Caesar Silverberg retweetledi

If you look around at what’s left of online political discourse, you increasingly see Liberals dropping the pretense of neutrality and admitting that their ideology is a particular way of life that has enemies.
The fake “hope and change” unity nonsense of the Obama era is well and truly dead.
Im not sure many Liberals understand the change in rhetoric, but it’s easily detectable from the outside. They’re essentially asserting that the things that make up DEI, Oikophobia, and Karl Popper’s vision of the Open Society are their particular way of life, and that those who reject them are their enemies.
And in doing so, Liberals are abandoning the long-held fiction that their ideology is just a neutral framework for peaceful coexistence or the pure application of morality as expressed in the form of politics. So they’re essentially conceding that Progressivism isn’t above the friend-enemy distinction but is rather an active combatant in that field.
Long term, that may be the correct move to defend certain elements of the Progressive project, but it comes at an enormous cost that I’m not sure Liberals are fully prepared to pay. They’re essentially abandoning the universalism that’s essential to Progressivism’s insistence that history is on its side.
The sectarianization of Progressivism might buy it staying power, but it won’t buy it new converts. And Progressivism needs converts to survive because it’s an inherently anti-natalist ideology. The moment Liberals began openly talking like a tribe, everyone else became free to start treating them like one, and a hostile and foreign one at that.
Progressivism may survive for quite a long time as a tribalistic project, but the “Progressive moment” is dying.
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