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I think there's something really puzzling and interesting going on with American (left-of-center dominated) institutions broadly right now, and I think the phenomenon is captured nicely by this example of the press, the public, and the unpopularity of affirmative action.
As someone who grew up religious and in the South, most of my life, the main feature that distinguished American high-status liberalism from my home cultures was that American liberalism was absolutely masterful in wielding soft power.
My home cultures were much more prone to highly unappealing sanctimony, and authoritarian preening, and scolding, and the telling of musty old just so stories, and dumb Rush Limbaugh-tier propaganda, and attempts to trot out "hello fellow kids" unappealing Christian "rock", and clearly out-of-touch and ignorant fearful conspiracy theories about everything, and simplistic moralizing, and deep discomfort with acknowledging or facing the darker and messier parts of life, and a wariness about asking hard or culturally threatening questions, and prissy Thomas Kincaid-tier "art", and... On and on it went. (And a lot of that remains true to varying degrees for those subcultures to do this day, of course)
And meanwhile, the combination and intersections of art from Hollywood and TV and the popular music industry and popular fiction, and seductive and unrelenting Madison Avenue advertising, and the draw of unfettered consumerism, and the clearly high standards and high status of America's university system, and the seeming rigor and high standards and skepticism and confident nuance of America's great news sources... It was (or seemed to be) a culture of sophistication, and of subtlety and nuance, and very high standards, and of worldliness, and of individual freedom and liberation (especially sexually, of course). It came across as a culture where people were trusted to follow their own bliss, and where the culture was confident enough that people could ask hard questions and follow those questions where ever those questions led them. These different institutions (or at least their portrayal) all came together to create an unrelenting, highly appealing outside cultural force that my home cultures ultimately proved defenseless in the face of and was ultimately entirely undermined by, especially given the weight of outside money and technology pushing it. When I look at the dynamic I experienced, the things that stick out the most are the profound confidence of that outside culture, and the incredible deftness with which it wielded its soft power. It was a culture that understood, in a deep way, that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. It had mastered the art of both leading you to the water without you seeing them do it, and also making you want desperately to drink.
That's how it all felt, anyway.
Subjectively, everything I just described above feels like it might as well have taken place on a different planet. Everything that made my home cultures unappealing and weak 40 years now feels like its seeped into Hollywood and Madison Avenue and American universities and ostensibly reputable left-of-center news. And instead of deftly steering masses of people without them even seeing that they're being led, we keep getting this ritual of well-bred, well-credentialed people, who've inherited these fantastic organs of soft power, pulling back the curtain, doing the equivalent of getting up on their rickety soapboxes in very public ways, and loudly berating and scolding the people they once would have masterfully exercised soft power over, undermining their own organs of soft-power in the process and generating all sorts of highly predictable attention and resistance.
It's all very fascinating and puzzling to experience.
It's increasingly seemed to me that progressivism is uniquely unmoored from any guiding set of principles. At the risk of sounding like a cliche, it seems unambiguously true to me that racism is bad unless it's against white people, sexism is bad unless it's against men, prejudice is bad unless it's against a group you don't like. I mean there is a strong correlation between someone identifying themselves as an ardent opponent of prejudice and racism with those who use the term 'white' as an insult to describe something they don't like. I just moved to new york, and am also from the south, and I'm astonished at the degree to which the most progressive people will talk about the south and southerners as if they're inherently inferior and will demonstrate an oddly aggressive and blatant prejudice against them, even if they've never been there. And what's crazy is it's so damn overt and explicit that you don't even need to really peel back layers of thought to identify the prejudice; they're not entirely against outright claiming that they're prejudiced against those from the south as if it's a badge of honor and will absolutely shit on it despite having never been there. And the hypocrisy is never really acknowledged. I say this not necessarily as an insult but as an observation: but progressivism genuinely does not appear to be guided by any sort of principle and intellectually the mechanics of it seem to be extremely sloppy, despite the fact that they have insinuated them into the foundations of collective thought to a unique degree.
I find progressivism, in academia in particular, to have become so consumed by ideology laid upon layers of other ideology for so long that there is such a profound and massive removal from the practical realities of things. They are so far removed from simply observing and assessing what is happening at a real level that it seems like for any discussion of any observation, the conversation must address everything except what's evidently going on. If the understanding isn't rooted in this conception of highly intellectualized frameworks and systemic structures it's considered to be invalid. There is such a consumption with systems-level thinking. The mechanism by which they seem to maintain this influence seems to be the reference of these vague and intellectualized approaches that, by their abstract nature, can't really be decisively refuted (meaning you can't really prove that a given structural characteristic doesn't exist because you can't really prove that it does exist either) and to disagree with them is to convey that you are not enlightened and missed that day in school when we learned of the these structures and frameworks with a clarity and obviousness that can only be matched by learning of the laws of physics.
I certainly don't want to spare the republican party any very well deserved condemnation, but I don't find that criticism to be particularly lacking right now, nor do I think they have the norm-setting capabilities to be as relevant to me.
The topic of casual, vitriolic, comically uninformed bigotry about southerners in other parts of the country is actually a really fascinating topic in its own right, and something I might wade into here some day when I'm less strapped for time, because it actually touches on some really interesting and fascinating challenges America will face soon, as the South continues to grow in economic and population strength relative to the North East and the West Coast.
If you wrote it I'd read it. I just read an article from Bloomberg that said the southeastern corridor (or something like that) just surpassed the northeast in terms of contribution to GDP, those from the northeast continue to leave for the south, as do businesses, and as a result the south's representation in congress is growing. I wasn't aware of the prejudice, which is sometimes just outright hostility, against southerners prior to moving up north recently, so I can't be sure if it's just a frustrated response to their diminishing importance or has always been there. But I do find it fascinating and odd to see a group slowly losing its prominence to another group it views itself as superior to, despite the deeply engrained nature of that superiority. Like the roots of that superiority are starting to decay but the flower doesn't realize it yet.
I think you'd get a lot out of the following article - https://www.ecosophia.net/hate-new-sex/
That's a blog written by a prominent astrologer. Even if I agree with what they're saying I just can't view it with credibility.
I mean check out this line from his wiki "He is currently blogging at Ecosophia, where he has written about the intersection of magic and politics."
"He criticises the openness of liberal occultists, arguing that magical practices benefit from more obscurity and secrecy" I mean fucking christ
If you don't like occultism or things influenced by it, what are you doing on the rationalist side of the internet? Did you somehow miss all the references to the kabbalah in Scott's work? He even directly mentions in one of his articles on Slatestarcodex that he has a lot of friends who are practicing occultists. If you're going to judge people based on an interest in the occult, you're going to have to throw Scott Alexander out with the bathwater too. For the record I think that if you actually listen to Greer speak on those topics he's eminently reasonable, but I'm not going to try to convince you.
Either way, I don't understand why you think that an author has to be judged by the entirety of their work as summarised by wikipedia. There are plenty of people who I trust in some domains but not in others, and I often find that even people I disagree with strongly on important issues can produce compelling works of writing. I don't agree with everything Friedrich Nietzsche said and I definitely think that Plato got some things wrong too, but that doesn't mean I can't recognise the quality of their work and get something out of it.
We have to draw the line somewhere and if that line is not at believing in astrology and practicing magic, I don't know where it is.
I don't think that's a particularly good metric. You're tossing out almost the entirety of human culture - you're throwing away Plato, Isaac Newton... hell, you're tossing just about the entirety of pre-Renaissance cultural output into the bin. Moreover, I view a lot of modern beliefs as having substantially less truth-value in them than astrology or magic - say what you will about astrology, but it produces less incorrect information than modern social justice theories, antiracist activism and a decent chunk of both libertarian and communist ideology. The fact that a lot of insightful and compelling writers believe in nonsense like tabula rasa doesn't mean that they can't produce great work in other areas.
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It really is a great case study in prejudice in action.
When I was in my early 20's two decades ago and moved to the upper Midwest from Atlanta, I got no shortage of comments about how racist, specifically, the South was, and (because of the way socialization works) I actually accepted those claims at face value. Everyone high status in my new world knew the South was super racist, and so I just kind of accepted the sense of what they were saying. It took me a surprisingly long time to figure out that, in fact, Atlanta is in most ways of course a million times better for black people than where I had moved to, race relations (though complicated of course) in the New South were productively evolving in ways that absolutely were not happening in the calcified old Midwest, black southerners and white southerners have way more shared culture and values than the weird balkanization you find up north, and all the smart high status people I was around had absolutely no idea what they were talking about, were extremely invested in some pretty deranged stories about race relations in America, and (worst of all) had most of their own sense of how public morality worked and their own moral worth tangled up in it all. The South certainly has its own problems, of course, but the role of black people in the moral imagination of lots of well-credentialed and wealthy northerners is just... creepy, harmful, and weirdly fanciful.
My hunch is that the reason for the prejudice is actually the consequence of something like privilege: when you're on top and overwhelmingly dominant for a while, you reach a point where you write off other places or groups and then don't bother updating your priors because, at least for a time, you don't need to. I would compare it to something like the old reputation that existed in America in the 50's and 60's that "Made in Japan" means cheap, flimsy, low quality junk. That stereotype was probably based in reality for a few decades, and if you were American, you could adopt that stance and then treat it as though it were true for quite a while without playing close attention... and that would be fine until Japan's capacity for quality and innovation grew better much faster than you might've expected, and eventually your musty old views would become a serious liability if you were an American working in business and your old prejudice against Japan's products eventually made you less competitive. The actual reality is that, especially after the Civil War, the South really was very poor and excluded from industrialization and urbanization for a very, very long time (IIRC, there were 22 major Northern metros in 1950 with populations > 1 million, and only 1 in the South at that time), and most of the rest of the country could ignore it and treat it as an unimportant backwater until really rather recently.
Those are all good points. but what i get stuck on is someone will claim to be a vehement opponent of prejudice and will be woke as fuck, but then they will be just flagrantly prejudiced against the south and southerners to a degree that would make a klan member blush. and they genuinely just don't see the hypocrisy or problem when i bring it up. like someone will have lived in new york their entire lives, has never been to the south, but they are just so confident that not only do they understand it really well but are confident it's just absolute hell.
a thought i had is that this is an excellent and perhaps somewhat unique feature of how decentralized the American system is. if each state were not allowed to have the degree of latitude they have, there would be less variation between them, so different parts of the us would no longer be able to evolve and adapt to different problems and ways of thinking. the us as a whole would probably just decline, but instead a business or person can just relocate to a part of the us whose policies are more optimized for the task at hand.
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I agree with all of that, but I don't find it puzzling. There's an easy answer: the impatience of virtue signaling. At this point in late-stage entryism, we're seeing that the cultural inheritors of the Left's long march through the institutions have zero of the patience that made their current positions of power possible. Not only do they demand instant justice for current wrongs, but they also want to refresh past wrongs and demand instant justice for them, as well. The problem for today's Left with the long march is that, to work, it had to be invisible. Today's political activists want to be seen protesting and be seen enacting change, and as a result appear obnoxious and taint their causes rather than move them forward.
All of this is also true about the New Right. The immediacy of rage and the catharsis of public tantrums are exactly the wrong way to go about reversing the Leftward drift of the last half-century, but since the Right doesn't believe in institutions to the same degree that the Left does, they don't even have another option. This is why the New Right would happily destroy the Constitution for short-term political success, thus destroying the foundation of future long-term success.
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