The exodus of the blue avatars

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The fact that few Republicans don't want to participate in a forum about election results and maps when so many believe that elections now are rigged and illegitimate is hardly surprising.

Another issue is that Atlas posters have always been significantly more educated than the general population, either graduated or in college, so Trump scaring off so many educated voters from the GOP definitely had an impact on our membership.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I wrote these messages almost a year and a half ago and they all seem basically germane:

I think the point about ideological diversity is more interesting, although reading old posts in isolation may not clearly indicate that back then most prominent blue avatars were basically seen as clowns. Post count was not inherently worthy of respect a decade ago any more than it is now. That said, I was younger then and more tolerant of ideological diversity and more willing to believe that the other side had points worth considering; I think that this is an evolution that has taken place in the minds of a lot of people here over the last ten years.

The biggest change in that regard doesn't have to do with this forum directly: it's the complete disavowal by the Republican Party not just of intellectual respectability but of coherent thought. The intellectual case for the Bush administration was wrong, but its existence meant that one could position oneself as an intellectual. By contrast, "right-wing intellectuals" online can get somewhere by making obvious criticisms of the Democratic Party agenda, but eventually they face a crossroads where either they have to admit that they voted for Biden anyway or else they have to give away any intellectual pretense by parroting the literally absurd claims of the Republican Party. It's no surprise that people here don't take kindly to the latter option, since that kind of agitprop is not meant for a politically sophisticated audience.

I was gone for a long time, so I don't recognize the names of all the posters who popped up in the last five years or so, but the dynamics of the forum in this sense feel similar to what they always have been. The one difference has to do with the obvious fact that avatar color is not indicative of political orientation or even partisanship; it has struck me how many blue avatars now are either not Republicans in any sense or else express sentiments that are unacceptable in the contemporary Republican Party. When I refer to Republican posters, I am not referring to those posters.

One type of Republican poster is the one who treats politics as nothing but a parlor game where they're on the opposite side of the rest of the forum. Republican95 is a good example of this now; Sam Spade is the classic example, even if he wasn't a registered Republican. This type of poster will often make interesting and useful contributions in terms of election analysis and the like (that is to say, the purpose of this forum), but over time their attitude starts to grate on everyone who sees politics as something that actually matters to real people rather than just a way to show everyone how smart you are.

Another type is the blue avatar who refrains from expressing political opinions and often does not really seem to post about politics at all: Rin-chan, who was the first Facebook friend I ever had, is the obvious example of this, and I'm sure there are plenty of blue avatars like this now. Everyone loves these people because they are nice.

Beyond that, it really is very difficult to be a partisan Republican who sincerely believes that Republican Party policies are morally right in the way that Democrats here feel about their party as a rule, because everyone will dismiss your words as laughable or abhorrent or both. (Back in the Bush years, there was a certain type of Christian politics that provided partisan Republicans with this moral dimension, but that never played well on this mostly irreligious forum and political Christianity is thoroughly dead anyway.) This doesn't bother me: Mike Naso did nothing but chant Republican Party rhetoric, and he was justly banned for it, because that's the level of Republican discourse. No thinking person wants or needs that.

So why on Earth did they leave? It's a bit of a failure that Atlas is echochambery (could be worse but we aren't in a good position)

To answer the immediate question at hand, they left because they got bored or otherwise outgrew this place, just like plenty of other posters of all persuasions; continuing to post on a message board for a decade or more is what's strange, not leaving at some point. It seems like what you're really asking is why they haven't been replaced by more right-wing posters, to which you can see what I've already said in this post.

A fair number of conservative posters of old are just not conservative in any sense now: MasterJedi, who still posts here, is one example. Another is Supersoulty, who was always a rarity among Republicans here in that his interest in politics seemed to actually be about helping people. It's not surprising that he was for Bernie Sanders in the last election. Plenty of Republicans here were always sort of liberal to begin with, and the subsequent direction of the Republican Party hasn't really attracted them. A sizable portion of the Republican contingent here has always been made up of teens who identify as Republicans because their parents are Republicans, and sooner or later plenty of those people realize that they're just liberals. (This is not limited to the Internet; I have plenty of friends who were Republican teens and all of them would describe themselves as either liberal or socialist now.)

And then, of course, there's Mike Naso, who, as I mentioned before, is the embodiment of the contemporary Republican Party. He was banned because nobody wanted to see his posts. Welcoming posters like that would certainly help change the partisan alignment of the forum, but it would do so at the expense of most good posters.

I know this was a lot of text, but hopefully it helps explain my views on the dynamics of the forum community.

In summary, as BRTD has mentioned, there are fewer Republicans here for the same reason that there are few communists here: followers of a political movement that doesn't believe in democratic elections don't have much reason to post on a forum about elections. Furthermore, contemporary Republican arguments are so insulting to the intelligence of anyone who has to hear them that it's difficult to interact with people in a respectful way while also proclaiming oneself to be a loyal Republican.

On that note we had two notable recent departures although one was a nominal independent and light green avatar for basically this reason outlined at the end, they were so abrasive that the backlash against them became too much and they couldn't stand the heat anymore, probably also coupled with the collapse of the red wave depriving then of gloating opportunities. I'm referring of course to ElectionsGuy and Politician.

The latter is also an interesting example of how in the last few years the primary method of messaging amongst forum Republicans has been just parroting stale and contrived memes almost entirely based around strawmen because they don't really have anything else.

Good point about Supersoulty btw, he was a very rare example of someone who actually supported the GOP because he legitimately believed their policies were the best to help people in general, it was laughably naive but at least not outright evil.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Landslide Lyndon is gone, only to replaced by about a dozen clones who thrive on Twitter bot/reply guy-tier discourse.

Not even close. There's no one here who has the same obsessive hate boner over Bernie Sanders as him...arguably amongst all active posters the level of obsessive Bernie hate COMBINED is less than him.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

In regards to the thread title....

Does anyone seriously believe the loss of ElectionsGuy, IndyRep and Politician is somehow a blow to the forum quality?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

In regards to the thread title....

Does anyone seriously believe the loss of ElectionsGuy, IndyRep and Politician is somehow a blow to the forum quality?

There are conservative users who make valuable contributions to Atlas.

ElectionsGuy, IndyRep, and Politician are not those users.

Do you actually agree with me that those stupid avatar/username/signature memes are very dumb and annoying as f[inks]? I recall you using one once although I could be wrong.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

ElectionsGuy's last post was about how he was leaving Atlas because everyone here was too stupid to see that Democrats would lose every single competitive election in 2022. If he has any sense of shame he'll never come back.

You know what's really hilarious in hindsight is that he kept insisting up and down that Mastriano was going to win based on Youngkin winning...but Youngkin was actually a very good candidate and not remotely comparable to Mastriano to out it mildly. Also love his "when polling and fundamentals collide, go with fundamentals" rule which has zero basis and is just a justification for hackery. Sure polls can be wrong but it's the fundamentals that drive them. Also he and the other R hacks failed to realize that things like Trump's baggage and backlash to the Dobbs decision are also "fundamentals" just like inflation and Biden's ratings are.