If there's one thing to notice about internet "liberals" it's how they're hardly liberal at all.

In real life, liberals are what they are because they oppose anti-intellectual folk community common sense. They oppose might makes right power politics where the goal is to treat human nature in a cynical fatalist manner. Liberals don't believe in simply making appeals to popularity or emotions, but rather believe in being openminded to the diversity of humanity, and this goes beyond race, sex, age, and sexual orientation. It goes on about the traditions of institutions which are supposedly justified by the quantity of popularity, effectiveness, and longevity.

Internet liberals hardly embrace any of this.

I've actually gotten in the habit of printing internet conversations now and handing them to real life liberals, and most of the time, they're convinced that internet "liberals" are just conservative subversives who are trying to make liberalism look bad. That way, people become provoked into becoming conservatives to oppose liberalism.

The main problem with internet liberalism is its denial of personal responsibility, and prioritization of enforcement before legitimacy is only semantically different from real life conservatism's belief in rugged individualism and conforming to norms. On top of that, the artistic depiction of ideals online is no different from religious dogmatism where ideas aren't justified by being analyzed from beginning to end, but merely through historical precedent and emotional appeals.

I mean in real life, liberalism is recognized as a relativist ideology, but online, liberals are incredibly contextualist. They want to see certain words uttered in certain ways, and if you don't utter them accordingly, they just lash out at you. In real life, liberals understand syntax before semantics. They don't care about what you say. What they care about is how you say it. Internet liberals don't seem to understand how people can come from a diversity of backgrounds. Instead, they take certain backgrounds for granted rather than understanding how people can use the same words in different ways to express different ideas.

The bottomline is internet liberalism doesn't seem to really care about the ideology. In fact, it's become increasingly prevalent among internet liberals to embrace pragmatism, learning from experience, and the value of evidence. Unfortunately, these are the exact same premises that conservatives have always used in order to oppress creative thinking, being closedminded to what is yet to be actualized, and getting away with abuse when nobody's watching...

…so no, it doesn't seem like internet liberals are really liberal at all.