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That attitude is catching on in America. The censorship and consent apparatus is more privatized and not officially backed by state power (but see threats from

That attitude is catching on in America. The censorship and consent apparatus is more privatized and not officially backed by state power (but see threats from politicians to tech companies to remove “disinformation” “or else”) but most people just put their heads down and toe the “official” line. You might even put on a little show about how woke you are to prove your loyalty. Such acting is common in all regimes. This happens in every society. There is an official ideology and whether through central direction or self-organizing systems, that ideology is enforced. Occasional periods of lighter repression (when the official ideology is something like classical or Rawlsian liberalism) end up just being openings for more assertive ideologies to take control. America recently exited such a period.

int_19h 6y ago
What point would you define as the beginning of that period that we're supposedly exiting?
- throwaway8581 6y ago
  The 50s and 60s. It was in full swing by the 70s. If I had to point to one iconic development, it would be the Warren court, and in particular its free speech cases. Those marked the decisive defeat of traditional conservatism, which never again was a powerful force in national politics (unless you count some elements of the Trump coalition) despite occasional lip service and token concessions by Reagan and Bush 43. A half-century later, Rawlsian liberalism has fallen to wokeism, which has become powerful enough to overcome the cultural and procedural obstacles to establishing itself as the new ruling ideology, taking out the liberal framework that enabled its rise, and beginning its own campaign of repression. Though you could say it was the American Revolution that set things off and that it merely took America 250 years to go through the progression that the French Revolution traveled in a mere 5 years.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    I feel like this overemphasizes the legal angle, while ignoring other aspects of censorship. It's true that the Warren court significantly liberalized things by setting very narrow constitutional boundaries in Brandenburg v. Ohio etc. But there's censorship by law, and then there's censorship by public opinion. When you complain about "wokeism", it's mostly the latter - but there was plenty of that in the 70s as well, only with different opinions considered unacceptable to the point where people could get fired for them, or have trouble finding a platform to address large audiences.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - throwaway8581 6y ago
      I don’t agree. You are suggesting that liberalism was just a mirage for a different underlying ideology. But I don’t think that’s what was happening. People really believed in liberalism. Live and let live is not a very profound philosophy—nor a very self-preserving one, which is why it fell so quickly—but it was real.
      - int_19h 6y ago
        I'm not suggesting that. I'm saying that the "golden age of liberalism" was not as golden as is often portrayed, especially in comparison with the current state of affairs. You could, and people were, effectively persecuted for stating their opinions - not in the court of law, but with very real consequences nonetheless. That people believed it was more real than it actually was, is another matter. But this invites the question - was it really the social consensus? Or consensus among some subgroups of society that simply didn't run afoul of speech taboos? (FWIW, I'm borderline free speech absolutist, so bear this in mind - I'm not arguing that extreme liberalism in these matters is a bad idea. Only that the past is not a good example of what it should be like, once you set the propaganda and cultural distortion aside.)
        throwaway8581 6y ago
        I think one useful metric is what percent of the population falls inside of the overton window that makes you unemployable in any upper middle class job (ie jobs that make it possible for you to acquire power). Jared Taylor, for example, was a translator for law firms for a long time after publicly and prominently saying that immigration should be curtailed for the sake of keeping the white percentage of the population higher. It was a quite unpopular view even then but it didn’t matter because whatever, it’s just his personal political views. Nowadays, even believing something that half or more of the population believes is far outside of the Overton window and will ruin your career.
  - saghm 6y ago
    > Though you could say it was the American Revolution that set things off and that it merely took America 250 years to go through the progression that the French Revolution traveled in a mere 5 years We're still quite a far way off from literally beheading people in the streets (and no, having your Twitter account banned is not even remotely comparable)
    - throwaway8581 6y ago
      No need to cut heads off. It’s less messy and more palatable to take someone’s entire livelihood away. Any real threat to power comes from the middle class. Make it so their precarious status depends on loyalty to your ideology and you have all the control you need.
maxerickson 6y ago
Tell it to the slaves bud. (I mean that we've regressed into repression)

int_19h 6y ago

What point would you define as the beginning of that period that we're supposedly exiting?

throwaway8581 6y ago
The 50s and 60s. It was in full swing by the 70s. If I had to point to one iconic development, it would be the Warren court, and in particular its free speech cases. Those marked the decisive defeat of traditional conservatism, which never again was a powerful force in national politics (unless you count some elements of the Trump coalition) despite occasional lip service and token concessions by Reagan and Bush 43. A half-century later, Rawlsian liberalism has fallen to wokeism, which has become powerful enough to overcome the cultural and procedural obstacles to establishing itself as the new ruling ideology, taking out the liberal framework that enabled its rise, and beginning its own campaign of repression. Though you could say it was the American Revolution that set things off and that it merely took America 250 years to go through the progression that the French Revolution traveled in a mere 5 years.
- int_19h 6y ago
  I feel like this overemphasizes the legal angle, while ignoring other aspects of censorship. It's true that the Warren court significantly liberalized things by setting very narrow constitutional boundaries in Brandenburg v. Ohio etc. But there's censorship by law, and then there's censorship by public opinion. When you complain about "wokeism", it's mostly the latter - but there was plenty of that in the 70s as well, only with different opinions considered unacceptable to the point where people could get fired for them, or have trouble finding a platform to address large audiences.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway8581 6y ago
    I don’t agree. You are suggesting that liberalism was just a mirage for a different underlying ideology. But I don’t think that’s what was happening. People really believed in liberalism. Live and let live is not a very profound philosophy—nor a very self-preserving one, which is why it fell so quickly—but it was real.
    - int_19h 6y ago
      I'm not suggesting that. I'm saying that the "golden age of liberalism" was not as golden as is often portrayed, especially in comparison with the current state of affairs. You could, and people were, effectively persecuted for stating their opinions - not in the court of law, but with very real consequences nonetheless. That people believed it was more real than it actually was, is another matter. But this invites the question - was it really the social consensus? Or consensus among some subgroups of society that simply didn't run afoul of speech taboos? (FWIW, I'm borderline free speech absolutist, so bear this in mind - I'm not arguing that extreme liberalism in these matters is a bad idea. Only that the past is not a good example of what it should be like, once you set the propaganda and cultural distortion aside.)
      - throwaway8581 6y ago
        I think one useful metric is what percent of the population falls inside of the overton window that makes you unemployable in any upper middle class job (ie jobs that make it possible for you to acquire power). Jared Taylor, for example, was a translator for law firms for a long time after publicly and prominently saying that immigration should be curtailed for the sake of keeping the white percentage of the population higher. It was a quite unpopular view even then but it didn’t matter because whatever, it’s just his personal political views. Nowadays, even believing something that half or more of the population believes is far outside of the Overton window and will ruin your career.
- saghm 6y ago
  > Though you could say it was the American Revolution that set things off and that it merely took America 250 years to go through the progression that the French Revolution traveled in a mere 5 years We're still quite a far way off from literally beheading people in the streets (and no, having your Twitter account banned is not even remotely comparable)
  - throwaway8581 6y ago
    No need to cut heads off. It’s less messy and more palatable to take someone’s entire livelihood away. Any real threat to power comes from the middle class. Make it so their precarious status depends on loyalty to your ideology and you have all the control you need.

maxerickson 6y ago

Tell it to the slaves bud. (I mean that we've regressed into repression)