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Why political revenge narratives don't make sense to me.
It essentially implies the difference between the right wing and left wing argument about things are about morals and not about the effectiveness of policy or economic ideas for the good of our country and our citizens. If "your rules fairly" includes doing things that you think are stupid, inefficient, counter-productive and extra prone to corruption then doing it back would be strange.
Presumably if you hold an idea like "smaller governments are generally better for a country's growth" or "the state taking ownership in companies leads to bad incentives" or "free speech benefits the country's citizens and the country as a whole" then it would make little sense to abandon them once you've taken power if you want the best for the nation.
After all if you care about the country, I would assume you want good and effective policy. If you see the left's policy ideas as bad and harmful to our future, it's not a great idea to join in on the self-harm. Unless you're a traitor and hate the country, you would be pushing for what you think is the best policy. Now people might disagree on what is best for growth, what is best for the people, and what is best for the country but we should expect them to pursue their ideas in the same way if they care about America, towards ideas they think are good.
This is part of why principled groups can stay principled so easily. An organization like FIRE truly believes that free speech is beneficial. Suppression and censorship when their side is in power would be traitorous to the good of the country in their mind, even if done out of a desire for revenge. A person like Scott Lincicome of CATO truly believes that government taking equity of private enterprise is bad policy, and thus it's easy for him to critique it.
They aren't "turning the other cheek", they just actually believe in the words they say and the ideas they promote. They want good policy (or at least policy they think is good) for the benefit of the country. Sometimes you can see this in politicians, like how Bernie Sanders supports the plan to take equity in Intel. He believes government ownership of corporations is good for the country so he supports it even when the "enemy" does it. I think he's a stupid socialist but it's consistent with what I expect from a true believer. And you see with libertarian Republicans like Ron Paul, Justin Amash and Thomas Massie criticizing the Intel buy.
Counter to this, the "revenge" narrative comes off like the advocates never believed the words they were saying. It suggests their stated beliefs don't reflect what they think is good for the future of the US, but rather personal feelings and signaling to their in-group community. If they changed their minds it would be understandable, but if that's the case then the revenge narrative is unnecessary to begin with, they can now argue on the merits.
(None of these are exactly my own views. This is an ironman post.)
Okay, so, you've probably heard of rabies. It's an incurable disease (at the very least it used to be, and it still is once symptoms appear) spread by biting that makes people bite others and be violent and semi-mindless in general. In real life it's also invariably fatal, which drastically cuts down on humans' ability to spread it to >1 other humans. But imagine a rabies that didn't do this - rabid people didn't die of rabies (or of thirst), they just stayed violently insane for the term of their natural lives. Imagine further that we didn't have a vaccine against it (this was even true until recently). Call it super-rabies. Or peeps. Or the Zombie Virus.
So, let's say that with the incubation period and everything, 5% of your population caught super-rabies before your government got around to noticing and acting. Now, what are you going to do about it?
You have to kill them. The lunatics already gone bitey? Mow them down with machine guns. The ones potentially bitten? Imprisonment for the incubation period, kill them if they go bitey or if they offer the least resistance. People protecting the super-rabid? We don't have time for this shit.
Yes, they're still human. Yes, they're innocents, insofar as they didn't choose their damnation. But you don't get to have a society that cares about respecting innocent life if you don't have a society. This is a state of exception; you mop up the existential threat as quickly as you can by whatever means are necessary, and then you go back to enjoying the sweet fruits of your bitter, bitter labours.
In case you haven't worked it out by now, some people think of SJ as an existentially-dangerous meme via undermining law and order. The analogy's not perfect - social justice warriors are far better at scheming than the rabid, and believing SJ is not always permanent - but you get the point.
That's one viewpoint. Another is that SJ is not itself an exceptional threat, but is an obstacle to solving other exceptional threats such as WWIII or AI by forcing every single discussion onto simulacra levels 2 and 3 (e.g., the initial SJ reaction to Covid of "the real issue is people using worries about infection as excuses for hating Asians!") or just by it directly focusing excessively on internal, day-to-day political squabbles and missing things that haven't come by in a while. (One thing that I will note about this viewpoint is that it's quite time-dependent. Mounting a massive anti-SJ crusade weakens you in the short-term in exchange for strengthening you in the medium-term; if you think crunch time's imminent, as I do, it's too late.)
Yet another is those that actually, seriously, have given up on liberalism. SJ's excesses have convinced them that liberalism was a mistake. They actually have come around to believe those SJ tracts about how you can't have a free society without banning a bunch of ideas; they just think SJ itself's the weed that needs to be removed. And, well, it's not like there's nothing to the claim that SJ is the same sort of thing as the Nazis (by which I mean the literal NSDAP). Try reading the Wikipedia article on Gleichschaltung, for instance. You couldn't just have a youth club in Nazi Germany; it had to be a Nazi youth club. You couldn't just have a bowling club; it had to be a Nazi bowling club. Now, go SJ-spotting around the Internet, or real life, particularly in June. You can't have a nerd forum in the SJ internet; it has to be an SJ nerd forum. You can't just have a medical establishment; it has to be an SJ health establishment. Those subscribing to this viewpoint think that liberalism is just letting these kinds of totalitarians get started. (NB: while I use a popular SJ infographic for demonstrative purposes that claims to talk about Popper, I am compelled to note for educational purposes that this is not what Popper actually said. But the people of this viewpoint believe the faux-Popperian argument for real.)
I don't know about that. As a fellow disillusioned-by-liberalism, I'd say it's much less about letting totalitarians get started, as that's a response from within the liberal framework, it's that liberalism itself is folly. You can't have "separation of church and state" or "neutral" institutions, you will always promote specific values. There are some values of liberalism I admire, but others I reject wholeheartedly, hence the conflict. I'm not a fan of them pretending to be tolerant, neutral, and above it all either, but the conflict would exist regardless.
Fair.
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