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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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There's no material injury. Trump supporters have an inferiority complex and feel humiliated when college-educated liberals look down on them.

I think this is a stretch. How many have been fired for not hewing to CEL social mores? How many have been threatened with firing to force them to do so? How many have been banned from social media for their political views?

The reason for the asymmetry of "resentment" vs. "contempt" is that the primary ways these classes interact are power relationships, and the power almost always goes the same way; the sneering bureaucrat autowins on most levels of escalation except for the two highest ones - electoral politics and violence.

How many have been fired for not hewing to CEL social mores?

Extremely few. Especially once you factor out instances of nonconformity that boil down to things like "don't sexually harass your coworkers so badly that even HR can't ignore it".

the primary ways these classes interact are power relationships, and the power almost always goes the same way

Does it, though?

Alternative theory: the asymmetry of "resentment" vs "contempt" is because the mean things liberals say about conservatives cut significantly deeper than vice versa. When conservatives call liberals godless degens, liberals' response is generally something to the effect of "hell yeah we are 😎". This is because they fundamentally don't care about the accusations. There's also a degree of reactance, especially for LGBT individuals, but there's no sense of shame or humiliation. Its like accusing a Christian of being a bad Muslim. On the other hand, almost everyone in the US thinks bigotry is bad and education is good. So when liberals call conservatives ignorant bigots, that actually lands. Notably, conservatives tend to get way more riled up about being accused of racism than homophobia (and don't care at all about being called things like gun nuts).

The actual power asymmetry is that educated liberals can make uneducated conservatives feel bad about themselves, whereas uneducated conservatives can merely scare educated liberals.

To take just one example, I used to work next to a small woman with a high-pitched voice who decided one day that 'she' was now 'he'. I had to interact with her on a daily basis, lying literally every time I referred to her with a pronoun, knowing that if I ever slipped up once and accidentally used 'her' in the office then my impeccably liberal employer was almost certainly going to fire me. It was stressful and humiliating, and I don't think she even meant to put me in that position. But that's the reality when you're surrounded by HR machinery that is willing to enforce liberal social mores at any cost.