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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 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.
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)
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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