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Alejandro1 comments on [Link] Noam Chomsky Killed Aaron Schwartz - Less Wrong
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This might be a radical suggestion, but who holds power does change over time. Especially over as long a period as a century. It can also hardly be disputed that gaining stronger allies or your allies being more interested in helping you makes you stronger.
Quite obviously Universalism was not completely done with tolerating racism in the 19th century. Note how Eugenics came into fashion among Progressives in the 1900s and how support Eugenics correlated with racialist ideas. And in the 19th century actual democracy (elected officials) on the state level had much more teeth than the 1960s according to Moldbugs model and my own study of US history. He notes in other writing that rule by the civil service which we have today is preferable to the mob politics and spolis system.
Desegregation in the United States was very much not the will of electorate of the Southern States. If populism had more strength I would have expected the activists to have been defeated for a while longer.
It is not a word game, rather a very firm admonishment to make use of a very handy heuristic. Humans love claiming they are the underdog. Winners write history. Yet the truth is underdogs don't tend to win. Of people claiming to have been underdogs who have won, I'd argue it prudent to expect most of them to be overdogs either consciously crafting a deceiving or rationalizing self-flattering image.
So you agree that the cause of civil rights started out as the underdog, and only gained power gradually with time until it had enough power to challenge the established law and change it. How does this differ from the standard Progressive narrative? (other than, perhaps, insisting pedantically that once the cause is strong enough to win, it shouldn't be called the underdog any more?)
Re your last paragraph, it is true that if a winner writing history says "we were the underdog, and despite that we won quickly and decisively", this should be suspect as unlikely and a self-flattering image. But if the winner's history goes "we were the underdog, had many defeats and setbacks but gradually rallied people to our cause until we started winning, and we hope to win more in the future as more and more people come to side with us" (which is closer to the standard Progressive narrative on civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, etc) why is this especially suspect? (You might suspect the cause to be less pure or the reasons why it gathered support less related to people seeing its justice, than the supporters believe, but this is different from questioning the underdog to overdog progression story).
Progressivism was already utterly dominant in the 1960s. It was utterly dominant in the 1900s. What changed was how important it thought "civil rights" where. This did not happen due to popular sentiment but changing moral fashion among intellectual elites in general. Not only did popular sentiment not change much because of activism, neither did intellectual moral fashion, it was changed as a side effect of where Ivy League opinions where a few decades before.
Now sure those opinions might have shifted because of activism, but that was a different generation of activists than the ones that where picked by the media and education industry as symbols for their new prescription for society.
Isn't it just easier to say that 1900s-progressivism and 1960s-progressivism are different but related movements?
It is worthwhile to ask how people and ideas moved (or didn't move) from one to the other - but that nuanced question is impossible unless one can admit there are two movements, not one.
The difference isn't any greater than between 2010s Anglicanism and 1950s Anglicanism, I don't often hear this argument related to them. But leaving this aside for now, one movement is quite clearly descended from the other, both in the affiliations of key individuals who connect both down to the chains of cited literature.
First, I'm not familiar enough with Anglicanism to agree or disagree with your assertion. For example, I don't think the statement is accurate about Reform Judaism.
Second, even if current Anglicans take the inside view to assert that they are the same as past Anglican, that doesn't require that we who are taking the outside view must agree with that assessment.
So, according to Moldbug, political changes over time aren't due to different movements waxing and waning in power and support, but rather due to one grand movement changing its mind? He seems to be a shockingly vanilla conspiracy theorist, given what I've heard of him. I'm surprised that LWers put up with him...
No. Also you may need to think a bit more about what exactly you mean when you say conspiracy theory.
You might need to expand on the "no".
You might try reading Yvain's summary of Reaction. I can't guarantee it's the single most accurate description of the philosophy in existence, but it's probably the clearest.
Did you read my article on conspiracy theories I linked to?
Your "No" seems to amount to "You interpreted Moldbug wrongly".
The article seems to amount to "Conspiracy theories aren't always wrong". I don't see the connection.
No.
To summarize.