[steve_adams_86]

I think this has happened at times to all groups as well. Right now the conservatives are 'stuck' at least partially because of the cognitive dissonance required to elect and support the current admin.

I think people on the left arguably did the same with various social justice initiatives. Things got crazier by the month for a while until people were genuinely afraid to speak, people were being cancelled for dubious reasons, etc. I recall long periods of needing to be very careful about how (not just what) I said to peers and even some friends. This was a very left-driven phenomenon. While it was started with arguably good intentions, it got weird.

The right has adopted this, ironically, though in a different way and for different reasons. In both cases it's about ideological purity and power, though

[andrewflnr]

Yeah, but part of what I'm seeing is exactly the left pulling their heads out of that mess, while the right is only digging in deeper, both on similar time scales.

[lelanthran]

> Yeah, but part of what I'm seeing is exactly the left pulling their heads out of that mess

I'm not seeing that; not yet anyway.

I expected to see that after the disastrous election that demonstrated just how fringe some of those vocal views were, but I did not.

[andrewflnr]

It's subtle at best in "vocal views". I'm getting this mostly from casual conversations.

[steve_adams_86]

Interesting point. I've generally intuited that the left would have carried on down that road were they to win the last election, but I could be wrong. And there has been a bit of a recoil from that kind of behaviour, so you're right about that.

[andrewflnr]

They were already starting to pull back from the worst of the cancelly stuff starting a few years ago. It only took a few years before they realized that a lot of it was blatantly self-contradictory (e.g. broad representation in media is impossible if people are only "allowed" to tell "their own" stories). And they might also have gotten the hint that they were scoring a lot of own goals.

A lot of the other stuff, like actual policy, they're still pretty dug into. But IMO there's a greater proportion of that stuff on which they're just correct, so that's kinda respectable for me.

[steve_adams_86]

Likewise, I think a lot of the problematic stuff came from legitimately good ideas. They were just co-opted by bad actors, so to speak.