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That attitude is catching on in America. The censorship and consent apparatus is more privatized and not officially backed by state power (but see threats from politicians to tech companies to remove “disinformation” “or else”) but most people just put their heads down and toe the “official” line. You might even put on a little show about how woke you are to prove your loyalty. Such acting is common in all regimes.

This happens in every society. There is an official ideology and whether through central direction or self-organizing systems, that ideology is enforced. Occasional periods of lighter repression (when the official ideology is something like classical or Rawlsian liberalism) end up just being openings for more assertive ideologies to take control. America recently exited such a period.

What point would you define as the beginning of that period that we're supposedly exiting?

The 50s and 60s. It was in full swing by the 70s. If I had to point to one iconic development, it would be the Warren court, and in particular its free speech cases. Those marked the decisive defeat of traditional conservatism, which never again was a powerful force in national politics (unless you count some elements of the Trump coalition) despite occasional lip service and token concessions by Reagan and Bush 43.

A half-century later, Rawlsian liberalism has fallen to wokeism, which has become powerful enough to overcome the cultural and procedural obstacles to establishing itself as the new ruling ideology, taking out the liberal framework that enabled its rise, and beginning its own campaign of repression.

Though you could say it was the American Revolution that set things off and that it merely took America 250 years to go through the progression that the French Revolution traveled in a mere 5 years.

I feel like this overemphasizes the legal angle, while ignoring other aspects of censorship. It's true that the Warren court significantly liberalized things by setting very narrow constitutional boundaries in Brandenburg v. Ohio etc. But there's censorship by law, and then there's censorship by public opinion. When you complain about "wokeism", it's mostly the latter - but there was plenty of that in the 70s as well, only with different opinions considered unacceptable to the point where people could get fired for them, or have trouble finding a platform to address large audiences.

I don’t agree. You are suggesting that liberalism was just a mirage for a different underlying ideology. But I don’t think that’s what was happening. People really believed in liberalism. Live and let live is not a very profound philosophy—nor a very self-preserving one, which is why it fell so quickly—but it was real.

I'm not suggesting that. I'm saying that the "golden age of liberalism" was not as golden as is often portrayed, especially in comparison with the current state of affairs. You could, and people were, effectively persecuted for stating their opinions - not in the court of law, but with very real consequences nonetheless.

That people believed it was more real than it actually was, is another matter. But this invites the question - was it really the social consensus? Or consensus among some subgroups of society that simply didn't run afoul of speech taboos?

(FWIW, I'm borderline free speech absolutist, so bear this in mind - I'm not arguing that extreme liberalism in these matters is a bad idea. Only that the past is not a good example of what it should be like, once you set the propaganda and cultural distortion aside.)

I think one useful metric is what percent of the population falls inside of the overton window that makes you unemployable in any upper middle class job (ie jobs that make it possible for you to acquire power). Jared Taylor, for example, was a translator for law firms for a long time after publicly and prominently saying that immigration should be curtailed for the sake of keeping the white percentage of the population higher. It was a quite unpopular view even then but it didn’t matter because whatever, it’s just his personal political views.

Nowadays, even believing something that half or more of the population believes is far outside of the Overton window and will ruin your career.

That example demonstrates that one particular view became less tolerated; what about others? E.g. if one went around openly espousing Maoism around that time, how would that affect employment prospects in law firms?

> Though you could say it was the American Revolution that set things off and that it merely took America 250 years to go through the progression that the French Revolution traveled in a mere 5 years

We're still quite a far way off from literally beheading people in the streets (and no, having your Twitter account banned is not even remotely comparable)

No need to cut heads off. It’s less messy and more palatable to take someone’s entire livelihood away. Any real threat to power comes from the middle class. Make it so their precarious status depends on loyalty to your ideology and you have all the control you need.

Tell it to the slaves bud.

(I mean that we've regressed into repression)

Any assertion of what 'most' Chinese citizens want is unprovable given the lack of any representation on any level of society.

Plenty of China watchers are happy to claim that Chinese people all support their government - and yet the government is curiously unwilling to test this assertion in democratic polls. Tells you something about how strongly held these beliefs are (hint: not very).

Do you think the results of the Harvard Kennedy School's study were fraudulent? https://ash.harvard.edu/publications/understanding-ccp-resil...

A big fallacy is that the "Chinese government" is this big monolithic entity. It's not. Supporting the Chinese government does not equal support censorship.

Do you support the National Park Service?

Do you support the Federal Aviation Administration?

Do you support the USDA?

Do you support Donald Trump?

Do you support the FDA?

Do you support NIST?

Do you support Joe Biden?

Do you support NIH?

Do you support public schools?

Do you support Guantanamo Bay?

Do you support the Environmental Protection Agency?

The Chinese government, although not democratically elected, is similar in one aspect, in that it is a very multi-faceted set of institutions that do a whole lot of things well that the majority of people support, and a few things that the majority of people secretly do not support but are unlikely to be vocal about.

> Most people in Shenzhen were extremely happy they were in Shenzhen where you could walk around freely instead of "free" Hong Kong where you had to be in fear of idiot high school students throwing Molotov cocktails and beating up anyone who spoke Mandarin.

In a related matter, I wonder why mainland China came down so aggressively on Hong Kong's autonomy. Was the legal system in Hong Kong so lax that it was impossible to punish severely the main organizers of the illegal demonstrations? Why was the Hong Kong government so incapable of stopping the violence, but the mainland intervention so effective? I'm surprised China chose to abandon its international commitments and make it much harder to get Taiwan to agree with a similar or even more favorable arrangement.

You're really conflating a couple other issues in with the original idea here.

> most citizens would rather have whatever it takes to have no riots

Isn't it a brilliant tactic deployed by the regime, making people think that freedom of speech equals riot on the street. Like the USA is burning in hell with all the black live matters protest and the capitol protest/riot?