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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.
You could call those examples trite, and you'd be right. You can make the argument that these are sincere, and I'd have trouble taking you seriously. But they're examples I 'picked' in the sense that I can stumble across them opening my normal web feeds and leaf through a week or two of news and social circles, and I'm selecting them only in the sense that they have a shared theme and I won't dox myself. My posting history has a long array of near-monthly examples, not just of randos, but of things in fields I care about.
I've had software collaborators suddenly wax happily about the time they decked Brendan Eich; the lead dev for a game mod framework I've spent almost a decade around got canned so hard from the project that at least one collaborator got an ultimatum from their job; my desktop environment's lead dev can't submit issues or talk on forum threads for several core libraries. The tumblr ratsphere example of A Good Feminist decided that her book about dismissing perspectives of other people was actually about "dismissing perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups"; the person who introduced Serano as such an example had their significant other drop private messages from Scott into the New York Times doxxing spree.
The STEM outreach group I volunteer for keeps having flareups and schisms because of increasingly tiny culture war stuff, yada yada. A college I've run events for is in the news for overtly discriminating against people who disagree with their politics, and it's only in the news because there's a hilarious amount of documentation, and that's still vague enough that without a direct link it could be in literally any state in the country.
It's not like it's this is just a progressive thing. There's no shortage of conservative overreach already, and I expect that the list is going to get much longer faster than I could write it out.
I'd love it if there were a lot more life in liberalism, or the Peace of Westphalia, or whatever you want to call it. As I've said many times, and will say again, we're all ultimately minorities of one, and I'm there a lot sooner than the average person. It's the reason I've even tried to continue conversations with Trace, after it all, or Amadan here.
But the Litany of Grendlin matters. If it's dead, it's not a bad thing to know that it's dead.
If you seek to change the world, change your mind. And then seek to persuade other people, having seen what it took.
These aren't the only ways to get people to follow your interests! That's the problem! Progressives and (especially!) the extremes of the left and right can make a very persuasive argument that many of the biggest political successes of the progressive movement in the last two decades have revolved around non-persuasive approaches, ranging from social shaming to blocking discussion to cancellation to lawfare to literally punching out
everybody that disagrees with themnazis. Non-extremists can do it.I don't think enough conservatives want to persuade. I don't think many, if any, progressives do. I'm not even sure many centrists do.
That's a part of what makes the examples here frustrating, and why I'm linking past discussions with TW where I'm trying to come up with a response to his last twitter discussion that isn't linking to past discussions. It's not moderation that's core to liberalism. It's at least imaginable to have a world where people had very strong and very strongly disagreeing positions, but where we hash that out by words and, where hashing that out either doesn't work or takes a long time to settle, we just live with that.
It doesn't even have to be that libertarian! (although that's easier to imagine).
But we don't. Even among actual moderates.
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