paulg, despite saying "There are aggressively conventional-minded people on both the right and the left", immediately follows that with a fixation on the left:

paulg, despite saying "There are aggressively conventional-minded people on both the right and the left", immediately follows that with a fixation on the left: "The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imagine what that would be like." We don't need to imagine. We're over a year into a wave of moral panic from the right focusing on local school boards in the united states, in which they seek to purge reading materials dealing with subjects that make them uncomfortable, fire people for raising those subjects, and impose rules against raising those subjects, in some cases carrying criminal penalties. Looking over at Russia, we see the worst case scenarios Paul references in the esssay playing out quite explicitly, today. The example of how we'll know we're really in trouble ("Damn right we're banning ideas, and in fact here's a list of them") and the example of Mao saying "There are heretics among us. Seek them out and punish them"? Putin and his followers have already entered that territory [1] [2]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/world/europe/putin-russia-ukraine-protests.html [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/09/world/europe/putin-russia-war-ukraine.html