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)