According to the last survey, 38% of rationalists identified as social democrats when choosing between that, liberal, libertarian, conservative and communist. When given more options, only 10-15% did (i don’t recall the exact number and checking while on my phone is inconvenient)
None of the questions asked about centrism, which is probably even more sensitive to number of options, so no comment on that.
that’s relative to whatever libertarian wrote these questions:
“more social democratic than a bay area technolibertarian” is not a tremendously high bar
more to the point: the rationalist subculture takes the assumptions of right-wing libertarianism as neutrality. e.g. on lesswrong neoreaction is within the overton window of things to discuss seriously, in a way that feminism and socialism simply aren’t. this bears no resemblance to a neutral starting position.
Also from the last survey
percent of people who identified as neoreactionary: 1.8%
percent of people identifying as socialist: 8.3%
percent of people who say they have a favourable or very favourable opinion of feminism: 61.2%
There was no ‘are you a feminist?’ question, so I’m using favourable opinion as a proxy. Imperfect, I know, but I think it makes my point.
Our overton window does not look like you say it does.
Every group that likes feminism also likes spending hours and hours arguing over it and what is really constructive feminism and so on. This is what defines the project. It’s founded on literary criticism. Eventually that has to translate into action but dissing a group as not feminist because they like to spend hours and hours tearing apart the doctrine and picking over the rubble would wind up disqualifying, uh, most of feminism pre-pop-culture-adoption, and honestly is still a fair amount if not a majority of it now.
Don’t listen to counterrevolutionaries who wish to stop discussion of the merits and particulars of feminism because they believe feminism is a “settled question.” All hail the Perpetual Revolution! May our discourse turn a thousand dynamos.
Actually the data quite obviously states its case in a not-really-ambigous way:
25% are libertarians
5% are conservatives
30% are “roughly as left as Dems/Labor”
40% are to the left of the two biggest “leftist” parties of the Anglosphere
Or for a more thorough breakdown: (rep/lib/dem party split %)
Roughly centrist:
65 moderates (9/0/19)
129 other (5/2/21)
129 pragmatists (4/2/17)
=
323 total
Generally rightist:
37 conservatives (43/0/4)
5 fascists (0/0/40)
30 futarchists (13/4/29)
5 monarchists (0/0/50)
28 neoreactionaries (7/11/4)
2 totalitarians (0/0/50)
189 libertarians (12/5/4)
10 objectivists (25/0/13)
=
107 non-libertarians
199 libertarians
=
306 total
Generally leftist:
50 anarchists (0/4/11)
13 communists (0/0/18)
244 left-libertarians (4/2/31)
215 progressives (1/1/40)
237 social democrats (0/0/34)
126 socialists (0/0/39)
=
641 other leftists
244 left-libertarians
=
885 total
Or in other words:
629 non-leftists
641 the kind of leftists who definitely do support higher taxes and minimum wages
and the median person is a left-libertarian (which I’m bundling a bit separately from the rest of the left only to pre-empt accusations that not being totally on board with higher taxes and minimum wage laws invalidates their leftism)
Or for a different formulation:
40 far-right (~3%)
67 right (~4%)
199 right-libertarians (~14%)
323 various centrists (~21%)
244 left-libertarians (~17%)
528 left (~36%)
63 far left (~4%)
Or consider that self-identified socialists alone outnumber the entire non-libertarian right, while the libertarian right in turn is outnumbered by both progressives and social democrats (who seem to be indistinguishable from socialists by eyeballing their survey answers; the natural objection would be that the survey is better at distinguishing right from far right but the resolution on the left side of the spectrum is lacking)
Or if we look at US parties, there are maybe 60 republicans, 30 libertarians, and 350 democrats. Yes, I know, “dems not really left blahblahblah”, but the other parties are utterly insignificant, constituting only ~20% of the voters. Do you think that a community which votes 13% rep, 6% lib, and 80% dem would not contain a significant amount of ~actual leftists~ too, for whatever value of “actual” you wish to use, and if so, please explain your logic.
Or we could look at specific policies, on which the consensus is basically: “more left than the mainstream, or way more left than the mainstream?”
The only way one can make this look like “leftism is marginalized” is by defining the left very strictly (sure, you can squeeze them down to ~12% at which point they only strictly outnumber the statist right) and the right very very loosely in a way which makes the distinction mostly meaningless for anything other than revolutionary purity testing. Sure, you can argue that $15 an hour and a basic income on top of that and high progressive taxation is basically rightist scum only one step away from Mossack Fonseca, but at that point I’m going to call bullshit and say your categories are bad and you should feel bad. Feminism is basically a background assumption the exceptions from which are noteworthy, and so is “being way less shitty to the poor than any current state is”.
So no matter how one looks at the data, the only explanation that makes sense is that the diaspora fails on some ridiculous criterion of ideological orthodoxy and is thus concluded to be basically Mossack Fonseca despite all the evidence to the contrary.
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