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This is fundamentally a question about "What do left-wing people believe and why do they believe it?" To answer such a question, you need a qualitative appreciation of people's belief structure, rather than pure quantitative analysis of the type you seem to be suggesting.
As someone who watched the intersectional feminist critique of "liberal debate" developing in real time, I can give you some examples of the types of direct criticism of liberal debate norms that led to decreased appreciation for such procedural rules.
Blog comment moderation. Early on, in the blogosphere there was a substantial (or at least noisy) "free speech" contingent that contended that all blog comment sections ought to be unmoderated for "free speech" reasons. Feminists frequently had bad-faith people showing up in their comment sections to deliberately troll; they were also frequently discussing delicate topics such as rape. Comment moderation of some kind or other was thus a fairly universal practice, and the conflation of "free speech" with being against comment moderation contributed to a decline in appreciation for the (broad, non-first-amendment version of the) concept.
The devil's advocate. When someone says they are "playing devil's advocate," they're often asking people to debate them as an exercise without holding them responsible for any moral repugnance inherent in what they are suggesting. Feminists got tired of being asked to calmly refute ideas that they considered personally painful and morally unsupportable. They noted/claimed that there was often an inherent imbalance in who was being asked to "remain calm" while hearing something deeply threatening to them on a personal level.
Tone policing. When speaking about an emotionally resonant subject, being asked to speak calmly can mean censoring yourself. Thus, while the previous two claims are about how liberal norms are too permissive, this one is about how they are too restrictive. Sometimes being visibly angry is the only way to truthfully express yourself. Intersectional feminists also claim that variation in the social norms applied to different groups of people will lead to greater tone restrictions on women (in whom anger is less accepted) and on black people (in whom anger is seen as more threatening).
The ban on "emotion." If I may quote myself: "Disallowing "emotion" favours noncontroversial emotions over controversial ones, since noncontroversial emotions do not need to be vividly expressed in order to be understood and taken as meaningful." Feminists tend to believe that typically male emotions are accepted, where female ones are not, and thus that they will be disadvantaged as women under such a rule. Intersectional feminists take it further, and suggest that upper-class white male emotions are likely to be the noncontroversial, accepted ones that have weight without needing to actually be expressed strongly -- and which are therefore likely to carry the day under liberal "rules of debate."
I am personally very sympathetic to most of these critiques. Unfortunately, I don't think the most common solutions on offer actually lead to better outcomes overall. Nevertheless, my explanation of the trend that you identify would be that these liberal norms fell out of fashion because they genuinely were flawed, and that bringing them back will require re-working them to take some of these critiques into account while also preserving what was important about them.
In one sense these critiques have some merit, but in another sense they were broadly deployed in a way that was effectively "men are assumed to be wrong by default and aren't allowed to respond in their own defense," and that applies to every other category they were used on. Subsequently they were also used very hypocritically - stuff like "eliminate whiteness" was normalized in prestigious publications even though saying that about any other race would rightfully be perceived as a threat.
It basically just nosedived straight into tribalism; as a result, I don't think we can treat these discussion norms as legitimate, at least not until they're applied more fairly to humans generally rather than based on identity groups. We need a show of good faith that that's something that the left-wing can realistically achieve, rather than the natural slide downhill of this kind of norm that we would usually expect.
Yeah, I come down somewhere similar. It's not that there's nothing good about these critiques, it's that the solutions currently being deployed are far too tribalist to support proper discussion between people who seriously disagree.
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None of these points is unique to feminism. If the reaction of "discarding all concern for fairness, reason, logic and impartiality" is unique to feminism, then that suggests a problem with the feminist movement.
Have you ever looked at, say, rightwing twitter? The responses from progressives are remarkably devoid of any content beyond bad faith, insults, and sneers. Applying moderation at a level that seems standard for feminist spaces would delete approximately 99.9% of all progressive discourse, depriving us of countless arguments like "No bitches?", "Small dick energy", "Educate yourself!", and endless other three word posts that boil down to "You are stupid!" or "You are bad!"
I think plenty of feminist and leftist positions are morally repugnant; you can't reasonably expect me to be calm about it, or to be responsible for my own emotional states or reactions. Many of these issues are ones that are personally painful and morally insupportable. You are threatening me deeply on a personal level. As such, if you respond to this post, I will interpret it as violence against me. If I wasn't being obvious enough, this is intended as an example of being on the other end of emotional blackmail. But if you reply, I will take is as an admission against feminism.
So when do you validate the anger of non-progressives at the efforts to queer their children? Or is there a category difference, where you expect normal people to be able to control themselves, while giving feminists the general presumption for self-regulation we usually hold for toddlers? For the record, I think this is deeply misogynistic.
Who decides controversial versus non-controversial? This comes off like a trick, to place one side's incoherent rage on the same level as the other side's reasoned argument. It's just the same old intellectually bankrupt monodirectional power dynamics. Have you ever bothered to engage with the possibility that emotionalism is, in fact, a bad thing? There are topics I get emotionally damaged about; I made a post about it a while back. But I understand and accept that my emotionalism on this topics is counter-productive. My feelings are not an argument, not a justification. They are an obstacle to understanding. If banning emotionalism and appeal to emotion and emotional blackmail is harmful to feminists, then maybe feminists don't deserve a place at the adults table.
I don't think the reaction of decreased respect for liberal norms is unique to feminism, actually. Certainly, many centrists seem to complain about illiberalism on the left and right. But feminism is the context that I, personally, can speak to with the greatest amount of personal experience, so that is where I have put my focus in responding.
I do not, as a rule, look at Twitter unless I have to. But of course I take your point that there are also trolls on the left.
If you were genuinely finding this conversation emotionally difficult and wanted to discontinue it, I would let you. I would also not hold it against you, nor consider that to be forfeiting your position. This is because I do think that everybody's emotions are worthy of respect. Yes, that includes when right-wingers get emotional about the possibility that their children might be harmed by the influence of liberal norms.
Of course. I'm very interested in this topic. I don't believe in the existence of a single set of discussion norms that will work for every group of people on every subject, and I think that disallowing "emotion" really does disallow certain sets of facts about how people feel. Emotions matter. Sweeping them aside can be counterproductive, sometimes.
However, I do appreciate that sometimes a ban on "emotion" is a genuine attempt to lower the temperature of a discussion so that people with very different views can actually hear each other, instead of just shouting past each other. Whilst I prefer a co-operative appreciation for the emotions of both sides to a terse ban on all emotional acknowledgment, I realise that different norms can be a benefit in themselves, and thus that in some contexts a ban on "emotion" may still be a useful tool.
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I am not. I am quite familiar with most of these debates. To me, the position you describe seems to stem from a desire to declare one's arguments unassailable via fiat rather than testing their merit through open discourse. The first few items listed by that article you linked are rather telling here:
The same is further evidenced by the fact that even the mildest and most factual critiques are banned on sight in feminist spaces, or how "sea-lioning" became a buzzword. We also see this when we look at why feminists flame out of discussion spaces like this one, where the biggest complaint almost invariably is that the powers that be do not sufficiently intervene to tilt the playing field in their favour.
It might very well be that women in general and feminists in particular have a harder time presenting their arguments in a calm and collected fashion. But that is not because the onus on them is particularly strict. It's because the most useful weapons in their rhetorical arsenal are emotional blackmail and performative pearl-clutching (i.e. un-personing the interlocutor as morally repugnant for the crime of disagreeing).
This is simply wrong if you look at the complete and total monopolisation of victimhood on behalf of women. Compare, e.g. how much societal ressources we spent on topics such as "How do we get more women into C-suites" vs. "Why are there so many male suicides?"
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If liberals control the institutions, they won't be able to prevent infiltration and Long March-style assimilation. How can they expect to survive if they're not suppressing enemy ideas, if they reject the concept of enemy ideas? I don't just mean 'we're going to abolish freedom of speech once we win and put you in camps' which obviously opposes liberalism, I mean 'we deserve/need all the power' ideas that are functionally identical to the above. Once you have all the power you can do whatever you like.
Liberalism is inherently unstable. It's useful for a very specific circumstance, where you have a frozen conflict or a stalemate. But conflicts don't stay in this equilibrium for long, power shifts unpredictably. Eventually you'll get a victor and a loser. This is much more stable. The victor can use their superior power to entrench dominance over the loser. Maybe their dominance will break in some unexpected disaster. Then you simply flip it around so the loser becomes the winner.
So how did liberalism get so far? Luck of geography. The British got a moat to protect them from all the European armies, this let them indulge in noncompetitive governance and ideology. They were free to invest heavily in seapower which turned out to be hugely effective for wealth creation and ideological propagation. And they were given huge deposits of easily accessible coal as the cherry on top.
America got a ridiculously strong starting position, facing not a single strong enemy in their entire hemisphere. They got to take the bulk of a rich, temperate continent virtually for free. The English-speakers ran away with the world because of our favorable geography, not because our ideology actually works. If there was a land bridge from Britain to Europe, liberal democracy would not exist. Napoleon or Hitler wouldn't even have had a chance to thrash it, it would've never even made it that far. There's a reason liberals tend to be vaguely anti-militaristic, suspicious of standing armies. Only countries privileged enough to be anti-militaristic can afford to be liberal.
The Dutch and Polish tried liberalism and vaguely democratic systems of governance. The Athenians tried it. It didn't end well for them. They were on the continent, playing on hard-mode. The Dutch and Athenians could sort of pretend to be islands with their floods and walls, that perhaps explains why they did better than Poland, by far the biggest loser of the 17th and 18th centuries. The Swiss got to be an island in the mountains and that worked out for them.
So my conclusion is that of course appreciation for liberalism will decline over time. It took a lot of luck to get this far, we shouldn't expect it to last. Ceteris paribus (and this is a very important qualifier), illiberal countries are stronger than liberal ones. Illiberal ideologies are stronger than liberal ones. Just look how the liberal system struggled to beat Bolshevism. They were tied down by an economic system that does not work, devastated by WW2 and controlled only the poor, weak countries and East Germany while the liberals got all the rich, strong countries! The liberals could shoot themselves in the foot several times and still win, it was ridiculously lopsided.
So liberalism defeating communism is evidence that illiberal ideologies are stronger, because liberalism won too slowly? How quickly should communism have fallen? Can you give a specific number of decades? And justify your chosen parameter value?
This seems a bit like arguing that basketball teams from the East Coast are better than the Chicago Bulls, because the Chicago Bulls had to go into overtime in order to beat the most successful (in the modern era) East Coast team.
As for riches, we can compare what happened when e.g. Finland and Estonia ended up on different sides of the Iron Curtain. Note that, unlike West Germany, Finland did not receive Marshall Aid. Similarly, Czechoslovakia was more prosperous than Italy or Spain prior to World War II:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_People's_Republic#Economy
True, liberalism had the advantage of an economic system that worked better than socialism, but it's not clear how far liberal economics and liberal politics can be disentangled. For example, censoring private media is a political and economic intervention. Modern capitalist but undemocratic and authoritarian regimes like Pinochet's Chile or the East Asian Tigers were not able to last for very long before becoming democratic (except in the special case of Hong Kong).
As I see it, the 20th century saw two extremely important defeats for illiberal ideologies. Firstly, fascism was defeated militarily, despite being an ideology whose principal appeal was military virility. Secondly, communism was defeated economically, despite being an ideology whose principal appeal was economic prosperity. At the end of the 20th century, the only non-liberal ideology worth worrying about was Islamic fundamentalism, and that has proven to be unable to spread beyond Muslims in the modern world - there just aren't huge numbers of people converting to Islam in the way that large numbers of people rapidly became fascists or communists in the 20th century.
Liberalism, broadly defined to include things like American conservativism (which accepts all the fundamental postulates of liberalism) and progressivism (which is less individualistic but still at least nominally accepts ideas like democracy and civil rights) today in the West is like the air: it's an ideology so entrenched in every facet of public life that people barely notice it until the rare occurrence of a problem, like covid lockdowns.
Fascism was defeated by the greater resources of the Allies, stemming from aforementioned lucky geography. If it were a test of pure military/strategic efficiency, there's no contest. Imagine if Germany had an extra 60 million citizens, just to match the US! Imagine if Germany was the world's biggest oil, steel or automobile producer (like the US was). Imagine if Japan's economy was a few times larger, if they had much coal, iron or oil on their home islands! Don't you think these material factors would change the outcome of the war?
The Allies behaved incredibly stupidly and made mistakes that should've cost them the war, only they used their resources to bludgeon their way to victory. In 1933 onwards, they let him remilitarize when they could easily have invaded and used the fact that they had a much stronger army to defeat him. In 1936, they let Hitler remilitarize the Rhineland. They gave up an alliance with Italy over their invasion of Ethiopia. Few now remember the Stresa front where Mussolini was aligned against Hitler. They let Hitler annex Austria. They let him annex Czechoslovakia, a well-defended country. They let him invade Poland without pressuring Germany in the West, refusing to support the ally they joined the war for. The Allies pointlessly gave up the incredibly strong starting position they had vis a vis Germany in 1933. Why? Precisely because of stupid liberal principles like non-aggression and pacifism. They refused to do advance their interests because they thought it might be morally wrong to defeat Germany while it was still weak, or work with Mussolini, or get an alliance with Stalin before Hitler did. They did everything wrong.
The British somehow failed to prevent a German naval invasion of Norway! Germany was dependent on iron ore shipped over this long, vulnerable route. Somehow the entire British navy failed to block off this route or prevent the Germans landing in Narvik, despite the German fleet being much smaller. The Allies somehow managed to fail defending Benelux and France, despite having had decades to prepare for that very invasion. They chose not to develop the weapons they needed to defend their own countries, they were dysfunctional.
Germany alone managed to thrash two and a half global empires! They conquered Poland, Benelux, Denmark, Norway and France in quick succession. They clearly knew what they were doing. At any rate, the mistakes they made were subtler and smaller in scope than the Allies just doing everything wrong from 1933-40.
It was only that the US intervened, bailing out the British when they faced complete disaster. The Soviets were preparing manically when the Germans invaded - note also that the Soviets possessed the largest army and airforce in the world when Germany invaded. The longer Hitler waited the stronger they got. Yet Germany had them on the ropes for a while, invading a much larger country while also fighting other global empires in Africa, the Atlantic and in the skies over Europe.
The US had a nuclear monopoly from 1945-9. They could've destroyed the Soviets then, while they were maximally devastated from WW2. Better yet, they could have avoided having a fanatically pro-Stalin president in FDR, a guy who literally said: "I think that if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace."
A less pro-Stalin president would've provided more conditional aid to the Soviets, tapering it off as they began to win the war. A less pro-Stalin president would have negotiated with the Germans to bring them on side against the Soviets. FDR pumped out all this propaganda about the lovable Uncle Joe Stalin, limiting US options postwar. FDR slow-walked US counterintelligence into the massive Soviet espionage campaign, his administration was full of Bolshephiles. FDR introduced the policy of unconditional surrender precisely to persuade Stalin he wasn't going to sign a separate peace, to increase his confidence in the US. This was a stupid move that got many Allied soldiers killed fighting a defeated Germany. Why not retake France and Benelux, provide Germany some reprieve from incinerating their cities and start bombing the Soviet Union? Let Germany do the bulk of the fighting, with some support as necessary. Then nuke the Soviets into the ground!
It would take one decade for communism to be defeated, at most. The entire Cold War was a huge error.
They were all in the US sphere of influence. All the East Asian Tigers and Chile, Brazil, Indonesia... were all heavily influenced by the US due to US size and power. America launched coups in these countries or propped up their dictatorships, they had huge power there. In China, the US had only limited power due to Chinese size and power. Lo and behold, China hasn't adopted US ideology! Nor has Russia for that matter. I think it was very silly that people assumed a wide range of weak, small US puppets/dependencies adopting US ideology was some kind of impartial law of the universe tending towards liberal democracy. It reflects the fundamental flaw of liberal democracies just hoping that things will go their way, hoping against all evidence that their problems will just disappear. The UK and France hoped Nazi Germany wasn't a threat. The US under FDR hoped Stalin was a nice guy. The US hoped that China would democratize.
Ok, so when you say "liberalism", it includes non-aggression and pacifism? So was the post-WWII US a "liberal" country?
I'm also confused by both your condemnation of Britain and France for underestimating the Nazi threat in the 1930s and your confidence that FDR could have negotiated an alliance with the Nazis in the 1940s against the USSR.
As for defeating communism by nuclear war in the late 1940s, post-WWII, this would have been good in many ways, but it would not have been the drastic ideological defeat that was inflicted on communism in the Cold War. The communists failed by their own criteria of success, just like the fascists. Sadly, there are still communists, but there are far, far fewer than there were in the 1940s and 1950s. If communism had been defeated militarily, far more communists could argue "Well, in the brief period of the USSR, it grew rapidly and it was going to provide tremendous prosperity for everyone as those growth rates continued." The stagnation of the Soviet economy since the 1960s, as well as repeated economic failures everywhere that communists held power for a prolonged period, has created a huge wealth of simple empirical evidence that has reinforced what sound economists have always known.
It's true that liberal democratic politicians often make this mistake, but you would need evidence that they do so at a higher relative frequency than illiberal non-democratic politicians. Even if we just look at the 1930s and 1940s, Hitler and Stalin had their own disastrous moments of wishful thinking.
There are more and less liberal countries. Modern day Denmark and Iceland are more liberal. Post-WWII USA was less liberal, it's gotten more liberal since then. But the US then and now was supposedly fighting for peace, freedom, human rights, defending the international order, enforcing the will of the UN... It's strategic moves were outwardly justified by liberal ideas. Some liberalism crept into the US's actual operations and strategy. That's the problem, why such a strong country has struggled against such weak opponents.
Well FDR couldn't because he was best buddies with Stalin. But the Germans by late 1944 weren't stupid. They knew they were losing. It was FDR's demand for unconditional surrender that kept them fighting. That was what glued them to Hitler. That and the Morgenthau plan was grist for Goebells' mills. He could fairly reasonably say that it was a war of annihilation, that any German who opposed Hitler in this darkest hour was betraying the fatherland. And so they fought on. The Germans were sending out peace feelers to the UK in 1940, they were trying to negotiate the whole war and especially towards the end.
Both errors are of the same fundamental type. Britain and France weren't reading the situation correctly and working to advance their interests. They abandoned the Czechs, failed to ally Germany or Russia. Allying Hitler in the late 1930s wouldn't have been such a bad idea, all things considered. Allying with Russia was another option. Almost anything would've been better than what they actually did, which was appease Hitler when he was weak, declare war on him when he was strong (but not actually attack when he was distracted in Poland), while spurning Russia and Italy.
The US didn't read the situation in 1944-5. They could've allied with Hitler against the Russians, or negotiated with German generals for a post-Hitler Germany. There was a lot of plotting going on in the German General Staff in 1944-45! Why let the Russians get so far into Europe? Why keep assisting them with lend-lease? Why not try to undermine them now that they were the primary danger, now Germany was out of the running? FDR genuinely believed in the United Nations, in this liberal utopia of peace and joy that Stalin could help achieve. That was the problem.
Absolutely, but these had some kind of reasoning behind them. Hitler knew Stalin was a major threat, he was perilously close to Germany's main oil supplier in Romania. They were ideological enemies and Hitler wanted their land. Hitler thought the Red Army was much smaller than it was, that's just an intelligence failure. Based on what he knew at the time, invading Russia was a good idea.
The US was fighting an undeclared war in the Atlantic and providing significant aid to Britain. Roosevelt was known to be a Germanophobe, it was pretty obvious the US was militarizing and would soon come after Germany. Declaring war would let them sink more convoys while the US was less prepared. They were not aware of how quickly the US would be able to train and field a large force, the Germans thought it would take them several years more to be seriously effective. There were costs and benefits, it's not a massive blunder.
Stalin thought Hitler wouldn't invade so soon, that the British were trying to lure them into war with false intelligence. That's a reasonable perspective. There's also the idea that Russia was preparing for an invasion of Germany, they had stationed huge forces on the border that Germany swiftly destroyed in Barbarossa. The Soviets were making light wheeled armored vehicles that would be pretty poor at defending Russia but useful for good German roads. The Germans crowed about capturing huge ammunition stockpiles on the border and German phrasebooks. This is revisionist history that has been contested but is fairly persuasive IMO.
Imagine if Stalin or Hitler had the upper hand against a disarmed, demilitarized Allies. Do you think either of them would let the Allies rearm and annex several small European states? They'd never make errors of that type. There are errors of faulty intelligence and miscalculating short term gains vs long term harms. But then there are errors of not knowing what you're doing, of living in a liberal fantasy land.
About the only example I can think of illiberal politicians messing up in such a ludicrous way was when the Khwarizmis killed the Mongol ambassador.
Main goal of unconditional surrender policy was to avoid the botched end of WWI, avoid situation where the enemy will try for the third time. Allies were interested in victory, not negotiation and were beyond caring about German feelings.
It was successful, Germany hadn't waged any wars for 70+ years and isn't going to in the foreseable future.
LOL. Aside of political impossibility, why would you want to do it? Why keep around the Nazis (who were anything but "reliable allies"), when you can rebuild the country from point zero as you wish.
Again, you cannot deny it was succesful. West Germany was far more useful to US/NATO than any Nazi or "reformed Nazi" state would even going to be.
West Germany served as a hypothetical meatshield against the Soviet Union. I'm talking about making it an actual meatshield against the Soviet Union. Note that nothing stops a US with a nuclear monopoly then turning on Germany again after its purpose is served.
"Oh you helped us beat the Russians? Well we're now going to reorganize your country anyway!"
If so, then it was a silly idea. They could simply decide to enforce the treaty they sign. How precisely you get to a treaty doesn't matter so much as whether its enforced or not. Furthermore, the balance of power was against Germany after WW2, you can't think that West Germany or modern Germany would be in a position to wage any offensive wars.
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As you note I think one's beliefs about procedurally fair rules are tied up with their conception of justice. Specifically, people support procedurally fair rules when they believe those rules will lead to just outcomes and oppose them when they think they won't. Unless one is committed to the proposition that procedurally fair rules always entail just outcomes (which I think describes very few people) it's not hard to find examples of cases where the application of procedurally fair rules lead to unjust outcomes. Some common examples in US history include poll taxes and literacy tests. While these rules were generally applied to all voters, they had the effect of disproportionately excluding certain demographics in a way many considered unjust due to those demographics relative poverty and illiteracy. This can also lead to a general skepticism of procedurally fair rules in general, in a way I think we still see today. The belief that the people who want to impose certain procedurally fair rules don't actually think the rule itself is good, but want the rule in effect due to the disproportionate impact it will have on certain groups (ex, debates about voter ID).
My own appreciation for procedurally fair rules as tools to achieve just outcomes has certainly waned. Whether that's my own changing sense of what is just or just an expansion of my knowledge of situations where procedurally fair rules have led to unjust outcomes is hard to say, probably a bit of both.
In my particular case I would say starting five or six years ago. I share the perspective articulated by @drmanhattan16 that there was something different about the 90's compared to today but I am not sure I could identify a sharp breaking point for the culture more generally.
I suspect a mix of the two. For some people it was always purely instrumental while others followed a similar path I did, becoming disillusioned with procedurally fair rules as a mechanism for producing just outcomes due to a perceived lack of results. I think a big part of the reason the "left" is broadly more skeptical of procedurally fair rules its because the left's political coalition is composed substantially of those groups that have been left in disproportionately worse positions by the application of such rules, and have disproportionately benefited from less procedurally fair rules.
ETA:
This is getting a bit more philosophical but since I have Moore v. Harper on my mind I'll mention I think there is also a population out there that is skeptical about the extent to which we can coherently categorize rules into "procedural" vs "substantive" such that all rules are "substantive" in the relevant sense.
It sounds to me here like you are saying that people have just shrugged and said "well, since the rules don't produce just outcomes then fuck the rules". It seems plausible that this is what people think, certainly. But it is distressing to me, because that attitude seems like nothing more than "I do what I want" with extra steps. I will certainly concede that following the established rules (which let's say for the sake of argument are fair) will not lead to a just outcome every time. And by all means, I think we should endeavor to change the rules to ensure maximum justice in the outcomes (while keeping them procedurally fair). But even though the rules are imperfect, I believe that on balance following them will lead to more just outcomes than ignoring them.
More pragmatically, I think that the ideas of liberalism (and federalism, what scraps we have left in the US) are very much correct, even to this day. I may not like it that my fellow citizens can do (insert immoral act here). But I like that a whole lot more than if they could force me to follow their ideology. Which, as sure as the sun rises and sets, they will do as soon as they get power, unless we agree to a truce. So I support a truce, even when I'm in a position of power (especially then, in fact), because I want my teeth to not get kicked in as soon as the other guys have institutional power.
Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of people have lost sight of this. I remember arguing with people (otherwise smart people, even) about Mozilla firing Brendan Eich back in the day. They simply considered it unimportant that if we set the precedent that you can fire someone for being against gay marriage, you also are going to be able to fire people for being gay if the Overton window ever shifts that way. They were purely concerned with short-term "get the enemy" even at the cost of long-term harm to their own causes.
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If you'll permit me to out-blackpill you: It's worse than that. I had quite a few discussions with self-proclaimed "liberals" arguing for more state control to crush their opposition where I asked them how they would like it if the winds shifted and they were left staring down the barrel they are forging.
The answer, and this is not me being hyperbolic, almost always was: "That is precisely why we must do everything to defeat those fascists before they even get the chance." It's quite literally who/whom.
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The easy option here would be to say "it was all motivated by evil capitalist for-profit medicine." Conservatives are even helping to build that case for them already, and it will be a simple pivot when the time comes.
You forgot to take it all the way, it will be blamed on "evil capitalist for-profit medicine, and wait a minute, which side was known for being pro-business back then?" and just like that the blame will be laid at the feet of the right, just like how eugenics has been laundered using the shoddy commutative equation "eugenicists= Nazis = right-wingers = conservatives".
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Will private enterprise and large corporate capitalism be firmly on the right in 2050? I don’t doubt that the right will be capitalist or at least anti communist, but it seems like large, complex corporations of the sort that are plausibly somewhat blameworthy for trans are becoming more and more lib/progressive in terms of alignment.
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Do you believe that it's practical to build and enforce a set of rules that ensure acceptable outcomes so long as they're followed, regardless of the behavior of those operating under the rules? Put another way, do you think loopholes are a generally-manageable problem in rule design?
...I think the above questions are pointing to a concept that seems extremely relevant to your question, but I'm not sure the questions themselves communicate the issue clearly enough.
Long ago, I was interested in tabletop game design, and came across the concept of "rules fragility". As I understood it, the idea was to seperate out the general concept of "good rules" into "good when people are actively trying to work with them" and "good when people are actively trying to subvert them". If you're familiar with the PnP roleplaying concept of a "munchkin", or the proliferation of explicit GM fiat as a conflict resolution mechanism, both are necessary because of rules fragility. Generally speaking, the simpler your ruleset, the easier it is to eliminate fragility. Games like chess or M:TG are sufficiently constrained that their rules can be made very resilient, regardless of player cooperation. The sprawling D&D ruleset, on the other hand, is legendary for its exploits, paradoxes, and hilarious implications. Munchkins and GM fiat exist because roleplaying games are, of necessity, too complex to make rules that self-enforce a good experience on uncooperative players.
Life is a whole lot more complicated than D&D, and while societies as far back as we can observe have always tried to form some sort of rule set, until relatively recently human societies frequently resorted to some level of GM-Fiat-analog. This changed with the Enlightenment, which introduced the idea that we could bind society to rules not through a superpowerful enforcer, but through the law itself. The idea was that it was possible, even practical to write a set of universally-applicable, objective rules that could account for all the exigencies of circumstance and behavior, resolve all disputes and settle all conflicts. One way to put it would be that the Enlightenment idea our society was founded on was that loopholes were a manageable problem, on the object level and all meta-levels.
As I've argued many times previously, it seems to me that this idea worked as well as it did for as long as it did because a relatively homogenous population more often than not treated our social "game" as fundamentally cooperative, not competitive. Periods where this cooperation broke down stand out in our history as moments where the system worked very poorly or failed completely. The problem now is that we are no longer homogenous, and our social game is becoming increasingly competitive. The simple fact is that the basic ruleset our society operates off is in fact fragile. Being fragile, it can't hope to handle high-stakes competition between cultural factions of the sort we now enjoy.
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As I understand it, your complaint is that people are increasingly reluctant to accept the outcomes mandated by the rules. I doubt that you consider rule-following to be a terminal goal, so the argument would be that rule-following should produce superior outcomes, right?
Let's say we disagree strongly on how things should be, but we've agreed to follow a set of rules. A conflict arises. You follow the rules to the letter. I apply a novel strategy the rules didn't account for. I win. You have no grounds within the rules to contest my win, because I didn't break any of the rules as written. Changing the rules to account for this novel strategy is itself a conflict, and you're already behind on winning conflicts. Suppose this pattern repeats a number of times, and you now expect that you lose by attempting to play by the rules, and I win by playing outside them.
Let's say you believe this outcome is a problem. What are your options to resolve it? Attempting to improve the rules is not, I think, a workable strategy. The simple fact is that, contrary to Enlightenment ideology, there is no flawless ruleset available. You are never going to close all the loopholes. Rules are simplifications, abstractions, map and not territory. they have to be interpreted, adjudicated, enforced, and each of those steps involves human judgement and an irreducible loss of objectivity. Motivated agents will always find ways around a fixed ruleset, and the longer they stand, the more porous they become.
At the end of the day, it seems to me that respect for a ruleset requires either trust that the rules lack fragility, or trust in the other party not to abuse that fragility for their own advantage. Leaving aside questions of cause and responsibility, it seems obvious to me that neither side of the Culture War actually maintains confidence in either of these propositions. Under such conditions, why would one expect the rules to continue to operate in anything approaching a reliable fashion?
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[EDIT] - Nope, can't leave it there.
You appeal to the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. Any given ruleset can claim that it's an improvement or even optimal from a Rawlsian point of view. How should people assess such claims? Why should people accept claims that a given Rawlsian assessment is rigorous and reliable? If people disagree over an assessment, how can we resolve that conflict?
I argue that appeals to Rawls are just another dead-end, for the same reason appeals to law or the Constitution are dead-ends. Rawls doesn't actually provide a way to ensure good-faith cooperation, and without confidence in good-faith cooperation, none of the rest of these arguments matter.
So, a few off-the-cuff remarks while I digest your larger point.
I used to think so, but given the obvious failure of the liberal ruleset in preventing enemy take-over, I obviously have to reassess my position. This admittedly half-baked post is part of that process. Many here pointed out that this ruleset can only work in somewhat homogeneous societies, which I am not quite sure about. Another thought is that the ruleset only works as long as it's enforced by a crypto-oligarchy of benevolent liberal true believers (this would explain the late 90s).
Yeah, Rawls himself was struggling with this quite a bit IIRC. His solution, the "reflective equilibrium" is a pretty big cop out, because it translates to "we, uhm, take all the facts into account, think about it real hard, and try to have them match lol idk".
But that was not my point. My point is that Rawlsian fairness is a regulative ideal. Whether a certain situation or proposed solution comes closer to it than a given alternative is up for debate. But my point is that the perceived validity of that regulative ideal as an aspiration is in decline and has been replaced by a tribalistic spoils system.
This really describes the crux of the issue perfectly. I am afraid I am unable to disagree.
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That's a very insightful comment, thank you! I will need to mull it over for a bit.
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The animals of a meadow agree that they'll all vote on what to have for dinner, and that every animal's vote is equal. A pack of wolves moves into the meadow. The pack is large enough that they constitute 51% of the meadow's occupants. They vote to eat the other animals, and then do so. Is this a just outcome?
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I am interested in picking at this a little. Would you agree that the application of something like a poll tax or literacy test could be just, then? As long as it was administered the right way? If so, would such outcomes also be good or desirable? Or is it possible for an outcome to be both just and bad?
I think this goes a little bit too far. Rather, I think there is often disagreement about whether a given procedure is "fair" in the relevant sense. I think most people would agree that fairness consists in something like "treating similarly situated people similarly" with a lot of disagreement bout what it means to be "similarly situated." Continuing the voter ID example some people A and B may be "similarly situated" in that both are US citizens who are prospective voters. But perhaps they are not "similarly situated" in that B must sacrifice much more time, effort, resources, etc than A to get an ID. Is rule requiring and ID to vote fair to A and B? It depends, even if we don't start at an outcome and work backwards (though I agree this happens as well).
The objections I have in mind are less meta than this. Consider again a literacy test. On the one hand, such a requirement is procedural, it's literally a procedure you have to go through in order to vote. On the other hand, the imposition of such a procedure implies a substantive judgement about who ought to be able to vote (specifically that people who cannot or will not pass such a test ought not be able to). So is the imposition of a literacy test a procedural rule or a substantive one?
I think you may be seeing people trying to apply pure conflict theory in an environment where only mistake theory is socially acceptable. Somebody made a comment here a long time ago to the effect that "I tolerate anything except intolerance" in fact allows you to vilify anything you like, provided you link that thing to intolerance in some way. This produces tendentious, distorted arguments similar (I think) to "Russians/Democrats stole the election".
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The roots of this rejection of procedural fairness in leftist thinking can be traced back quite far, for example Herbert Marcuse published an essay in 1965 called "Repressive Tolerance" containing ideas that really seem not all too dissimilar to most current leftist rhetoric. It's critical theorist-talk, which means the entire text is 11 pages of violence against the English language, but here's a link anyway:
https://sites.evergreen.edu/arunchandra/wp-content/uploads/sites/395/2018/07/tolerance.pdf
In it, Marcuse argues that the rationale for free speech - which was one of determining truth - has been invalidated, because society would have to be "free of indoctrination" for free speech to serve its function (he never coherently outlines what a society "free of indoctrination" would look like and under what conditions he would consider free speech valid). He then claims that society exists in a state of "false consciousness" which precludes rational thought and discussion and disadvantages the left, and states that if the pathway to a subversive (read: leftist) majority developing has been blocked by what he calls "indoctrination", it is okay for people to use undemocratic means to re-open that pathway.
Of course, he seems to constantly imply throughout that he wants special favours to apply to his ideology where it's okay when he does it, because he then calls for making a distinction between "progressive and regressive indoctrination". Despite stating that media is one of the great vectors of indoctrination where truth is determined for the masses, he also makes it clear that he is okay with journalists editorialising in line with his values, in fact he outright endorses this because impartiality is misleading and "such objectivity is spurious". If this was done by his culture war opponents Marcuse would almost certainly label this as indoctrination, but he seems to want an exception for himself.
On page 6:
Marcuse then goes on to argue for "intolerance against movements from the right and toleration of movements from the left". He posits that right-wing ideas constitute "clear and present danger" and advocates for "the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print and picture". He posits that tolerance of certain viewpoints in the current environment creates and maintains a repressive society, it prevents their attempts to emancipate and liberate, and that means that "tolerance has been perverted". In Marcuse's conceptualisation of things "true" tolerance was always about being a partisan tool of subversion which was intolerant towards the repressive status quo, and non-partisan tolerance is a bastardisation of that because it "serves the cause of oppression". Which seems like a clear redefinition of its meaning to me.
Pages 9-10:
In Marcuse's writings, you can also see the groundwork for why leftists seem to love percolating their propaganda into the education system. Because people grow up in a repressive world, repression will find itself in the academic enterprise too, and this is a "pre-empting of the mind" which means impartiality and autonomous thinking is impossible. To Marcuse, it is only right as a result that the student learns to "think in the opposite direction", to internalise subversive leftist propaganda.
However, he goes even further. He identifies neutrality when analysing history as being distortion of reality, because it doesn't impose his preferred value system onto historical occurrences. People shouldn't be allowed to evaluate these occurrences on their own merits without it being already coloured by selective framing because it "reproduces acceptance of the dominion of the victors in the consciousness of man", and therefore bad. And he identifies the young as the vector through which his views can spread, because they have not had enough time to properly internalise "repressive" ideas yet.
Page 10:
Marcuse's entire essay is basically "We're right and they're wrong, and their ideology is dangerous and it's everywhere, so we get to suppress our outgroup however we want in service of our Utopia and proselytise our values in the education system". In short this rejection of procedural fairness has existed in the left for a very long time, and if I had to guess what caused the shift you outline I'd say that, for the most part, the recognition leftist thinkers were previously paying towards actual liberal values was done primarily out of convenience and based on what they thought they could get away with.
The most scary thing about Marcuse's logic is that if you can suppress your ideological opponents, your ideology is probably not a subversive minority without the power to become a majority in the first place. It is a perfect weapon for an ideological group who is in fact powerful but pretends not to be for the purposes of political convenience. Once basically every institution was under their control, the left got to continue indulging in their intoxicating delusion of being a subversive movement under attack by a profoundly repressive society, and using that as a pretext to attack and suppress their culture war opponents.
EDIT: added more
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The left never really believed in any of that. Or at least, the more radical part of the left (anarchists, communists etc)
The left subverted Western institutions and is now, to use the famous phrase, manipulating procedural outcomes. Thus the right in US lost faith in these procedures, at least the ones in existing institutions.
In 2010, (or 2000, or 1990 for that matter) anyone calling themself a classical liberal was almost assuredly a libertarian or an embarrassed conservative. It's most strongly associated with people like Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell - people who never split from progressives because they were never with them. More broadly, I think the argument for a major political realignment between parties is pretty weak. Some people have shifted on the margins, but the core political coalitions aren't that different. The most pronounced difference between 2010 and 2020 is the center-right's political influence has been gutted and the far left and right exert more influence over their respective wings' priorities.
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You may find it interesting to also look more historically. My very cursory understanding of history tells me that there was a weird period of time in the 1990s where people started taking ideas like this more seriously, but we are now simply returning to how people have always been - censorious and willing to wipe their enemies from existence and memory altogether.
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I think you need to clarify what you think has happened. Are you saying that, in the past, only the left was concerned with those values, while the right rejected them? The latter part of that claim has merit, given that for decades mainstream "law and order" conservatives have denigrated procedural protections for criminal defendants as "technicalities." (And of course many pro-Trump conservatives were upset that many election lawsuits were rejected on procedural or procedural-adjacent grounds [though laches is in large part a substantive defense, rather than a purely procedural one]. But then the pro-Trump wing probably does not represent traditional conservatives, and I don't know what traditional conservatives said about those lawsuits). OTOH, the far left has never been pro-due process; what is "the end justifies the means" if not a rejection of the value of procedure? Given that 'the woke" are the far left, then it does not seem that much has changed.
Overall, I am very skeptical that there are have ever been many people who value procedural protections per se, just as there have never been many few people who value free speech for their enemies.
Complaining about standing is not the same as complaining about neutral rules.
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