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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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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?

No, I don’t think liberalism is dying. I think the reverse is true; the population of conservatives is ever-shrinking like that meme of two ants in the middle of water.

I can’t pull up my non-anecdotal evidence at the moment, but I can use my own anecdote in my family. My entire family, from my parents to the great grandparents, is blood-red socially-conservative MAGA Republican, and I am the only progressive blue blood Democrat (the story of how that happened is tragically boring). My entire family is also stupid. I can not think of a single person that has demonstrated emotional intelligence more developed than a fifth-grader (and therefore virtually every member is suffering from depression) and I can think of the numerous amount of objectively stupid decisions (money purchases, medical needs, personal safety) that make me marvel at how having a lot of money can insulate a man from his own misery.

Anyway, my Republican family members around my age have 1-2 children, but they’re close to poverty due to having a one-income household since the mothers have no careers and are supported by their wealthy parents. Additionally, it is seriously possible their children will have early deaths due to medical negligence (it already happened to one, actually, so it’s natural to assume it will happen again). While I might not have as many children now, I believe the odds of them being intelligent enough to participate in the local, national and global scale are far higher than my familial counterparts if nothing more than I am less likely to leave my children unattended in dangerous situations because I will be smart enough to recognize them. A smart alive Democrat is worth a dozen stupid dead Republicans as I say with cheek.

My family is convicted that I did not come to my beliefs on my own and so are desperate to find the culprit and stop them so that I’ll metaphorically “come back home”. The Republican party gives them an answer; the gays, the trans, the liberals, the colleges, the porn, the atheists and the scientists all duped me into it, and when Trump comes and undoes it all everything will go back to normal and I’ll want to spend holidays with them. I believe it will be a genuine tragedy when Trump’s presidency is over and my family is faced with the terror that is my absence.

Therefore I believe, with my anecdotal evidence, that the same situation is being replayed all across the country in families just like mine. I believe the illusion of dying liberalism is actually the slow death rattle of conservatism. The wheel of progress is slow but ever-grinding, as they-who-is-I say.