The problem for anyone who actually believes the above (of which, I doubt the population is as large a those who feel obligated to claim they believe the above) is that stances which were regarded as entirely uncontroversial or even liberal 20 years ago are now considered part of the vast right-wing conspiracy that “everyone understands” must be suppressed (even though the rules say nothing about doing so) because the core clique of the board has shifted along with the winds of what is fashionable in the Democratic Party. The range of acceptable opinions in the “debating” forums is so narrow and the amount of bullshit behavior from the regulars that is tolerated so large that they have become completely useless for any desirable purpose.
First off, things which actually are extreme far-right stances aren’t against the rules. You can come on this board and argue that women who get abortions should be executed, or gay relationships should be illegal, or immigrants should have no protections in the American legal system. You’ll get yelled at in the Pit but you won’t get sanctioned by the staff right away. They love the idea of letting in the worst examples of dissent from the consensus so everyone can assure themselves that the outside world is all like that. The board staff frequently likes to point out that there even is no rule against “racism” per se though this is more a case of “we won’t write the rule down to show how tolerant we are, but in reality the rule de facto exists” - you can and will get modded for openly advocating anti-black racism here.
Things which reasonable centrists and liberals can and do disagree on get the most mod attention because that is where the emotions are right now and that is where the self-appointed guardians of right-think feel they need to put their thumbs on the scale. I can’t even list the topics I’m referring to because there are people looking to nuke my account for bringing them up - they find the fact that they can’t muster any argument from liberal principles for their positions disconcerting and just manufacfture excuse after excuse to warn people and cut off discussions. Anyone who has seen my posts in the GD forum knows what I’m talking about.
I’ll repeat my call from above to simply get rid of the politics forums and impose a soft ban on political discussions here (no reason to target people for an occasional Trump joke, but just get rid of threads entirely devoted to arguing about candidates and issues). To reiterate: There is no legitimate interest from the board audience in “debating” anything or in the mods using their discretion to create an environment in which a non-personalized exchange of arguments takes place. The people who feel the board belongs to them interpret disagreement as trolling because they believe this is the kind of social space where arguing about politics is unfathomably gauche. Nothing is accomplished in threads where the only types of posts allowed are 20-year veterans tripping over their own self-satisfaction and compulsive masochists, and anyone who might be able to actually break through one side’s self-delusion is quickly modded out of talking about issues they have expertise in.
If you want to have the GQ and cultural discussion boards, and try to attract people to them, then getting rid of the politics forums that have been nothing but pointless and offputting for 10+ years seems like a great way to help achieve that goal by breaking up the insularity and getting rid of threads where people just yell for no purpose. There are plenty of other places on the Internet where they can do that.