The relative proportions of liberalism, libertarianism, and conservatism haven’t changed much, and I don’t think we can say much about five new communists; by far the most significant change appears to be the doubled proportion of socialists. So this doesn’t look like a general loss of metacontrarianism to me.
I’m not sure how to account for that change, though. The simplest explanation seems to be that LW’s natural demographic turns out to include a bunch of left-contrarian groups once it’s spread out sufficiently from OB’s relatively libertarian cluster, but I’d also say that socialism’s gotten significantly more mainstream-respectable in the last couple of years; I don’t think that could fully account for the doubling, but it might play a role.
The relative proportions of liberalism, libertarianism, and conservatism haven’t changed much, and I don’t think we can say much about five new communists; by far the most significant change appears to be the doubled proportion of socialists. So this doesn’t look like a general loss of metacontrarianism to me.
I’m not sure how to account for that change, though. The simplest explanation seems to be that LW’s natural demographic turns out to include a bunch of left-contrarian groups once it’s spread out sufficiently from OB’s relatively libertarian cluster, but I’d also say that socialism’s gotten significantly more mainstream-respectable in the last couple of years; I don’t think that could fully account for the doubling, but it might play a role.