As I’ve gone through these past few years, I’ve realized the true conflict at the center of this site and by extension Twitter. It’s not this petty “le SJWs vs anti-SJWs.”
It’s liberals versus the fascists versus the communists. Through reading and studying materials from places such as /r/neoliberal, /r/badeconomics, Exponents Magazine, and more, I have realized what truly lies ahead. The liberal democratic order is facing its largest threat since the 1930s due to mass political polarization, with the youth of today feeling compelled to either join the ranks of the far-right or march with the far-left. I have seen the rise of socialism with much concern, and many of the people I had once criticized for their odd and irrational behavior in the early years of 2013-2015 have been trapped by this pipeline to communism. Likewise, I have also seen many young conservatives caught up in the pipeline to fascism during the same time, which is even more concerning.
The conservatives and the far-right really have no one but themselves to blame for this phenomenon. For years, they intentionally mislabeled key government functions as socialism, despite of course anyone who used a dictionary knowing that they were dead wrong. However, this only served to make people actually think this nonsense unironically, and see socialism in a positive light, thus enabling actual communists to move in and convince them easily that real socialism was a good idea. I have tried and failed to tell someone that a fire department is not socialist because it receives government funding, and it frustrates me to no end when this person claimed that dictionary definitions didn’t matter, because, in his words, “everyone else was using the word differently.” Keep in mind, this person was also a firefighter themselves, and was not saying this to attack his own profession, but rather to say that socialism was not a bad thing.
In 2013, I predicted to a few friends one day that this “tide of SJWs” (I can’t believe I’m using that unironically right now) would one day lead to a massive blowback from the right-wing in the form of an embrace in fascism. Now, with someone like Trump having held the office of the Presidency of the United States, that has become reality. We are now seeing the result of that pendulum swing: Another blowback with the rise of socialism and communism. The 2020s will be a decade of terror in the United States as we descend into our own Years of Lead/Anni di Piombo, with both far-right and far-left groups waging war on the United States government, the liberal democratic order, and each other.
Fascism and communism are both cancers to humanity, and both would be better off discarded in the trash bin of history as failed ideologies whose only success was in the amount of dead bodies they piled up when put into practice. Both ideologies reduce the liberal democratic structure down to merely an enabler of the “other side” that also must be torn down. Both present themselves as the only solution to the “problems” of democracy that produce the “other side,” when in reality, the only thing that produces fascism is fascists, and the only thing that produces communism is communists. Both thrive on each other to justify their own existence while seeking to make democracy, egalitarianism, liberty, and pluralism the supposed “enabler” of all things wrong with the world. They are both at odds with the rules of liberal democracy.
Those rules? Those rules demand that no political ideology use violence to enforce its rule on the people against their will, and that the one and only arbiter of violence should be the state’s judiciary and executive, who must be independent from the political powers in charge of said state. When this rule is broken, blood is shed, and democracy dies.
Maybe I will find no sympathy here. After all, fuck being “boring” or “centrist,” right? Going to an ideological extreme is the norm these days, and there is seemingly no room for the liberals. The very word has not only stayed a dirty word on the right, but it’s become a dirty word for those opposed to conservatism too. No longer do you see people saying “liberal is not a dirty word.” Now you see people saying “fucking liberals,” but from the left. Of course, conservatives being conservatives, most don’t seem to care or have the brain power to notice that liberals and socialists are not the same, which again perpetuates the ideological extremism we see nowadays.
