Maybe not, it feels like to me that the Overton window[0] has been sliding left. My views on freedom of speech made me a 'leftist commie' when I used them to defend South Park and Eminem now most often I'm accused being 'alt-right' by those who disagree with those same views.
Plenty of people stand up for their rights because they legitimately care about freedom. It’s not all some conspiracy by hate groups to defend themselves.
At a point where each issue is extremely polarizing, where we connect people around the world - blurring the local and the global - and there’s a new crazy event happening every minute around the world minute - people lose nuance and the ability to stop and compartmentalism events.
Since everything is now part of a never ending stream of outrageous actions, content consumers have adapted by looking at meta identifiers to get a grip on the world around them.
Who is speaking? What are they saying ? Oh? It matches statements used by white supremacists ? Ok, good bye.
I don’t have the time or bandwidth to invest in you.
When everything is accessible and people have only limited processing space - decisions are made on lossy fast information.
The Left-Right Overton Window has definitely moved Right, in that reductive to the point of uselessness, single-axis characterization of American politics. Some of Reagan's and Nixon's policies would be dismissed as "libtarded" now, as would some of W.'s.
Another Overton Window (or, more accurately, related group of Windows), describing discourse about and among the races, sexualities, gender identities, &c, have at the same time moved in a direction that is less welcoming to speech that is premised in a notion of superiority or morality about those things, especially when uttered by a person who believes that premise, and which is about the speaker's (and by implication their tribe's) own superiority, or someone else's inferiority or immorality.
The vector product of those Windows' movements is a culturally dominant polity who feels marginalized.
> My views on freedom of speech made me a 'leftist commie' when I used them to defend South Park and Eminem now most often I'm accused being 'alt-right' by those who disagree with those same views.
I think there's a meaningful difference between speech that is offensive, whatever that means, to cultural norms — especially those that are othering, or regressive, or shame-based, or whatever — and speech that is offensive, whatever that means, to individuals and populations — particularly when those individuals or populations are minorities, and have been historically subject to oppression, and which speech attempts to normalize their oppression.
Don't mistake me: Freedom of speech is for the speech one likes least, or it's for no speech at all; I want the bigots every bit as free to make their noise as I do the artists or the critics (who are often the same people), but for entirely different reasons.
Perhaps the comedian's notion of "punching up" versus "punching down" is relevant here. Perhaps also that people — on both sides — are generally just bad at disagreeing.
While South Park and Eminem both 'triggered' a lot of people because of their use of obscenity, neither is leftist in any way, shape or form. South Park regularly attacks anyone who tries to change society, which is in no way a leftist mindset. As for Eminem, I can't think of a single example of left-leaning thought in any of them outside of freedom of speech.
In general I think you'd have a very hard time making the claim that the overton window is sliding to the left. Maybe the overton window is moving to the left for gender identity and sexual expression, but that is about it. The right has succeeded in moving the overton window substantially in their favor in most social and economic programs.
