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				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


In my experience, anti-wokes are more likely to entertain the possibility of race and sex differences being biologically intrinsic, but they shy away from applying biological explanations to LGBT, preferring instead to endorse social constructivist theories




Is this an accurate description?  I mean, obviously there are a lot of strands of anti-woke.  But it seems to me that a slightly more nuanced read on this might be more like this, and I'm going to dip into analogies here...


Teenage girls being prone to anorexia in the 90s, or teenage girls being prone to cutting, were not biologically determined in the sense that there was a specific "I want to cut" gene that was being triggered, exactly, and cutting was those girls "true self".  BUT it was almost certainly the case that many of the girls prone to cutting, or to anorexia, did have some other, background biological traits that made them more likely like to be susceptible to those manifestations of whatever else was going on with them on a deeper level.  They had their own hardware, but the social ways it manifest were absolutely a kind of social software, and broader culture played a deeply important role in making those behaviors manifest the way they did... and different broader cultures could absolutely dampen or accentuate harmful behaviors.


Likewise, it is very likely that most school shooters have some biological things going on internally that worked against them.  But it was obviously the massive coverage of Columbine that put a giant spotlight on "school shooting" as the cultural pattern that that kind of biology got channeled through subsequently.


I am no expert on HBD and black people, so I'm going to just sort of shrug on this topic.  But I will say, because it's quite an interesting detail, that violent, destructive riots by black people in the 20th century has been a largely northern phenomenon in the U.S.  Southern law-and-order has been much less coddling of such things, in general, but also, at least historically, Southern blacks were much less successfully targeted by radical activists with immigrant backgrounds from continental Europe that spread a radical culture of violent rioting as a way to force social change and try to spark revolution.  Whatever is organically, biologically wrong black people (I will be rhetorically agnostic here, as it's not my point), clearly certain cultural strands can serve to make it far, far worse.


I could do this all day, of course.  I don't think most anti-woke types would disagree with me too sharply, or maybe that's just a guess.  This is a way of saying "it's nature AND nurture!", I suppose, but I don't think that quite gets at the deeper orientation, which is more something like, "nature is real, a lot of nature is pretty bad, healthy cultures cut with the grain of nature and try to steer it towards better, more pro-civilizational ends, there are absolutely limits about how far this can be taken because of the reality of nature, and certain ideologies work as arsonists in the face of these facts and are anti-civilizational to the core".  And even accepting these tenants in broad strokes, different people could come down on different sides about how much culture can actually achieve, versus how much nature cannot be evaded.


So, putting these analogies down, I have to imagine that there a lot of people who put a lot of LGBT pretty firmly in something like the above framework - it's no more real than cutting or being a Quaker (which is to say, it exists culturally, it's very important to some people, but it doesn't exist the way that helium does), it probably is a manifestation of something deeper biologically (like whatever it is that gets manifested in cutting or rioting), the fact that it has even those natural roots doesn't mean it's in any sense good (which is just the naturalism fallacy anyway), and the rise of Queer identification (or even the rise of "identity" as a conceptual orienting principle in the first place) is obviously cultural, political, and activist driven.  And just like you can accept that some people choose to live as Orthodox Jews and can accept giving them space to do so (and giving them space to believe things about you that you wouldn't appreciate) while balking at having their belief system aggressively pushed by the state, media, and shared educational bodies, so likewise with the LGBTQ+ movement.  In this view, the science and liberal tolerance might've supported something like decriminalization on normal liberal grounds (liberal society tolerates all sorts of things that aren't clearly good or bad that subgroups care about), but active promotion?


It seems to me, anyway, that the current pop progressive stance goes, much, much further than all of this.  It's something like, Science shows that gayness is exactly like having brown eyes or being left handed, and it's totally natural, and Science also somehow proves the normative claims that it's entirely morally neutral or even good, and it has existed in exactly the form we now recognize throughout all of human history, but we've finally become enlightened enough, and made enough progress, to recognize this and encourage people be who they truly are, and all of this applies to all humans who have ever lived universally, past, present, and future - and all traditions or religions that have ever been wary about this were always emphatically both incorrect and immoral.  And there are no possibilities, now that we have it all figured out, that there will ever be any negative consequences at all to our new progress.  And anyone who dissents from this framing is a bigot and should be hounded out of polite society as an example.  I'm being a hyperbolic, but to be honest, this does capture roughly how it often seems to me (although I suspect some people might admit a bit more nuance if really pressed on an individual level).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is just idle speculation on my part, but I feel like I'd read before, on the subject of Iran, that one of the giant, deep gulfs within the Democratic party at the upper echelons is the issue of the relative power of blacks, and the relative power of Jews.  Just as a matter of deeply important sub-coalitions floating around.  I think I saw this discussed specifically in the context of Obama, and important parts of his elite posse, so to speak - a bunch of them deeply resented how much power and coddling Jewish power got within the Democratic party (according to them), and they wanted to see the Jewish part of the coalition taken down significantly.


The last 15 years has been an unrelenting window in to how those groups take other groups down a peg - #metoo puts men on the back foot, #blm puts whites on the back foot, non-stop Pride month puts unsupportive religious people on the back foot.  It's always about raising the salience of some public issue, forcing attention on it, and framing the split in ways that foregrounds a specific group and disfavors them.  I'm not saying this is entirely astroturfed, either - I think it's something like a savvy awareness of how mass politics actually works.  Smart, well-connected activists lay the ground work for narratives, plant the seeds, agitate in the right places, and then if they've done their job well and have luck on their side, other people organically pick up the threads and the whole thing snowballs.


I'm not saying, exactly, that this is all there is to the Palestinian issue.  But I am saying, at the very least, that it does pattern match to a preexisting split in highly placed circles that is highly useful to certain powerful people.  That's my impression, anyway.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't know; I think this is not responding to the actual argument.


I think most traditionalist Christians would say, you want a culture that treats sex like it's sacred and important.  Abstinence only sex education might be part of that, but it pales in comparison for norm shaping to other forces.  And the norm shaping in the 90s and 2000s, via Hollywood, and network TV, MTV, and the radio, was absolutely drenched in liberal notions about "sexuality" and "sexual liberation".  (I'm honestly not sure where to put internet porn in this discussion, because although it shaped certain norms about behavior, I'm less clear about its role in normalizing public social roles about sexuality, and I suspect it played an important role in the #MeToo sex negative backlash towards male sexual assertiveness).  I mean, I grew up in the religious South in the 90s.  And all the Southern Baptist families around me still had to deal with the fact that their kids were marinating in a sexual culture being promulgated by a million vectors of national broadcast media, all heavily liberalizing, whether they liked it or not.  Fights over abstinence based education were rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.  I think, given that broader media context, that sure, abstinence based education probably couldn't have worked.  And it may well have been that kids from more traditional or religious households were less likely to be on birth control or have condoms and then, after amorous circumstances intervened, ended up getting teen pregnant.  I don't know (although the other comment about the usual racial cofounder can never be ignored when it comes to the South).


If traditionalists say "tell them not to have premarital sex", they generally mean something much, much bigger and deeper than the contents of a stray sex ed class.  They mean something like, a healthy culture in one where all the various sense-making institutions treat sex like it is sacred, and important, and something set aside, and not to be treated likely or traded like a product - and then people will respond to that and treat it thusly, rather than treating it like a trip to the amusement park with a new friend.  Progressives deeply disagree with this, but they understand the impulse, because this is precisely how they feel about "racism" and "sexism" and "xenophobia" and "homophobia" - they get very, very upset if people treat those topics lightly, and they insist that all the various sense-making institutions that they control treat these topics as sacralized, and important, and set aside, and that everyone participate in their universal morality story.


Lots of cultures historically have had much more consensus on treating sex the way that traditionalists would prefer it were treated, including America in earlier eras (the fact of the pill coming into existing in the mid 20th century complicates this discussion, of course).  And claiming that that never worked is probably a tall order, and disingenuous to boot, because the actual crux of the argument for most progressives, really, is not, "Did it factually work?"  It's "I don't want to live in a world where sex is that culturally locked down and hidden away".  Which is fine, but accepting that means abandoning the fig leaf of scientism and accepting that different groups just fundamentally have incommensurable worldviews and values.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think this gets at the mainstream conservative position, or least the more religious inflected one.  I would say most religious conservatives I know, at least, would say 1) single women absolutely shouldn't be having premarital sex, and 2) no one should be killing unborn babies, and so once a young woman is pregnant while single, the locus of moral concern and protection is on the blameless unborn child... and if helping and encouraging the single mother out (who often are vulnerable women themselves, even if they've made terrible choices) helps the baby, then so be it.


Same with Medicaid for the kids of single moms; to most religious conservatives, anyway, the kids didn't do anything wrong, even if their parents did.


I think this is a different position from a lot of progressives, who might well want to destigmatize sexual liberation and single motherhood and leave it as one coequal choice that women might make, who might think that the stigmatization is responsible for a lot of the difficulty of the position in the first place, and who think government really has an obligation to make the coequal choices more available to women if they choose them.  And it's a different position, too, from a lot of more libertarian / non-religious conservatives, who might well see single mothers AND their children as primarily a context where incentives matter - if you make it too easy to be the child of a single mom, the system will produce more of them.  And besides, a lot of those behaviors are downstream from HBD anyway, and in those cases, the kids are probably tainted by a kind of biological original sin anyway, given the evidence of their parents.


That's my sense, anyway; for the religious conservatives I know (and I think they are typical of a lot of conservatives), a lot of the issues around single parenthood amount to something like a kind of triage, trying to figure out how not to hurt the morally blameless while maintaining high standards and ideals and valuable stigma that keep bad behavior in check.  It's genuinely tough to balance.


I think you see something very similar, but more so, play out about black abortion.  I would say the prolife white religious people I know, even southern ones andd very conservative ones, legitimately rejoice in young black mothers not aborting their children and putting them up for adoption instead (while still thinking they should be taught better values, get religion, and stop engaging in low sexual behavior).  Libertarians and certain wings of the emerging non-religious right, on the other hand, seem to... well, believe others things about black abortion.  That's my impression.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Here's what I keep bumping into with lines of thought like this.


Like many others, I did the angry atheist thing.  But I was never really able to get past the wisdom present in Christ saying "By their fruits shall ye know them" - and indeed, one of the things I appreciated about abandoning the conservative, constricting faith of my youth on exactly those lines is that I could read, say, stuff from zen Buddhist thinkers and appreciate them morally on a deep level without having to decide whether they were really devil worshippers or not, for example, as my home tradition would have insisted.  But, speaking of fruits, over time I think I became really discouraged by the behaviors, habits, and world views of many people who were most vociferously anti-theist, whether that was through New Atheism, or whether (and worse) it was from various cultural strands through university influence that were all downstream from the biggest anti-theism of them all, French enlightenment philosophy from the last 250 years.   Meanwhile, many, many people will look at, say, Mormons they know, or the Amish, and they're say, "They believe a lot of silly things, and they sometimes seem quite naive about the broader world, and yet at the level of behavior, they can be the nicest, most selfless, most family and community oriented people I know."


I appreciate the project of trying to reconcile science (but less so "reason") with the great world religious traditions that have shaped the bones of different civilizations.  I think as a practical matter, fundamentalism's insistence on loudly proclaiming anti-hard science positions has often been deeply counterproductive.  And yet it seems to me that much of the strange power of real, historical religious traditions often has something deeply to do with their shared status as being beyond reason and evidence, and the shared authority that comes from that, and especially the common knowledge that comes from that shared authority.


And the shared authority aspect is really key.  Speaking entirely from a secular game designer perspective here (because that's where my brain mostly lives), the game theory of Mormonism, say, working makes total sense to me.  You believe that God exists, is all knowing, is all powerful, and is all good.  And you know that God specifically commands you not to lie.  And because God is all knowing and all good, this means there is no way of weasle-ing or lawyering your way out of this.  You might as well try to lie your way out of obeying the law of gravity.  And just like knowing that gravity exists, you believe, deep in your bones, that you've been freed by this knowledge - that there was a deep, powerful, important rule about the universe that hurt you for not knowing it, and you've been liberated by knowing it now.  People who believe in Foucault might see this story as a panopticon, meant to police and and imprison you, but to believe this tradition, really, is to believe that you started out in the prison of your own self-destructive moral error (no different than not understanding gravity or the empirical germ theory of disease), and this knowledge (through faith) frees you from that prison.  But then something much more complicated happens once you're in a shared community that also overwhelmingly believes these things - because (and this is where game theory and my game designer sense kicks in) you also have the common knowledge that everyone around you also has been liberated in exactly this way, and you know that they know that God knows, with perfect knowledge and perfectly benevolent judgement, exactly what they're doing too, and they can't weasel their way out of it either, no matter how much money or worldly power or social status they have either.  And to the extent that this belief is truly pervasive, and the authority of this belief is respected, people truly do become different, and something real comes into a being - a community, or a world view, a way of being, that actually didn't exist before, but does exist now.  A kind of high trust society comes into being because of that shared common knowledge about everyone else's metaphysical beliefs.


I guess this is something like a William James-ian pragmatism at play, because I feel like the word "truth" is tugged in different directions here.  What does it mean if a myth isn't materially true, but believing it nevertheless brings into being something true and real and good - and meanwhile, this insistence on the assumption of materiality itself as the final arbiter is also possibly unjustified - based on an untruth, if you will, and its own faith commitments that precede it?


So, finally, returning to the initial discussion... The thing that I wonder about a lot is the impact of this move to make Christianity, say, "make sense", or any of these traditions.  Based on what I just said about, it's not clear to me that the shared, common knowledge authority of these traditions, and the game theory results of that, really survive when authority is shifted over to "reason", to "making sense".  Because the reality of this turn towards the insistence on myths surviving reason and making sense is that most of the game theory I just discussed seems to dissipate immediately - if I know that I am hopelessly biased and self-dealing, and I know that you are hopelessly biased and self-dealing too, once we both turn to our own personal reason as the final arbiter of these traditions, we might all reasonably expect that each of us is going to lawyer the beliefs until their authority is threadbare, and what they compel of us will be minimal.  And that sounds appealing for me, in my selfishness, but it doesn't sound so good to me for the rest of you, who have all sorts of selfish designs for me.  And eventually the whole thing collapses.  One might very well arguing that this exact process has been exactly what hollowed out mainline Protestantism.


I'll be honest, though - I really do feel muddled here.  Because the response that "doesn't it matter if these traditions really are materially true, though" certainly feels compelling, too, and I can't actually set that aside.  I can say all of the above, and honestly believe it in broad strokes, I think, about how these various systems likely work socially.  I can absolutely find the actual human results of some other, theoretically more sophisticated, more cynical belief systems pretty corrosive and sometimes disastrous, and wonder what that actually does mean about their truth content.  But at the end of the day, it's very hard to actually pull myself out of a strictly material belief system, too, I guess.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Why Bother?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Back in 2010 and 2011 and 2012, all of the liberal news opinion sources that I had read when I was an I AM VERY SMART New Atheist suddenly shifted on a dime, and they started repeating an intersectional line of politics that none of them had evinced back when all of us were extremely mad about Bush.  It was the early rumblings of the politics of wokeness, essentially.  And for several years, I found my blood pressure going up more and more every time I would read these formerly sympathetic sources.  I found them painting with broader and broader brushes, and casting more and more groups that I still identified with in a worse light, and I kept wrestling with the "why bother" question... until a point finally came, in 2014, where a discontinuous break happened.  And all of those voices suddenly went from being an "us" to a "them", and I was no longer a sympathetic reader of those voices.


But what I want to say is... that process of me reading, and getting more frustrated, was an essential part of the process of me shifting my perspective, and realizing a whole lot of things about politics and ideology that I had been totally in the dark about.  That was, for a time, an actual answer to "why bother".  It led me to a lot of much smarter, sharper reading (mostly in the form of actual, rigorous books) than I had done when I was coasting on anti-Bush vibes and Obama charisma.  In retrospect, I would say, interacting with those conversations was really important, because it was interacting with it that led to the point where I could be confident that that conversation was entirely over.  You could say that's sad, I guess, but I think it's just pragmatic, and possibly healthy, too.  If you're blithely in a Schmidt-ian relationship with powerful forces, much better to remove the scales from your eyes, accept reality, and move on (possibly reconfiguring your life so your surface area is minimized as much as possible) than to be a gas lit cuckold, if I can haul out a fraught term.


So there's that.  And unfortunately, this cycle feeds on itself - at this point, I simply can't and won't give progressives much of hearing unless they really bend over backwards to repudiate most of the last 15 years of politics and culture.  And that's extremely unlikely, so I'm not particularly reachable.  And that's too bad, I guess - but I already went on this rodeo before, back when I was being activisted out of my home conservative culture between 1996 and 2008.  Fool me once, shame on me...


And of course, and I'm far from alone in this, I'm socially still surrounded by highly presumptuous, true-believing progressives for professional and class reasons, so at least in my case (and I think I'm far from alone in this), it's not like I no idea what evolving progressive thought looks like these days.


I believe, and I think this was once a much more common American belief, that there are much, much, much worse things in the world than different groups with different world views and different values giving each other some generous space.  If we are lucky, maybe America will return to that form of organization.  But it's going to be very difficult in the interim, because we have all sorts of institutions in place (the New Deal state, universities, Hollywood, multinational corporations) that assume a degree of integration that is possibly no longer supportable given how America is drifting.  Or maybe other blacks swan events will conspire that restore a sense of unity - but if so, they'll almost certainly have to involve a massive amount of suffering and death, just like the Great Depression and World War 2 did.


So, to return to your original question, why bother?  Well, pragmatically, it's likely that Trump and the new version of the right will overplay their hand in certain key ways.  And as they do, there will likely be people who are receptive to new arguments again.  You can only make those arguments if you're mixing it up in mixed communities and have gotten good at doing so rhetorically.  And the old wisdom I've always seen is, far more people read than write, so if you make good arguments on a forum, even if you're downvoted, you might be reaching an audience that's invisible - that's a thankless road to hoe in the short-term, but if you time it right, and you're fortunate in picking where you participate, you could well reach people that way.  I mean, even for me, there is no possible future where I'm reachable by American progressives in a positive sense... but I could be persuaded that whatever gets called the right is more or less supportable, depending on what's going on.  But this is all about "what's politically effective", not "what's a fun way to spend my evenings".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not positive, but my impression is that this was a conscious turn by really important elite factions in the 80s, though.  I don't believe it was "how politics was prior to the 2010s" - it was more like, what politics looked like once the Reagan detente offered up grill-pilling as an option for exhausted voters who were ready to move on from disruption and political struggle.  No more fighting over politics - instead, America is great, nationalism is great, Wall Street is great, money and capitalism are great, religion and families are great, no more inflation is great, Hollywood images of peaceful race relations are great, local religious observances instead of national politics is great, Cosby Show instead of All in the Family is great.  And especially, Boomers finally leaving their disruptive twenties and settling down to be stable and raise their families is great.


If you go back and read, say, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 72" by Hunter S. Thompson, or "Days of Rage" by Bryan Burrough, or really anything about the rise of the New Left in the 70s, there is a whole lot of familiar archetypes, topics, and styles of rhetoric.


I guess at this point I'm coming to believe that breaking the brains of a certain amount of people is an overtly desirable feature, not bug, of certain kinds of political agitation.  Making people unreasonable can actually be a really effective strategy for forcing certain kinds of change through, because then powerful leaders can't (by definition) reason with those people, and thus have to give in to demands instead or find some other way of dealing with them.  I feel like that's what I've been seeing, at any rate - people who would naturally be somewhat unstable having that massively amplified by forces that appear to be attempting to accentuate exactly those tendencies for a variety of reasons.


I absolutely agree with your prescription about what would be better, I'm just not sure if there's a way to get there from here.  I think there were a bunch of factors that made Reagan exactly the right affable messenger for that turn in the 80s for a turn away from politics of a certain sort.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
When I was a kid, in the 80s, where I lived, Ronald Reagan was the good czar, and all the lingering bad old strife from the 70s was going to be put behind us, because it was all a great misunderstanding, with the government getting way too out of line with the real Americans and needing to be put back in its place.  And liberal was a dirty word to tar people with.  I didn't understand what had happened, of course, but I could just feel it, overwhelmingly, from all the adults in my life.


As I got older and further from that past, it seemed less and less real, like some sort of giant ridiculous propaganda coup... especially by the Clinton years (New Democrats didn't look anything like what I had been told, right?)  And especially by the awfulness of the George W. Bush years.  It got really easy to think that all the adults in my life, back in the 80s, had just been misled by propaganda and that era's equivalent of Fox News.


All of which made the 2010s deeply harrowing and shocking for me, especially as I had already steered my adult life in the assumption that much of what I had been told as a kid wasn't true.  But early in the 2010s, it dawned on me, watching the mounting personal wreckage of political radicalization from people in my own personal life, especially women of a certain sort, exactly why those adults I had grown up around had loathed the 70s so intensely.  "The personal is political" might be an interesting airy political theory, but as a lived practice, it clearly utterly breaks a lot of normal people into quivering, non-functional shards who can't recover from it.


I have a half-sister, twelve years younger than me, who went very much through a similar arc to Lana (I have never been especially close to her).  She started out quite conservatively religious.  And now she's got three kids, lives in a polycule and her various gendered lovers with her despairing, rather unwilling cuckold husband, has gone down the double mastectomy route, is mainlining T and showing off her beard and armpit hair on social media, and writes borderline suicidal posts from time to time about how the only people who will respond to her at this point are online activist LGBTQ friends, as everyone in her normal life is done with her.  I'm probably "misgendering" her here, but I blocked her a while ago on Facebook, so I really only get updates second hand through my sister.  And my half-sister has a litany of internet disabilities and conditions, can't leave the bed most days, and has made nasty allegations about several members of her family about abuse in the past, none of which are backed up by any of her many siblings.  It's horrible to watch, especially given the children involved.  I think she would have had a rocky mental health experience in life no matter what, as it runs in the family.  But she's clearly been stewing in social influences that make everything far, far worse, and amplify her hardest tendencies...  And I've seen milder versions of this play out the last several years in other cases, too!


It's vaguely interesting that there's this "public" conversation about incels and online radicalization of young guys (which, I mean, sure, there's a plausible discussion there), and then meanwhile, there's this giant elephant in the room.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Oh, totally.  But I think I'm trying to get at something slightly different.  To go with a slightly strained metaphor...


It's more like George W. Bush was a basketball team, everyone knew it and knew that the communal sport seemed to be basketball, and so the Democrats trained to play and beat a basketball team. And they arguably got really good at violating the spirit of basketball while staying in the letter of the rules of basketball (or so it seemed, if you were not sympathetic to Democrats).


And then they show up to play basketball, and Trump is there, announcing that the actual sport is boxing.  And the refs angrily shake their heads no - we play basketball here! - and then Trump cheerfully gives them the finger and sells ticket to the upcoming boxing match, a giant crowd shows up for the boxing match, the crowd gets rowdy and ignores the refs, and then the refs shrug and the boxing match starts.


I think that's roughly what I'm getting at.  Democrats couch it in moral language, but as you well note, it's extremely difficult to see how Trump (especially earlier Trump) was morally worse that Iraq War era George W. Bush.  But it is easy to see that Democrats really liked the social, cultural terms of debate they had against the Mitt Romneys of the world, and they really don't like the terms of debate they have against Trump.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Here's an extension of this theory that I've also been kicking around.


I remember, during the 2016 primaries, when Trump was still being treated as a joke, him racking up surprisingly big wins (in a Republican primary context) in places like Massachusetts.  And I was reading something at the time that noted, essentially, that there was a surprisingly big, untapped demographic of voters all throughout New England and places like Illinois (or other Midwest places with dominant progressive cities ) that wasn't particularly religious or pious or prissy, and wasn't large enough to win local elections, but that sounded a LOT like Trump and was really receptive to Trump.  But neither major political coalition had had anything to say such people for a very long time.


And ever since then, I've gotten rather stuck on this notion that the older 2 party system, the one that was stable for a while, was really two coalitions that were, especially, catering to two regional sets of winners.  The Democratic party had turned into the party of coastal winners, and the Republican party had evolved into the party of sunbelt winners.  And that meant Democrats were more attached to old money prestige cultural institutions like universities, and the Republican party was especially connected to new money success like booming California and Texas and Florida population growth and business (although over time, the political culture in California shifted from the ur-Sunbelt model to a much more coastal, entrenched model).  And this bifurcation was comfortable and made a lot of sense to all involved - of course the two parties are going to be heavily utilized by various winning elements of society and work as their megaphones and enact their interests.  And the winners of the Democratic coalition were morally prissy about PC stuff, and the winners of the Republican coalition was morally prissy about evangelical and personal sex stuff, and so that go reflected in how they became annoying in public discourse, and how they got attacked rhetorically.


But the George W Bush years, and Iraq, and the 2008 financial crisis, were very bad for the Sunbelt winners coalition.  It was badly weakened.  And a lot that coalition, particularly the parts that had gotten wealthier and were more drawn to the cultural attraction of the Obama story, really didn't want to be associated with the culturally low class (but still economically booming) Sunbelt model any more.


And that coalitional weakness opened the door to a new faction, one that wasn't really getting any representation or being courted... the Northern (and Midwest / rust belt) losers faction.  And the Northern losers faction is a nightmare for the Northern winners faction, because 1) they aren't prissy like the Sunbelt evangelicals, 2) they've embraced counterculture energy to a more serious degree than even the Northern winners had (which had always been a cultural Achillies heel for southern evangelicals), 3) they're actually way more racists and tribal than sunbelt winners have been for the last several decades, and much more unapologetically so, which morally horrifies Northern winner sensibilities, and 4) on a deep and profound level, their condition is in many ways the FAULT of northern winners, their own local expert class who has been much more interested in growth through globalization than the economic fortunes of their downscale neighbors.


I get the sense that Democrats really, really, really wish they could just run against 2006 era George W Bush again, or Mitt Romney.  That's a very self-flattering world for them, where everything makes sense and they get to fulfill their role of being cool.  But quite frankly, the 2016 campaign was the first time in my entire life where I was seeing campaign material for Republicans, at least online (much of filtered through 4chan anarchy), where I recognized the Republican side of political rhetoric being, unambiguously, much cooler in a countercultural sense than what Democrats were doing.  I found it fascinating, to be honest.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There's an idea I've been toying with for a while that connects with this.  I saw some comment a while ago (I can't recall where) that Obama had said he expected some macho, manly, John Wayne type to be who Republicans settled on in 2016.  And so Trump blindsided him.


And lurking in the background there, you can see, I think, something like Obama's (ultimately disastrously flawed) theory of how progress happens in society.  Namely, you get a bunch of hardcore radical leftist activists to get agitated up like an agitated bee's nest.  And then kind-hearted liberals publicly portray themselves as simply responding to the people's will as they enact progressive change.  And then, after enough of that, eventually stern dad John Wayne gets back in office and spanks the radical activists who have overreached - and he gets considerable public support in doing so.  And so those activists are forced to have their more extreme edges get sanded down.  A certain amount of liberal capitulation happens - but meanwhile, quite a lot of the previous change sticks, too.  And liberals get to console their radical activist fringe and say, "I know, I know - what a dick that guy is!  We fought for you, and we'll fight for you next time, too!  Show up at the polls and organize!  But I mean, what can you do?  Reactionaries and fascists, am I right?"  And notably, in that story, liberals never, ever, ever have to be the bad cop and police their own crazies.  They really want to be the cool uncle who still listens to Nas on their ipods (but wear mom jeans).


But Trump threw a massive wrench in this theory of social change.  Because of course actual Trump is intermittently pretty radical himself, or at least is quite comfortable with radical rhetoric.  And because the actual populist forces that Trump taps into are frequently fairly radical too (but a radical strain that is utterly terrifying to American liberals who really don't want to accept the reality of their own social position).  And because American liberals secretly want stern dad John Wayne to reassert reality and normality after their radicals go too far and temper those radicals a bit while leaving the hands of liberals clean and letting them chafe against the repressions of normality... and Trump really didn't do any of that.  Trump loves chaos.  He doesn't have any of that energy that George W. Bush or Mitt Romney have, trying to be a beleaguered dad from a 50s sitcom holding the line and reinforcing norms in a prissy, stuffy, uncool way.


In 2017, the old, comfortable script got thrown out.  And that meant that nobody was there to police liberals' radicals for them - and indeed, liberals were busy being utterly frantic themselves because of Trump, so policing their radicals was the last thing on their mind.  They were coming to feel pretty radical themselves.  So there ended up being no breaks on the train, and the radicalism of the left ended up growing way more pronounced and unchecked.  And so that's grown and grown...


But by 2025, 1) it's turned out that some of those radical edges are absolutely electoral poison (and increasingly make even normie liberals uncomfortable), 2) some of those radical edges are tearing the Democratic coalition apart, 3) intersectionality has proven a lot more adept at making fervent enemies (like nearly all young white men in America) than friends, and crucially 4) a lot of those radicals REALLY, violently hate the Jews, and given how the current Democratic coalition is structured, that simply can't be allowed to continue.  And because of the way Trump rolls, they simply can't wait for the stern 1950s dad to show up and reinforce norms and boundaries for them.  So (or at least in this theory) some American liberals (or their powerful institutions in the background) are finally reaching the point where its dawning on them that they're going to have to do the policing themselves, as deeply painful and unpleasant as that may be.  And that's going to require theorizing their erstwhile allies in Latinate language and casting them in pretty unpleasant lights via rhetoric rewritten as social "science".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You know, a while ago, I remember Matt Yglesias noticing that elected Republican officials (this was pre-Trump) were MUCH more sensitive to conservatives being called "racists" than they were to conservatives being "racist".  He said it in a way that made it clear the thought he was being cute, of course.


But the observation has stuck with me, because it's actually fully general.  And I think there actually really serious consequences.


To a first approximation (and I'm aiming here to use the no-no word to good effect), by the end of the 70s, the more radical side of liberals came out of the civil rights movement with a stance that was something like, "It is your own racist standards and worldview that make you think you can put certain people in the category of "nigger", and the word "nigger" exists to keep people down, and to the extent that there are people actually behaving in bad ways that might make you want to label them as "nigger", that's actually a result of pre-existing systemic racist forces that produce the "nigger" in the first place.  All of this is a stain on you, not them.  That word is your original sin."


And then, at about the same time, the Reagan coalition and Reagan detente settled on something like, "Obviously there are a whole bunch of people that it would be reasonable to call "nigger", clearly they are incompatible with civilization, but it's rude and unhelpful to use that explicit language about the topic, and much more to the point, there are a bunch of American black people who can be trusted to live up to high standards like the rest of us, we don't need to lower our standards, and it would be a grave injustice to treat those Americans as though they were just "niggers" who, by the way, totally exist, but we're just going to throw up our hands and corral those types in inner city ghettos and then massive prisons and turn our heads and avoid acknowledging it because, honestly, there really is nothing to be done, and we're more interested in integrating the more upstanding black citizens anyway, which is a much more happy project that we'd like to have our names attached to".  Which is to say, the conservatives of that era might well have said, "You know what's much, much worse that calling someone "nigger"?  It's choosing to be a civilization destroying "nigger", obviously, or choosing to coddle and elevate such people like liberals insist on doing.  Incentives matter, and you're making sure you get a lot more of that".  There's actually some interesting personal anecdote from Glenn Loury, talking about a private conversation he had with William F Buckley during the heyday of the Reagan administration in the mid 80s, and the summary of what Buckley had to say was very much in that ballpark - do what you can for the redeemable half, throw your hands up and move on for the other half.


And then Obama came along, and he and his movement (and the collapse of George W. Bush conservatism) destroyed the Reagan detente, and we've been living with that liberal story about racism every since.  But I think this has probably been a great example of arson being applied to Chesterton's fence - the older Reagan-era norm, with its insistence that "of course you can expect plenty of black people to live up to high standards" played a really important social role in encouraging everyone else to go along with integration.  Despite all the word policing, the Emperors New Clothes is real, and I have to believe that anyone who has ever lived around a large enough variety of black people has some contact with some uniquely frustrating (or likely much, much worse) behavior.  It's certainly been the case in every city I've ever lived in, and every good white liberal I know, if you can steer the conversation sensitively, will more or less acknowledge it and have their own stories, often said in sadness not anger.  Just going off of basic human psychology, it would be the most natural thing in the world for lots of non-black people, given their actual life experiences, to hold significant grudges about black people in a tribal way.  It really is, or I think it is, an act of civic virtue when someone says, "While all of that is obviously true, it is both wrong and unhelpful to tar other members of the larger group for the behavior of these particular people..."  But that impulse really only works when you can follow that by saying "...because I know lots of people in this group both CAN and ARE living up to our high standards, and we are collectively capable of validating and affirming those high standards".  Ever since the Obama years, this is no longer the narrative frame we exist in, I don't think.


I think this is why, at least for someone people, Chris Rock's old "Black People vs. Niggers" stand up bit feels so cathartic.  Because the rules of the game, post-1980 was, you can behave as though you acknowledge those facts, you can vote with your feet and where you buy property, but you absolutely can't actually name those facts with your mouth.  That was the trade off, the detente.  And so hearing someone touch that nerve by actually naming it was electric at the time.


I've long expected that the Obama-era blowing up of those older norms, especially after a lot of the insane cancel culture language policing, was eventually going to force a deeper re-evaluation of these topics.  In important ways, the Reagan-era settlement was a kind of social compromise between a bunch of different groups that had a lot of tension with each other, with different parties each getting half a loaf.  The Obama era shift was not like that.  I think it's always had a deep instability buried in its heart.  A lot of groups didn't actually sign off on it, they just had it shoved down their throats while they were weak.  And its norms (which have been unstable and have often been caught up in purity spirals) have proven to be simply way too far from reality to be stable, too.


All of this has been very much in the back of my mind as I watch the current kerfuffle about this crowdsourcing money stuff.  I don't enjoy rudeness, but a lot of the progressive McCarthyism of the last 8 years or whatever has more or less guaranteed that we're going to see some new norms renegotiated, and it's bound to be messy and probably often unpleasant and shocking as it happens.  But I don't think there's any switch we can hit that will just take us right back to 2008.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is the kind of post that makes so many good, and big, observations that it's hard to respond to usefully, almost.


But at any rate, I've grown to be really, really interested in this topic, specifically on an internal-to-the-USA level.  And part of that is that I grew up in the New South in the 80s and 90s, and then I moved to the Midwest, got to know more of the country, and have ended up in a Rust Belt city now, where I'm raising kids.  But I still have family down in the New South, so I'm down there fairly often, and (because I grew up there, but only some of my family was from there) I only briefly had a burst of hicklib anti-southern idiocy in my late 20s before reality caught up with me.


But the reality, right now, is that where I am now, it absolutely feels old and gray and like its best days are well behind it, because that is clearly true.  The rustbelt part of the country I'm in clearly once had a lot of money, and youth, and immigration, and energy.  And now it's like a donut - a small hole of well educated tech and medical workers, and a much larger donut of older, less skilled workers who are kind of decaying in place (in very broad strokes - there are random suburb and exurb professionals too).  And that's been roughly true when visiting my family in the Northeast.  But where I'm from in the New South is clearly going from strength to strength right now.  There are still the general problems that new money has - it still punches under its weight in broader cultural projection and influence on the academy and literary cultural and all the sorts of things that old money tends to be heavily over represented in.  But when I go back down to visit my family, there is a sense of confidence, like everything is working right, and most people's best days are ahead of them, not behind them.  I mean, this is a huge part of what makes the New South the New South - the older South saw its best days as long, long behind them.  Where I live now, the school district has had a stable population for decades and is really strong, but many neighboring districts, if they are less shiny, have been dwindling for a while now.  Meanwhile, the county I grew up in in the New South had two high schools when I was there in the early 90s.  Now it has 5.


I saw some article a few days ago mentioning that in 2030, at current rates, New South states (and intermountain West) will, combined, get 10 more house seats, and New York, California, and other older Midwest blue states will collectively lose 10 house seats.  Or, elsewhere - and this, I think, might be the most important set of statistics in the country - if you look at the enrollment statistics for American public schools by region of the country from the Department of Education, you can literally see the future of the country being written.  Fully 40% of American public school children are in the South at this point.  Only 15% are in the North East, with the remainder being 20% in the Midwest and 24% in the West.  That entire table is worth poring over, because it does capture the slow but steady shift of where people are having kids at this point - there are a lot of regional micro-stories there. As a practical matter, this means that the fact American university systems are saturated with a very specific North East (and later California) derived progress narrative in which Southerners are the ultimate evil, the local Hitler, probably has a limited shelf life - as the economic and demographic reality of the South rising again becomes more and more unavoidable, and as tolerance to "Hide your strength, bide your time" gets exhausted, there's probably just going to have to be a reckoning with this tension, or so I suspect, and the process might not be pretty.  I'm convinced this is an important undercurrent of current politics, in fact - just as the economic, industrial rise of China has proven to be an existential problem in a Thucydides trap kind of way for the existing Yankee built system, the rise of the South is likely not a process that can be easily absorbed by the existing power arrangements because of some deep assumptions in those power structures about the moral role of the South, and the tensions between those assumptions and reality.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I guess women don't know that you can't really see dicks of someone using a urinal unless you specifically look around their body to try to see it.




... Never, ever, ever underestimate the skeeviness and boldness of a certain subset of men, if they think they can get away with their exhibitionism or voyeurism fetishes while avoiding consequences.  I've read elsewhere that many women are absolutely shocked by the brazenness of a subset of men sharing unsolicited dick pics quite freely online, too.


I think there might be a significant experiential gap here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'll agree about it apparently being a scissor statement, given the responses so far, but...




Much as every event obviously has an immediate proximate cause, it is obviously true that a system should only be meaningfully assessed on the basis of its actual outputs.




This is not at all obviously true.  This is the crux of the entire conversation.


I guess it really is a scissor statement, because to me, the use of the statement, as rhetoric, seems extremely obviously, and Scott entirely whiffs it.  And I don't think it's about giving in to cynicism.  It's about naming that different groups of people having different amounts of power in systems, as well as different values and worldviews, that this shapes their rhetoric in complicated ways, and participants in some of those groups can be protected from the rhetoric of other, more powerful groups if they can be taught to think about what systems are actually doing, rather than living in other people's rhetoric about what those systems are supposed to be doing.


Say that my wife and I participate in telling our kids about Santa and giving them gifts from Santa, and it's a happy ritual, connecting their experience to our our own experiences from our childhood.  We have a lot of power in the relationship compared to our kids, we can get away with bending the truth if we think there's some cultural good to it all, and if they asked about whether Santa was real when they're small, we would probably fudge the truth about it to keep the happy ritual going, and we could get away with it.  But there's absolutely no need for cynicism here -  it's much more complicated than saying we were lying to them, because we would be inclined to think that "is Santa real" isn't even asking the right questions about that tradition, we would likely recognize that a 5 year old isn't even really in the right position to understand why we participate in the rituals we do, and we would expect that later, when they're older, they'll understand what we were doing and probably keep the tradition going.


A radical child activist (?) who came along and looked at this system might try to shake my kids out of their Santa belief, if that activist thought the entire enterprise was bad for my kids and needed to be radically overthrown, by adopting a "the purpose of a system is what it does" stance.  Because that paragraph that I just wrote, which is something like a functional / sociological description of the Santa ritual, is a really strong inoculation against literally believing in Santa; the sociological explanation of why we do the Santa ritual sounds pretty compelling, and it makes belief in literal Santa much more difficult, or least plausibly it does (except we're talking about 5 year olds here, so my just so story is hitting its limits).


Now, this example is a toy one and likely (to most readers) pretty benign.  But arguably, this sort of situation comes up constantly in society between different groups of people with different amounts of power and different beliefs about the broader good in the world and how to achieve those goods.  I mean, it's no hard to change my Santa story just a bit, swapping parents with intellectuals, kids with normal people, and Santa with socialism, and you've described much of the 20th century.  It's the core idea of Plato's noble lie, too.  Or of Steve Jobs standing around on a stage, making all sorts of charismatic proclamations that somehow become true enough by people believing them and changing their expectations and how they act when it came to adopting new technology that went on to impact the social world.  It's why faith is stressed in certain major religious traditions, too.  The cultural scripts that people load up in their heads change how they experience the world and how they behave, and clean mapping to empirical reality is not the main driver here.


"The purpose of a system is what it does" is in the same skeptical tradition as open source programmers saying "I don't need to see your advertising or design doc - please show me the running code instead".  Or the tradition of Marx saying he's a materialist and has no use for idealism or ideology.  Or sociology tabling the truth claims of religion and instead theorizing about how different religions function in the world (and thus wrecking their foundations in the process).  It's economists examining how people actually behave, in aggregate, in the face of incentives, ignoring questions of how they ought to behave.  It's the tradition of C.S. Lewis's Bulverism, ignoring someone's argument and psychoanalyzing what forces caused them to make that argument instead.  (And I'm not saying any of these are good or bad, for that matter).


To me, that's the obvious rhetorical use of POSIWID, especially on the dissident right.  It's primary use is to shake certain people free from inhabiting the rhetorical frames of other powerful, status quo groups of people.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I don’t know if that influence counts as ‘shadowy’ given it was all very public.




I think one of the things that's unusual about the pairing of Trump and Musk, at least for politicians, is the way that they're very intentionally brash and attention seeking.... and provocative, and, for Trump especially, fractious.


It seems to me that, in the normal course of things, activist parts of a coalition's base tend to be very noisy and confrontational, and then the more technocratic part of of a coalition, or the finance-oriented part of a coalition, tends to let that activist part suck up all the negative oxygen and emotion and then respond to in in the most anodyne, bloodless, quiet ways possible, generally making the really big changes.  They tend to be more in the Politics and the English Language camp when it comes to attention management.  And of course there is often more financial or organizational connections between the two parts of coalitions.


Trump and Musk seem like they're collapsing that distinction, which is... interesting.


Anyway, whether or not this way of behaving, this division of labor between funders/organizers/NGOs and the groups they fund, is shadowy is kind of a tricky issue, or so it seems to me.  On the one hand, when I read, say, this Tablet story about the Pritzker family, their wealth, and the way they use it, and all the programs they fund, I could see the argument that none of what they're doing is secret; it's all in public, in some literal sense.  That's what makes it possible to write that Tablet article, after all.  And yet I also know that my fairly well-educated progressive in-laws, who live in Illinois and follow CNN and MSNBC, absolutely don't know any of this stuff, and it absolutely isn't worth the time trying to get them to know about it, because they have all sorts of ideological white blood cells about even the framing of topic.  Same with the topics covered by Jacob Siegel in this article about the rise of the disinfo industry.  Same with this famous Time magazine article.  Same with all the discussion about the role and influence of USAID.  Obama was famously very swayed by Cass Sunstein's theory of nudging groups, which is quite literally about recognizing problems with the attention that normies pay to things and then making policy that leverages those flaws (ostensibly towards pro-social ends).  Is Moldbug's Cathedral shadowy?  Or is it just normal and inevitable, the reality of complicated modern states dealing with the cognitive realities of their "citizens"?


I feel like this is a major fault line right now.  Over and over, one set of people is inclined to say, I think, "Everything is legal and above the board, and this is just what our system literally IS.  This kind of technocratic organizing is simple how power works, and how it must inevitably work."  And another side says, "Even if it's ostensibly legal, there are so many layers of indirection, and so much rhetorical obfuscation, and so much artful shifting of attention, that surely the goal is not democratic deliberation and self-governance.  TPOSIWID."  Much like with the USAID stories, whether or not these different organizations or funders or whoever else is shadowy, large blocks of voters sure seem to respond like the organizations have been shadowy when those voters finally realize what the organizations have been up to...


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You might also be interested in George Marsden's "The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief", Thomas Leonard's "Illiberal Reformers", and Helena Rosenblatt's "The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century", all of which also cover this same era and dig into some overlapping topics and themes.


I've been trying to understand the shift from the worldview of the progressive era (where a lot of our inherited institutions were built and cemented) to... well, whatever emerged in the 60s and 70s, and all of these books were really useful for me in that regard.  Leonard's book was a bit dry, but lots of great information.  The other two read pretty easily, IIRC.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I wonder if there's not an alternative way of framing all of this, not as "should we have accountability" but rather, "must accountability be externally legible, and what are the costs and consequences if it must?"


As an example, one of the interesting things about the modern university system is it bolts two incompatible accountability systems on top of each other.


When my wife got her PhD, it was a long, grueling, intensive process.  In particular, though, it was expensive in the sense that she had a world class expert in her field who paid quite a lot of attention to her during that multiyear process (she fortunately had a good and ethical advisor).  And you can see (if this is working correctly) the outlines of an older system of accountability; in theory, my wife went through an intensive acculturation process by an existing cohort of experts who could, by the end of the process, vouch that my wife had internalized values and norms that meant she could be trusted by the broader cohort of researchers in her field, and thus ought to be able to independently drive a research program.  That doesn't mean there's not also lots of peer review and criticism and whatever else, of course, just that she went through a process that, if it worked correctly, meant she should have an internal mechanism of accountability that meant she could be trusted, in general.  All of this is much, much clearer in action if you look at universities operating many decades ago, when they had much less money, much less bureaucracy, and generally much more independence.


But clearly the current version of the University is flooded with extra deans, and administrators, and IRB reports, and massive amounts of paperwork, and giant endowments that are lawfare targets, and many layers of bureaucracy, and a bunch of arguably screwed up personal values from cultural evolution the last few decades. And many of those changes are intended to keep everyone in line and make sure everything is legible to the broader system.  And so, in those spaces, the older model of producing virtuous professionals who can work cheaply by their own guidance is frequently superseded by this other "trustless society" model.  And everything is slow, and expensive, and the values of the bureaucracy is often at odds with getting good work done, for all the reasons discussed in the linked conversation.


Or, to use another example, I've seen this claim made, by certain irritated black activists connected to screwed up urban neighborhoods, that there's just as much crime going on out in the white suburbs, but the cops are racist and just don't enforce laws out there.  Which honestly, the first time I read that, was generally just kind of shocking and equal parts hilarious and depressing.  Because of course, the entire point of going to a good suburb is that a critical mass of people have internalized an illegible, internal sense of accountability that means they mostly don't actually need cops around all that often.  And everyone around them knows that about them, and about themselves.  That's literally why certain people find them kind of stifling. (Obviously there are things that happen in suburbs like weed smoking or domestic abuse or whatever.  But obviously we're talking about questions of degree here)  Meanwhile, in distressed neighborhoods, you simply have to have cops and a legible system because a critical mass of people do not internalize that sense of accountability, and so you need the external accountability of the legible state.


Anyone who has worked in an effective small startup, versus a giant profitable corporation has almost certainly run into these same divides, I suspect.


Getting back to the question of government in this context, a few years ago, I read through Michael Knox Beran's "WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy", which was a great book, as well as C. S. Lewis's "Abolition of Man".  And they were a really nice pairing to capture some of these big questions, about whether a society needs to produce leaders who have an internal sense of morality and virtue, who try to do the right thing at any given moment based on an internally cultivated sense of accountability, versus the transition to a world where accountability is an external, entirely legible thing where independent judgement and virtue can't be relied on and instead bureaucracy and technocracy solve all problems (like, say, the way that Uber driver reviews might, as just one simple example).  And I think you can find upsides and downsides to each approach.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


So why all the hullabaloo about manufacturing? Jobs.






This is the backlash to automation. This is the "wrecker class" implementing destructive policies in response to being automated away.




I feel like all these issues are always multi-causal and overdetermined.  To make a comparison, it seems clear to me that since the rise of Obama, there were a bunch of really powerful forces that decided they were interested in using the wedge of "spreading LGBTQ+ rights" as a pretext to push more American power and influence into lots of other countries.  Or the cause of black Civil Rights in the aftermath of World War 2 gave much wealthier, more powerful Northern interests a pretext to push for massive development in the American South, fundamentally altering its character (in many cases against the will of many interests that were locally powerful but weak compared to Northern money and social power).  In each case, there were obviously lots of true believers, but there were also powerful triangulators who massively amplified these narratives in the public because they could be used to pursue other goals they considered important.


I'm not sure if it makes me a conspiracy theorist, but I have this sense that there are very big, very powerful, very important forces - non-partisans ones - that are less noisy and fractious and attention-seeking than Trump + friends, who have come to see the giant gamble starting in the late 90s of integrating China into the world economic system as a world-historical gamble that has proven to be an existential mistake, at least on the terms that it has evolved.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I get that sense.  And so there needs to be some public, noisy, easy-to-understand narrative to walk parts of that back, and to rebuild America's military, and to get normie young men to identify with defending a homeland and to start families and to raise kids, and to convince Europeans that they need to defend themselves and to regain something like an internal sense of nationalism (which being pissed off at Americans might ironically inflame and facilitate, as seems to be happening in Canada) and a willingness to actually make material sacrifices to make that all possible.  There needs to be something like the 1980s again, basically, in much of the West.  If you ignore belief in universal principles and stick with realpolitiks, globalism seemed unambiguously useful to many powerful American interests in 1998, and now we've reached a point where, at least for certain aspects of it, that's not so clear.  If you go along with this argument, local automation absolutely isn't a threat to these powers that be - in fact, it's crucial.  Chinese manufacturing broadly (specifically where they can piggyback from it to engage in a massive military buildup that leverages it) absolutely has evolved to be a threat to such powers.  And if you're onboard with this theory, you would expect the public narratives that get the most oxygen to be the ones that are most aligned with reorganizing America's global system to protect against a rising China, rather than ones that, say, take automation seriously.


I'm not saying that makes true believers in manufacturing=jobs fake or anything, any more than people for whom Civil Rights occupied a sacralized moral status were fake.  That stuff is out there and it is real.  The existence of decaying parts of the Rust Belt is real.  Many families cultural memory of the role that well-payed manufacturing jobs played in buoying their communities and giving them a sense of pride are real.  People with those concerns are always out there.  But the question of why it's getting so much oxygen now, why the megaphones are amplifying the narratives they are, is a different story, or so it seems to me.  That's my speculation, anyway.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


How do we get the trust back?




I think one thing that American liberals / institutionalists desperately need to recover is an understanding that most people don't see themselves in some universal, internally sympathetic class with our well-credentialed elites, and thus that the claim of such elites earning and maintaining trust is itself nothing like a default.  And "But I did well on the test administered by elites like me" isn't enough.  I think that's a really hard pill to swallow for people who have put all their chips on the current meritocracy, though, and it's understandable, because we were all born into a world that once had more default institutional trust.


It's interesting, because I don't think these ideas are hard to get across in the abstract.


I've asked before, as an example, some well-credentialed liberals I knew if they would accept universal health care funded and run by the government, with the constraint that it would be entirely run and maintained by experts from the Communist party of China, with their own internal methods for determining who was an expert.  And (it should go without saying), I have not got any takers - and honestly, it's a bit interesting to try to tease out why exactly.  And yet, realistically, for many Americans, administration by the current system internally gatekept and administered by American liberals is obviously not that dissimilar to that thought experiment for large swathes of Americans who are entirely alienated from those liberal gatekeepers too.  They could well be forgiven for suspecting that the American liberal gatekeepers, as a class, despise them much more, and are much keener to socially engineer away their communities, than a similar program administered by the Chinese might be.  At the very least, they can go read what the American version are actually saying in English about them on social media.


I get why it's a tough spot, emotionally, to be in for the winners of the meritocracy I'm gesturing at.  It's really nice to get free institutional legitimacy, and it totally sucks to lose that if you were accustomed to having it, especially if you are the tail end of a long process of drawing down that legitimacy that had been built up by your forbearers who understand power and public trust in deep ways that they apparently didn't pass on (which I personally think is an accurate description of the institution builders of the progressive era compared to their "progressive" great-grandchildren).  But from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in 3 generations is a thing.  And I think American liberals simply no longer have the luxury of being oblivious to the realities of where power and legitimacy come from, and thus how they absolutely HAVE to rigorously publicly police themselves and their institutions to regain that trust.  This stuff isn't magic.  But I see a whole lot of behavior that looks like magical thinking, with a complete obliviousness to cause-and-effect when it comes to public trust.


Even if "Racism is a public health emergency" made any sense at all, people who want public power have to be smart enough to understand that you can't announce that stuff and then be surprised and huffy when large amounts of white people ignore your authority when you announce you intend to squirt novel fluid in their kids arms via flu vaccine.  There's a total misunderstanding about the role of "consent of the governed", and how it means something much bigger in the way Americans organize themselves culturally than just questions about law and the Federal government...


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I think it just comes down to costs




I think this is true, but I think it's also very important to be clear exactly why there are the costs there are - I think they're far from inevitable.


From Tanner Greer's piece in Palladium, A School of Strength and Character


"When Alexis de Tocqueville compiled his reports on America for a French readership, he recalled that “In America, there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined powers of individuals.” Yankee agency became an object of fascination for him: “Should an obstacle appear on the public highway and the passage of traffic is halted,” Tocqueville told his readers, then “neighbors at once form a group to consider the matter; from this improvised assembly an executive authority appears to remedy the inconvenience before anyone has thought of the possibility of some other authority already in existence before the one they have just formed.” This marked a deep contrast with the French countryside Tocqueville knew best, where the locals left most affairs to the authorities."


The whole piece is worth reading, but I think the case is strong that, in reality, whatever was good and useful about decentralized democratic power, it has been largely drained by the rise of 20th century managerialism going hand-in-hand with the Civil Rights revolution (which in practice has made lots of basic democratic self-government entirely illegal).  Or as Greer also states, "The first instinct of the nineteenth-century American was to ask, “How can we make this happen?” Those raised inside the bureaucratic maze have been trained to ask a different question: “How do I get management to take my side?”"  I think this stuff also dovetails nicely with James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State".  If you're allowed to solve your problems in tacit, illegible ways, a lot of problems are actually pretty simple to solve, and they respect the Gods of the Copybook Headings too, so you don't get more of it... which I think was the OPs point.  But if the entire power of the remote state requires that everything be legible... well.  Costs clearly skyrocket, and massive amounts of inertia and veto points kick in.  (This also clearly mirrors the experience of working in a motivated, small, mission-focused startup versus working at a giant, wealthy, extremely hierarchical corporation, for similar reasons).


I think after much of the experience of the 20th century, a lot of people in the most "civilized" places have just internalized a massive degree of fatalism about everything.  Everyone knows, really, how to solve these problems.  It's not like no civilization in the history of the world has figured out how to make safe streets in urban areas, and so we have no models or something.  Westerners simply aren't allowed to, that's all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I have a complicated reaction to this line of argument, I think.


The other day, when talking about the future of the Department of Education, I made a general comparison to how Latvians in what is now Latvia would or should have felt in 1984 if an ethnic Russian were defending the efficiency or professionalism of the central Soviet bureaucracy as it pertained to overseeing education throughout the Soviet Union.  And my point then was that the fundamental split was who / whom, and no amount of arguing from the ethnic Russian would bridge that.  But the devil is... the "What have the Romans ever done for us" bit in the Life of Brian has a lot of wisdom in it.  That was the Soviet bureaucracy.  And that is the Cathedral as well.  And yet, also, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."  And here we are.


To me, it seems like the fundamental problem is that American liberals want there to be "shared" central institutions and "shared" central media voices with "shared" trust and "shared" authority that are somehow perceived as "democratically legitimate", but they also think it's the most natural thing in the world for those "shared" institutions to have their particularist values and their particularist worldviews and be populated by their people and for them to do the gatekeeping.  It's totally understandable that they should feel that way, given the actual reality of American since the New Deal, of course.  And yet, any argument that's not grappling with that central tension here is, fundamentally, just trying to paper over the actual chasm.  For all of these things, they're the Soviet party member in 1984 trying to insist that the ethnic Latvian is being misled by misinformation and propaganda from capitalist roaders by not accepting the authority and value of the central Soviet bureaucracy.


I can't remember if it was Moldbug where I first saw this observation, but I once came across the observation that almost every major power in the world covers, in their authoritative institutions, a lot of the same material in the hard sciences and engineering and basic medicine, and they get a lot of legitimacy by mastering and employing that materially-based knowledge and improving the lot of their citizens - and then they smuggle in a bunch of not-science in the same institutions but call it science to piggyback off that authority, and they spread the legitimating ideology of the hierarchy in this state or empire... anyway, once I saw that observation, I can't not see it everywhere.  And that move seems fundamental to this specific discussion, especially given the role that trans (and LGBTQ2IA+ more broadly) has played in exactly this kind of context.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
British writer Louise Perry, in one of her podcast discussions after her book "The Case Against the Sexual Revolution", made an observation about this.  And she noted, basically, that her conservative critiques about the sexual revolution weren't interpreted as being tied to regressive evangelical Christianity in Britain, because that wasn't a movement with any particular force there.  So it meant she was free to make something like a secular argument for a return to older Christian ethnics, and for it to be received that way in Britain.  Whereas in America, because of the contours of the culture wars (and honestly because of the physical contours of the country, with evangelical Christianity often being coded as a Southern thing, meaning racist low-educated poor losers of the Civil War etc etc etc), that kind of argument is automatically slotted into a pre-existing fight.  And I think she had the sense that it was much easier to advance that sort of argument and have it be engaged with in Britain as a result.  In a way, it reminds me of the Charles Murray argument that a lot of well-credentialed American progressives of a certain sort seem entirely unwilling to preach what they practice; in their personal lives, they are thrifty and monogamous and live up mostly to a 1950s-ish life script (once they admittedly exhaust a non-martial serial monogamy phase in their 20s), but they're largely unwilling to advocate those positions more broadly.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Oh, I am well aware of why libraries are hotbeds of woke - it's for precisely the same reason that certain fields in universities are (and with substantial cultural and demographic overlap).  Although I understand the general comparison to religious soup kitchens here, though, I believe there are actually also severe constraints on how and in what ways religious charities can be overtly religious or proselytize when dealing with public money, aren't there?  I have that general sense, and Claude suggests there are indeed extremely strict behavior limits imposed on such charities.  And I know the question of, say, if Catholic adoption services could reject gay potential parents has been a culture war flash point previously, for example.


Recognizing the social dynamics of why libraries have been taken over by a very specific, very radicalized niche subculture seems like the start of the conversation when it comes to public funding and public goods, not the end of it, at least to me anyway.  It feels very similar to the issue with universities, where the people who dominate them use some extremely narrow, extremely particular definitions of "inclusive" and "global" that, in practice, exclude way, way too many people in a destabilizing and social mission undermining way.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My mom was an elementary school teacher, and her general experience was that you can teach bright kids all sorts of ways, and it will mostly work out eventually.


On the other hand, there are a lot of slower kids who will struggle to learn but who can, eventually, pick things up via rote learning like phonics.  It's slow and perhaps not fun, but they can do it eventually.  But a lot of other methods of instruction (which are often supposed to avoid beating the joy of learning out of students the way rote learning theoretically does) often end up just failing complete with slower students, because the cognitive machinery simply isn't there.  And while learning phonics might not be fun, being illiterate for the rest of your life is way, way less fun.


All of this is vexing if you happen to be a bright kid who struggled through boring methods of instruction, because you probably were ill-served by that kind of instruction.  And you probably would have done better (and maybe we all would have benefited, for that matter!) with personal instruction that could lean into your natural capacities.  School actually really does suck for lots of bright kids.


But there really is a serious problem with Ed schools producing all sorts of novel instructional methods based on blank slate ideology and theoretically serving the moral goal of equity and anti-racism that, in practice, just hurt the students they're supposed to help because their (highly ideological) diagnosis of the problem starts wrong and then stays wrong.  And all the rest of us are externalities to that process.