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That's not fair, he used to be a good writer that used to be able to show he properly understood the arguments he disagreed with.
He used to be a somewhat ordinary young man with an eclectic reading habit, allowing him to mix weird rationality ideas while still understanding the opposite perspective. Then he became an incredibly successful and popular writer and moved to San Francisco where he now lives with his wife, children and mistress.
No matter how much he tries, if he does still try, he can’t really empathise with the people outside the blessed circle. They’re just too different from him now. At the same time, general political polarisation has continued to the extent that I doubt he ever meets any right wingers any more, even the weird kind.
It’s the same problem that’s occurred since time immemorial and is the reason why (as I understand it) Republican politicians were discouraged from spending too much time in Washington.
I think people were literally warning him this would happen if he moves back to California.
They did. But it worked for him, he’s fine. He doesn’t need influence with conservatives and frankly I don’t think he wants it.
I think also that he just made his peace with woke. It’s less confrontational than it was, and he agreed with most of it to start with, and the main issue he had with it (feminism) is no longer an issue for him.
In other words, he betrayed us once it was no longer in his interest to oppose the woke.
He got rich and famous enough that he managed to get married despite being a textbook beta nice guy; what does he care now about the plight of the incel? He makes his money in the normie-ville of substack and his psychiatry clinic; what use does he have now for cultivating a following by spreading heresies? Being controversial now would only threaten all he has.
Telling heterodox truths is a game for anonymous young single men who have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Established men become assimilated into the system.
Who's "us"?
I agree Scott got soft, but stability and family making you more mellow and less of a firebrand is an eternal cycle, it's how things are supposed to be. It's why Kulak in his incessant calls for violence never actually talks about building things, starting families, falling in love, having children. Men who have lives and families to care about don't want to burn down the world.
I would broadly define ‘us’ as some amalgam of ‘those who have had the pointy end of wokeness shoved up our rectum at some point’ and ‘readers of Radicalising the Romanceless’.
Especially as the latter, I’m pretty disappointed. Scott wrote a set of articles saying, “here’s a massive problem that makes lots of young men miserable, why don’t we discuss it, and can we at least agree on not accusing these young men of being entitled proto-rapists?”. Ten years later, having achieved fame and fortune on the back of his fans, and a wife and mistress thereby*, he writes another essay saying pretty clearly that, okay, nothing has changed, lots of young men are still unhappy, but ultimately he likes the system the way it is and thinks it would be inhuman to change it.
It’s not like he was ever a firebrand. He was never a Kulak-style writer, he never did anything as a young man he couldn’t do now that he has more stability. But when he was unhappy he wrote about young men’s problems, and now that he’s happy he’s decided that everything is fine even though nothing has changed except his own personal welfare. That’s just pure intellectual cowardice. If you’re going to ‘mellow’ as you get older, either you have to admit that your original beliefs were wrong and explain why, or else you have to admit you hold beliefs purely because they’re convenient for you and that you’re okay with letting your less fortunate peers sink.
To take an example that goes in my favour, it’s very common for young socialists to become capitalists when they become rich. But this means that either you have to be aware you really fucked up when you were younger, and understand why socialism actually doesn’t help the poor, and try some other way instead. Or else it means that you’re a coward who cared about the poor when you had no money and became willing to disregard them the moment it became convenient for you. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to call the latter ‘betrayal’.
*he mentions somewhere that he explicitly dates by going to meet-ups and having eager young women come up and say “wow, are you Scott Alexander?!”.
I'm not sure what follow-up to Radicalizing the Romanceless you're talking about, but from the summary I don't see the inconsistency. Recognizing that a problem is real, but disagreeing with its strongest activists' proposed solution and throwing your hands up helplessly, is a very common and coherent position on all sorts of controversial issues. (For example, I agree the plight of the Palestinians is worthy of sympathy, but have some pretty unsolvable disagreements with Hamas on what ought to be done about it. Surely I can express these two points even if I have no alternative miracle-solution to put forward?)
Scott himself puts forth a few ideas in the now-linked essay before dismissing them all. In general there are loads of potential policy ideas of many different strengths for encouraging people to pair up, discouraging them from behaviour that makes pairing up difficult, and facilitating people finding matches.
The Israeli-Hamas conflict is intractable because both groups want the same land, they can’t both get it, they both consider the conflict existential, they have powerful backers and they’re willing to be extremely violent. In contrast the problem of inceldom and birth rates is very tractable and historically was a mostly solved problem, it’s just that seriously discussing it gets you nobbled.
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