| That linked article was too long to read properly sorry. In the history of American democracy, if you take the mainstream political position (Overton Window, if you care) at time T1, and place it on the map at a later time T2, T1 is always way to the right, near the fringe or outside it. So, for instance, if you take the average segregationist voter of 1963 and let him vote in the 2008 election, he will be way out on the wacky right wing. Cthulhu has passed him by. Clearly 2009 and 2017 are pretty different worlds. We don't execute, but we can blacklist and exclude. (Consider what might happen if he wanted to present a paper at a conference.) This is precisely my point. There is no we - there are multiple groups, and while some may exclude others will welcome him. As a specific - real world - example I'd note the rapturous reception any anti-climate change paper gets, and how authors get invited to present at anti-climate change conferences. Yes, they maybe excluded and blacklisted from orthodox scientific conferences, but they have an entire separate world open to them. That's very different to being suppressed. |
For example if you believe that climate change is a conspiracy by the Chinese to weaken the American economy, then even if you can go to anti-climate change conferences and be popular among climate change denialists, you won't be very happy because you will believe that in the end the Chinese are still going to destroy your country.
You could gain some social power but lose all your structural power[1]. For the sort of people who care more about objective reality than about popularity contests, that is a bad deal.
[1] https://squid314.livejournal.com/354385.html