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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29816 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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I do find it interesting that whenever I venture into left-wing spaces, they have a very similar mindset to the right-wing ones re:

  • the uniparty is neutering politics, pretending to hold our ideology whilst throwing us under the bus at every opportunity (citing e.g. the lack of long-lasting legal change despite the Floyd riots)
  • even when our guys are popular the moderates in our party close ranks to keep them out (Bernie Sanders, attempted with Jeremy Corbyn)
  • mainstream media lies to build complacency and takes every opportunity to identify us with the worst of our movement (e.g. the /r/antiwork interview, the UK media's treatment of Corbyn)
  • the opposition wants us gone permanently, and any election risks them finally getting enough power to manage it

I think that conservatives have a much stronger leg to stand on here: the illiberal centre is left-wing and actively persecutes right-wingers; the fact that it's not quite left-wing enough for the radicals doesn't fill me with sympathy.

But I think that the paranoia on both sides is basically driven by structural problems:

  1. An oligarchic form of government that is unaffected by election results (the Deep State, the Civil Service)
  2. The professionalisation of politics (almost all politicians come from a very similar and unusual background and are beholden to the Overton window amongst people of that background).
  3. An increasingly weighty cruft of legal systems and regulations that have got ever more tangled and impenetrable over time and prevents movement. This (and the production of 'clients') produces a 'ratchet' model of politics where losses like Brexit are often permanent.
  4. Genuine ethnic and moral tribalism vastly reducing the space of beliefs that are shared by a supermajority of people.

The result is that

"My ingroup is relentlessly oppressed by the supposedly neutral authorities, who are actually in the pockets of my enemies. The outgroup is highly organized and relentlessly hateful of people like me. If my side loses a battle, that's just further proof that I'm right and the whole thing is rigged. If my side wins a battle, it's also evidence of how right I am because the only way we'd win against such odds is by being twice as correct as the enemies. My side is the victim. It's all a conspiracy rigged against us."

is essentially true for anyone except the most anodyne of the centre-Left. It hasn't escaped my notice that much of recent right-wing thought (conflict theory, the long march through the institutions, the Cathedral, who/whom) is very much from a left-wing critical tradition, because they are used to being political outcasts and have more mental tools for dealing with that. Often it literally comes from (former) communists - people like Brendan O'Neill, Peter Hitchens, Freddie de Boer.

I think horseshoe theory is overrated, but dissident/complacent is often a useful axis to go alongside left/right and authoritarian/liberal when you want to model how groups will behave.

I kind of agree with their points, but I feel the overton window is sufficiently skewed towards the Left (along with the Left not really being able to understand the sheer breadth of the political spectrum) that these discussions are being had by like 95th percentile Left people and 40th percentile Right People in the grand scheme of things.

I mean, what are the broadly popular left-aligned ideas which are outside the overton window? Marijuana legalization is the only example I can think of in recent history, but I'm sure there must be other examples.

True. Cultural victory to the point that even the most frothingly-left stuff will be treated more as 'awww that's impractical but we understand the dream'

But I think that the paranoia on both sides is basically driven by structural problems:

It's not driven by structural problems, it's driven by the fact that radical wings are ... radical wings. They are weirdos and of course, to them, everything looks like "the uniparty is keeping us down".

Bernie bros were genuinely the worst about this.

We have seen radical wings not do these things. Anti-abortion people don’t do this. They just win thru institutions. Milton Friedman is as much of a weirdo as any of those people. Even today the very libertarian people are the weirdos. And he crushed his competition over decades which is completely provable because you can go on Reddit and stop in neoliberal and see that his enemies adopted his labels (before undermining).

I'm saying that the uniparty is keeping them down. Combine that with the fact that radical wings are growing rapidly in America and Europe for the structural reasons I give and it's no surprise that the amount of paranoia is also growing.

If someone is agitating for fringe views, and the country is even roughly representational, then keeping them down is the expected behavior.

You're right that they are growing though, but even a growing fringe can still be anathema to ~2/3 of the population -- that was more or less what the French election just showed.

If the country is roughly representational, and someone is requesting unpopular actions, then not necessarily giving them what they want is natural and appropriate. The charge - increasingly true, I think - is that active methods are being taken to discredit and weaken those broadcasting non-majority views along the lines I described in reply to OP.

Which I can understand but it's somewhat distasteful at best and causing the very problem it's meant to prevent at worst.

I'm not sure I get the distinction between you're drawing here about "active methods".

Sticking with left wing examples for now, let's say there's a movement advocating for a wealth tax.

Saying, "no, only 10% of people want that," is appropriate.

Saying, "no, only 10% of people want that," and then going through that movement to find the one member who said something stupid ten years ago and bringing it up incessantly whenever people talk about wealth taxes is what I would call "active methods". An active attempt to damage and (further) discredit movements that are not popular in order to prevent that movement from ever becoming more popular.

That kind of seems like regular politics. Possibly unpleasant, but not some kind of illegitimate thing. Parties do it to each other all the times -- the left wing broadcasts MTG in their fundraisers all the time. Right wing blasts the squad.

What's more relevant to me is the question: if a movement never becomes popular, how do we distinguish between "we were discredited" from "our ideas were never palatable to more than 10% of voters"? Because I feel that many losing movements declare that, and it can't be universally the case.

I think you're right, it is regular politics. The overton window has become narrower and more harshly enforced since 2010, as the political and media class grows more uniform, and simultaneously the size of groups outside that window has been steadily enlarging. I think this is explains the feelings of persecution on both sides.

What's more relevant to me is the question: if a movement never becomes popular, how do we distinguish between "we were discredited" from "our ideas were never palatable to more than 10% of voters"? Because I feel that many losing movements declare that, and it can't be universally the case.

I'm not sure, sorry. In theory, you could be maximally encouraging of fringe groups (e.g. fawning newspaper coverage) and see whether they turn out to have legs, but I'd be very surprised if that ever happened.

Perhaps you could use volatility of support as a metric? If support for your ideology has strong peaks and troughs in response to events and scandals, that suggests that more people might be willing to support it depending on the circumstances. And, therefore, that the media can manipulate support with bad coverage or that politicians can manipulate support by crushing the insurgent new politician everyone is interested in. If support for your ideology chugs along at 5% for decades that suggests it's just unpopular. But this is very tenuous.

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There is something I uniquely hate about using “radical wing” as a term. It’s just feels like you are implying they are crazy people.

In Europe the right is rising. But I don’t like calling them “radical”, they would be normies for most of history. Today’s neoliberal establishment of “open borders” were the radicals until about 1980. I feel like labeling something radical is just means to lazily call a side as not worth considering their ideas.

At some point all the political groups have been the establishment and in power. Even the Pride and a lesser extent the pedophiles found themselves in the establishment since 2020 but were far outside of it in 2000.

Especially when the "radical fringe" are actually the majority: https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/192912?context=8#context

For me, it's "extreme/ist/ism." It's the dumbest and most obvious boo-light ever ("anti-abortion extremists! open borders extremists! Tea Party extremism! Extreme political views!"). Extreme relative to what, exactly? I think its use could have been slightly (but only slightly) more excusable a century or so ago when there was a broader social and political consensus, but now those words are just used to exploit the lingering but fast fading memory of Normal and Decent Times in the minds of inattentive readers.

I also hate the term centrists which some people like to claim. It comes off as people who want to claim they are moderate, but I guess I think it can only be has no opinion. The Overton window moves so if you are a centrists I guess you are a npc. Wherever the window is at the moment you’re in the middle. I don’t think it would be a popular political philosophy if you explained it like that.

De Boer might be the only one who actually fits the radical label. But only in the American context. That is the establishment in a few places. I’d probably label him a failed ideology over radical (might even be a maximizing ideology in an AI world since the price system might be replaceable).

If America didn’t have black people Bernie Sanders would probably be the dead center of American politics. And that might actual be the short term utility maximizing position (I think bad for growth, but homogenous tribes like sharing much more with each other).

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