[wutbrodo]

The details of the coup aren't understood or cared about that deeply by American discourse. But the idea that it's trivial and salutary to identify and ban "bad" or "dangerous" speech is decisively left-coded right now, in exactly the way similar impulses were right-coded during periods of rightwing political dominance (immediately post-9/11, parts of the Cold War, etc)

[barbacoa]

All these recent events involving censorship and left aligned tech companies eerily reminds me a passage the Unabomber wrote in his manifesto back in the 1990s.

" Some leftists may seem to oppose technology, but they will oppose it only so long as they are outsiders and the technological system is controlled by non-leftists. If leftism ever becomes dominant in society, so that the technological system becomes a tool in the hands of leftists, they will enthusiastically use it and promote its growth. In doing this they will be repeating a pattern that leftism has shown again and again in the past. When the Bolsheviks in Russia were outsiders, they vigorously opposed censorship and the secret police, they advocated self-determination for ethnic minorities, and so forth; but as soon as they came into power themselves, they imposed a tighter censorship and created a more ruthless secret police than any that had existed under the tsars, and they oppressed ethnic minorities at least as much as the tsars had done. In the United States, a couple of decades ago when leftists were a minority in our universities, leftist professors were vigorous proponents of academic freedom, but today, in those of our universities where leftists have become dominant, they have shown themselves ready to take away from everyone else's academic freedom. (This is "political correctness.") The same will happen with leftists and technology: They will use it to oppress everyone else if they ever get it under their own control. "

[wutbrodo]

Exactly. I don't share the Unabomber's directional disdain for leftists, but most people are simply too dim to understand the concept that liberalism/illiberalism exists on an axis independent of leftism/rightism. If you're planning to burn down liberal norms for short-term partisan gains, you better understand the long view, but that's simply beyond the capacity of the majority of people.

To be clear, there are leftists and rightists that explicitly own the rejection of liberal values (Communists/tankies, racial essentialists like the "woke" and neo-Nazis, neoreactionaries). But the majority of these dynamics are driven by useful idiots who can't even grasp what's happening.

[covidthrow]

Not entirely sure why you're being downvoted—maybe some are reading your list of groups, seeing their own, and saying, "well they were right up until that part," and got offended—but you are correct that illiberalism exists on all sides of the political spectrum.

And of course when it does, the now-illiberal faction rationalizes it with some manner of, "liberalism, except when..."

The problem with liberalism is that—while it is the most sane mode of structural organization—it is extremely brittle in the face of illiberalism.

Liberalism—and its ancestors/influences—never ate itself, unlike illiberalism. But it does always fall to barbarism. It's like having an argument with an insane person: you may be right, but you'll never win that fight.

That is a seriously concerning weakness, because when liberalism is threatened, the default modes of self preservation are either: roll over and get beaten (as a matter of principal) or reject some (or all) liberalism in order to fight back. In either case, liberalism goes away.

I'm not sure that anyone has ever come up with a reasonable defense. (And maybe there is none.) Humanity seems to prefer pendula. The grass is always greener...

[wutbrodo]

> Not entirely sure why you're being downvoted

I've definitely learned not to be fazed by downvotes on political topics, especially in the current political environment. Like I said (and like you say, more diplomatically), most people are just too dim to understand not only this dynamic, but the very concept of liberalism.