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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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