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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.
I think you're basically right. His voting preferences are indistinguishable from something like an anarchist voter just trying to push the Overton window left. I think he is deceiving himself when he says he's a centrist and believes he has a better chance of tinkering with the Democratic Party to make it into what he wants than he does any other alternative. He's pretty clearly blue at heart.
Given his priorities lately on hammering the left about how it handles education and how it's handled the FAA hiring scandal, it aligns with his stated goals and makes him not the ideologue that I think he is perceived as here, but he has serious blind spots, like Scott Alexander, but perhaps less severe.
John Grillington, lifelong center-right suburbanite, has voting preferences indistinguishable from a literal neo-nazi. One shouldn't draw overly strong conclusions from that. I can understand why Trace writing the right off might be annoying, but it doesn't make him a fake centrist.
I actually think this is backwards, both specifically and in a more general sense. The rat-left are mostly pretty moderate and hold normie center-left policy preferences. They like meritocracy, institutions, pluralism and tolerance, etc... They hold some odd beliefs, but those are orthogonal to their politics. The rat-right, such as it is, is far more prone to fairly radical political beliefs (e.g. neoreaction, HBD).
It rather does. As a matter of category, a centrist is a balance of left and right. If they write off on half the political spectrum, they are not a centrist.
If your definition of centrist is 'even 50/50 split in preference for prevailing political parties', perhaps, but that is an unreasonable standard and also a faintly ridiculous one. It would require ignoring actually existing politics in favor of maintaining a dubious notion of balance. Intellectual alignment is not partisan alignment and you don't get to vote for what you want; you get to vote for what's on offer. One can have authentically centrist preferences and still feel one party consistently offers something more aligned with your preferences than the other.
One may also align with one party or the other for more basic reasons. TW has been pretty unambiguous about why he's not aligned with the American Right, and it's not because he's actually a doctrinaire leftist; it's because the American Right thinks he deserves fewer rights and preferentially wouldn't exist.
The location of a center does not care if you think it's unreasonable or ridiculous. A center is a relative state, and it is relative to elements adjacent to it as a whole, not what someone wishes those elements would be. Trying to claim an 'authentic' center is just a No True Centrist fallacy in the making.
TracingWoodgrains is not a centrist because they disagree with both elements the Left and the Right. They are a fake centrist because they are not in the center. That they quibble with the left on matters of tactics is irrelevant.
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