act smart (contrast TheMotte's designated stupid zone, /r/culturewarroundup, with the average comment on /r/blockedandreported).
Kiwifarms isn’t really full of people pretending to be stupid, on a lot of threads the actual quality of the writing and the clear intelligence of the commenters is actually impressive. It’s more just strange that seemingly very smart people spend years of their lives chronicling in exhaustive detail the exploits of minor online figures.
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Didnt /r/drama go kind of nuts in 2014? I used to love that place as a lolcow farm that dunked on screeching libs but it went through several cultural changes and purges that its become just a meaner version of leftist subreddits now. Still a bit funny, but more monotonous
rDrama was always kind of nuts and they have always been mean.
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How do you guys even read that website? At least on reddit you could turn subreddit CSS off with RES.
I kind of like the kitty that follows your cursor.
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