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The odd spread of opinion on the motte in either incarnation has been a puzzlement for both posters and mods alike for years, to the point where, imho, the mods give far too much leniency toward left-aligned posters in an attempt to foster a more 'even' debate forum. A laudable goal, I suppose, but not without it's unintended consequences.
Again, imho.
How the motte as a whole has developed hasn't been a surprise to me. At all.
Please allow me to explain my point of view.
Also, please excuse my generalizations, as I'm going for brevity, and relying primarily on my personal experiences.
I've been around a time or two. Long enough to see how forums develop, primarily in the fandom arena. Fandoms as a whole tend to lean left. Often, most fandom forums will also include 'off topic' areas that allow for political discussion.
While you could likely quibble with the ratio, I think it's fair to say that the most vociferous voices in these off-topic forums are going to lean heavily left. This creates a board culture that slowly dominates more and more, accelerating depending on how the spread of moderators and their personal opinions go.
This creates a specific argument culture - the majority of posters are left aligned, posting frequently, and have a plethora of free time to do so. If any right-aligned posters decide to wade into that pool, they're going to be faced with large opposition - gish galloping, low-level harassment in the form of having to deal with multiple posters attacking their view without pause, and so on. This creates stress, which can result in bad behavior(despite their opposition never being called out on it), often resulting in mod action, which creates a feed-back loop of self-satisfaction for the left-aligned posters and mods. This creates a perceived trend - right-aligned posters cannot debate or argue their points, hence their ideas are not good, and so on. A chilling effect occurs, as right-aligned posters realize the juice isn't worth the squeeze, the environment is hostile, and the mods - supposedly neutral arbitrators - will not be on their side.
So. This reinforces a perceived board culture, and what few right-aligned posters that debate such things will typical be extreme outliers, as they've been hardened by experience and can handle operating in a hostile environment.
However, a curious thing can occur. Off-shoot forums can develop, much smaller, taking population from the larger as a whole yet not having the numbers or involvement. Off-topic forums are put in place, including, yes, politics.
And a different environment emerges. When the playing ground is made even, suddenly it's the left-aligned posters acting badly because they're no longer operating in an environment they're familiar with. One on one, they can no longer rely on gish-galloping or numbers, and their opponents are well-experienced handling rapid-paced one-on-one debates(they have to be, to survive this long). Suddenly, the shoe is on the other foot - and the resultant behavior is so explicitly bad, even if the mods would normally be left-aligned, the size of the forum can't hide the behavior. It's clear, explicit, gains attention, and the mods have to play by the stated rules whether they want to or not.
Such off-topic areas are often shut down in quick order, likely due to all the mod-actions that result from it. I suspect this is due to all the left-aligned posters constantly abusing reports in the background, resulting in an over-sized headache the mods don't want to have to deal with, but this is pure suspicion on my part, lacking in any explicit evidence.
The motte exists in it's current forum because it's a level playing field, rigorously enforced. When their is conflict with the mod's decisions as a whole, it's often in the form of special treatment toward the left-aligned posters as a whole, but the mods have limited choices. The wider internet as a whole has inculcated a specific attitude in most left-aligned posters that does not lend itself toward even debate. They exist in an environment that encourages gish-galloping, low-level harassment, and confidence that the mods will take their side in most matters. They're used to low-level chilling effects and love-bombing in the form of most posters taking their side.
You say the motte is more 'right-aligned'. It is, likely. From the perspective of most left-aligned posters that wander in, because they're used to a radically different debate environment, populated by posters with similar opinions, where their perspective is rarely challenged, and where ideas in opposition to their own are rarely presented in a cogent fashion(and when they are, there's no guarantee it will remain).
The motte as it stands is the result of evolutionary pressure focused on political debate exerted on the wider internet as a whole and this forum in specific. Factors elsewhere do not exist here. This is a strange country, with different rules and pressures.
If you want a more neutral forum, find better left-aligned posters that can operate with those rules and pressures. Otherwise, don't be surprised when they decide to instead debate and argue in places where they can flourish.
Unfortunately the OP deleted his comment. But I think what you say is largely true. Especially about the course that almost every other forum takes- I've seen it on RPG and boardgame forums, on fan fiction forums, on writing and literary forums, even (to a lesser degree) on tech forums. Some of the places I hang out at which are ostensibly "apolitical" have threads explicitly about "How can we support Biden in the election?" You can imagine what would happen if someone started a thread about how to support Trump.
I am "left-aligned" but this place feels like one of the few places left on the Internet where I'm still a liberal. Anywhere else, if I express my actual (classically liberal, or as the choads on those forums would mockingly say, "cLASSiCly LIbErAl!!!") views, I am immediately tagged as a right-winger. This used to make me say "Wtf?" but now I just accept that I am politically homeless and will be the first up against the wall.
(But really, it just enrages me, when I can still muster such feelings, that believing in colorblind meritocracy, free speech, presumption of innocence, biological reality, "my rules, applied fairly," etc., is now coded as "right-wing.")
Because no one believes you. Whatever you, personally, believe, it all stinks of embarassed conservatism. People make fun of self-identified "classical liberals" because the label has been spoiled by bigots hiding behind a mask of libertarianism (libertarianism that for some reason only seems to extend as far as their own preferences). I like meritocracy too, but I've met too many people for whom 'meritocracy' means never having to think about how society allocates opportunities.
I could go on, but I'm on my phone and that makes composition awkward, so I'll leave it at this: I find this comment darkly hilarious because the kind of people who populate the Motte are exactly the reason you are treated to a presumption of bad faith.
I won't say you're wrong that this is how many of my "fellow liberals" think. You are wrong if you are accusing me of actually being an "embarrassed conservative" who actually believes in my heart of hearts that white men rule by divine/genetic right and I'm just pretending to believe in classical liberal values because they flatter me.
As for other Motters, I won't speak for anyone else, but from what I have seen, the people who claim to be liberals really are; the white nationalists or white nationalist-adjacent don't claim liberalism. I can think of a couple of regulars who've claimed they used to be liberals ("before they got mugged by reality" as one person put it) - I am not sure if someone getting blackpilled puts the lie to classical liberalism.
I am not trying to accuse you of anything. I am telling you why this political narrative is not taken seriously.
The people I am describing are not white nationalists (they are frequently racist, but not ideologically so). They are embarassed conservatives. I use that turn of phrase for a reason - they are people who like to think of themselves as liberal even though their political priorities and sensibilities are overwhelmingly right-wing. I know no shortage of people like this in real life by dint of the fact that I used to be one, and the almost universal pattern was that when push came to shove they'd come down on the conservative side of an issue. Sometimes this was just lack of perspective - they couldn't conceive of how a gay man or a black woman might have a different experience with - but often it was just disregard.
I think you're just exhibiting the traits I am protesting. So if I have to wear the "right-wing" label if I continue to believe things that made me a liberal in the 80s and 90s, then sure, I guess I'll have to wear that label before I will accept the progressive redefinition of "liberal."
I don't know what to tell you, man. If your political beliefs really crystallized in the 90s, you're going to find the valence of many of your beliefs sliding right (or being reduced to rhetoric rather than policy, or just losing salience). It doesn't necessarily make you right wing relative to the general population, but it probably makes you more right wing than you used to be. That's not some semantic sleight of hand on the part of the modern progressive movement; that's a normal aspect of how politics change. I'm more left-wing/less conservative than I used to be, partly because my views changed, but in large part because things I still believe became less conservative.
And that is apart from how certain phrases can serve as political euphemisms that convey a meaning quite distinct from their literal one.
I feel like there are a few core concepts to liberalism that are very old and very consistent and the disconnect here is that most modern progressives don't realize that they have almost totally abandoned the ideological framework that they were raised in, so they still hold onto the word liberal despite abandoning the ideology.
It seems sort of amusingly illiberal, to rewrite history so that liberal is just the word that the left uses to describe itself and so liberals who are no longer in-line with the modern left, despite being totally in-line with liberalism, must be conservatives.
The reality is the modern left is not liberal for any coherent understanding of the term, this is not even ship of Theseus territory, it is an almost total abandonment of liberalism as an ideology. The principled liberals who used to be on the left were all collectively shocked(or shocked later when they finally noticed) as the rug got pulled out from under them and their massive wide spread cultural support vanished over night in the face of woke. As I vaguely gestured to above, I think this is mostly a politics as fashion thing, and all the people who would have smashed the like and re-tweet buttons on "I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it," on a hypothetical 1995 twitter, ended up smashing the like and re-tweet buttons on "Freezepeach" on the real 2015 twitter.
A great place to watch this in the wild is, if you have the temperament for it, any Destiny content. Destiny is basically a liberal, and when he talks to progressives he will make liberal arguments, and you can see the sort of confusion and cognitive dissonance, as they try to square a sort of vague background respect for an under-specified liberalism, with their totally illiberal current positions and thinking.
I don't think this right. It is true that progressivism contains illiberal beliefs and values, but that is generally true - virtually every political movement in the US synthesizes liberal and illiberal beliefs. Very few people can be said to have abandoned liberalism, but everyone accepts compromises on liberal values. Sometimes this is directly ideological (something which applies to progressives, populists, religious conservatives, leftists, etc...) and sometimes it is the consequence of disagreements about what liberal values mean in practice or an attempt to reconcile internal ambiguities within liberalism. (Or ideology making contact with reality).
The suggestion that all the principled liberals are on the right is belied by the reality that the modern American right is a coalition of religious conservatives and right-wing populists. These people are not totally illiberal, but their policy preferences center on illiberal goals. The center right, which one would expect to be the standard bearer for conservative liberalism, is functionally dead.
Tellingly, while there is a lot of policy conflict between left and right on culture war issues, the intellectual side of the culture war is almost entirely center left vs far left. The right doesn't have much intellectual firepower to bring to bear, and what it does have tends to be either too spicy for public consumption or too lacking in clout due to misalignment with the broader conservative movement. The latter functionally operate at the right tail of the center left (e.g. people like Lyman Stone or Tanner Greer, who are smart and interesting and also totally untethered from operational conservatism). This is a major reason why conservative illiberalism doesn't get much discussion.
This linguistic shift is decades old (older than me, certainly) and conservatives were enthusiastic participants. The modern progressive movement didn't even exist at the time.
Beyond that, I stand by my initial point: self-described classical liberals are very likely to be people with right-wing views who do not want to describe themselves as conservatives. Not always, certainly (sometimes they are embarassed liberals instead), but someone with conventionally center-left views will probably describe themself as a liberal without adjectives (or maybe a neoliberal if they're terminally online) rather than a classical liberal. The consequence is that professing seemingly anodyne, cross-spectrum beliefs becomes right coded (and 'professing' is the key word here).
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