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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?
Yes, (classical) liberalism is certainly on the downswing now. Noah Smith has written about that here and here. Liberalism is the rebellion now. Wokism was obviously authoritarian. The dissident right, while they liked to pretend they were liberal in order to criticize the left, were mostly liars whose real issue with the woke was that it was the wrong type of authoritarianism for their tastes. It's like how early Atheism dunked on Christianity almost exclusively, but principled people like Dawkins said something to the effect of "obviously my critiques apply to Islam as well" and was punished for it because most people in the movement were never really about principles, they just wanted to sneer at their outgroup.
This is ridiculous. Liberalism was the rebellion 10 years ago, and Noah Smith dutifully contributed to crushing it.
The dissident right does not pretend to be liberal. Liberals are freaked out by it, and call it the "woke right". The liars are, again, people like Noah Smith, though the liberals themselves haven't quite covered themselves in glory when it comes to honesty regarding their criticism of the dissident right.
They absolutely did, pretty constantly too. They argued in favor of free speech and against things like top-down enforcement of morality.
Now the mask is coming off since Trump is in power again.
Not sure what you're referring to here. Care to link an article or two? I vaguely recall Noah being somewhat woke previously, but it was mostly halfhearted, and he's been calling for its elimination for over half a decade at this point.
Who, specifically are you talking about? One thing to keep in mind is that people change their mind - I used to be liberal until recently, and am dissident right now. At no point did I lie about my views.
How is Trump limiting speech or imposing morality top-down?
I'll look for some quotes tomorrow. If you can link some anti-woke and pro-liberal postings of his re: covid lockdowns,vaxx mandates, BLM, and the Twitter Files, I'd also appreciate it.
Musk is a pretty good example here. He claimed to be a "free speech absolutist", but then he started censoring a bunch of things he didn't like once he took over Twitter.
Looking for old articles is pretty hard on blogs, but I found several from Noah going back to 2021, e.g. him arguing against woke, arguing against motivated leftist science, and this one arguing against decolonization narratives.
I'm one of Musk's biggest critics around here, so I'll happily grant you that he's not what he portrays himself as, but he's not a very good example for you, for a couple of reasons.
First, he's not dissident right. He was censoring them in the aftermath of H1B-gate.
Secondly, this is like trying to use Zuckerberg, Bezos, Dorsey or any other Megacorp CEO that was full-woke, and suddenly discovered moderate liberalism. These people aren't liberals, woke, dissident right, or anything else, they're just covering their asses.
I was hoping for examples of public intellectuals or activists. Liberals would be people like James Lindsay, Peter Boghosian, Jordan Peterson, Johnathan Heidt, or Konstantin Kisin. Dissident right would be people like Yarvin, David Greene / Distributist, Auron MacIntyre, or Lomez. There's people who are kinda borderline like Chris Rufo (but I haven't seen him either promising free speech or censoring people), or people who changed their mind over the years like Carl Benjamin.
The liberals are still liberals as far as I can tell, and I haven't seen any phenomenon of any of them suddenly moving to the dissident right, when they got power.
Re: Noah Smith, I found some tweets where he was supportive of BLM, and seemed to think lockdowns were good, but you were right, and he seems a lot more reserved than I expected. Maybe I confused him with someone else.
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