Read on Twitter
The difficulty with claims like this is there is an implicit claim that the feelings represent reality - in this case, that people are self-censoring in a way that represents a crisis of liberalism. But that is asking *a lot* of the survey data... https://twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1289333770370203650
asking about coherent opinions on complex topics on which only a thin slice of Americans, (e.g., those involved in endless twitter debates about illiberalism) have any kind of coherent opinion or concrete experience...
decades of research on public opinion would lead us to believe that very, very few Americans have stable or coherent opinions on topics such as these.
Yascha asks for an explanation of these trends - the most likely one is that you now have elites yelling about a crisis of illiberalism ("Twitter is censoring me!") so the mass public has started to parrot that concern.
Does it mean the experience of the mass public has actually changed? Maybe, but the evidence from this survey data is pretty weak on that front. It's hard to take this as indicative of some sort of crisis.
A last comment here. One of the hardest things about being a student of politics is avoiding the tendency to let your own experience with politics color your interpretation of the experience of the mass public...
Just because people like Yascha and other elite commentators are very concerned about illiberalism does not mean that the mass public is and assuming as such is a common mistake.
