but specifically I see it first hand in liberal groups I’m in and I realize that it can be seductive to talk about conservativism (for example) as simply evil. Hell, I often see fellow liberals tearing apart their own if someone doesn’t live up to a 100% purity standard they’ve created.

Liberal groups are squeezed because the middle is disappearing under the steadily tightening contradictions. You only have to walk the streets for a day or two to see the results of liberalism, certainly it has created great productivity but the production is not going to the majority of people. When the soviet union fell the liberal ruling class (which I include conservatives in, they are two halves of liberalism, the political ideology of capitalism) went into overdrive taking away every single benefit given to the people in pursuit of competition with a real threat that sought to improve people’s standard of living worldwide.

As such, liberals are radicalising in much the same way that many pushed to the left (communists/anarchists under the umbrella of socialism) are and as much as many pushed to the fascist right are. It was the liberals in the SDP that killed Rosa Luxembourg to prevent the would-have-been sparticist German revolution which then probably led to the nazis taking power, liberals aren’t incapable of being “extremist” in their own sense. As they get threatened more and more between the rising far left and the rising far right they themselves become just as radical about maintaining the status quo, this in turn causes them to shut us socialists out of their spaces. And why do they do that? Because they really don’t want people like you talking to people like me, because when people like you talk to people like me you come away from the interaction just a little bit more red than you were yesterday. They see that happening everywhere, and the only method they have to deal with it is to prevent the mixing of groups.

When I start hearing my liberal in-groups parrot such talking points, I take a step back and remind myself this is emotional, not rational, discourse and is not a productive way to discuss sociopolitical issues with others.

This is precisely when someone sometimes needs a verbal slap. One of the only tools we have for moving people in the online space is creating discomfort, and if creating discomfort in someone over the way one interaction occurs brings them towards behaving differently in a future interaction then it is a valid and useful tool to have available. Some people need a dressing down before they open up. Some people do not.