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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   37693 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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"fucking stop it, you're going to cause a literal civil war with your antics"

It is remarkable to read stuff from the early 1800s discussing how an American civil war over slavery was just inevitable--a matter of time.

It is depressing to feel like that's where we are today, that it may still be decades away but that a civil war between "reds" and "blues" has become inevitable. I would like to believe there is time to de-escalate, but I'm not sure there is a clear way--the bifurcation of American culture has gotten to the point where one side or the other simply must go away if the country is to survive at all. Time and demographics could accomplish that naturally and gradually, but if not, then a civil war is what will do it. But demands for political orthodoxy (on either side) seem to be getting louder, not quieter.

The young adult population in 30 years will be incredibly red if trends continue, so I doubt that. If there's going to be a red blue civil war it'll be soon because the blue tribe won't fight a war they're unable to win.

Is this actually true? Seems like there are some small indica that the next generation might be a bit redder than the younguns but by and large the young adult population doesn't seem to be trending incredibly red. I'd be fascinated to read a take otherwise.

(I've 100% seen the "only the reds are having kids" take but it doesn't seem clear that that actually results in red kids.)

young adult population doesn't seem to be trending incredibly red

The main two confounders here are that 1) the young adult population is less white than their elders and 2) the red/blue fertility gap had probably existed prior to that, but it only really opened up with the great recession.

Currently, the AA fertility rate is converging with the blues and hispanics are trending away from the dems. Thus we can expect 1) to be less of a factor going forwards. And the great recession happening 16 years ago, we can expect under 2) that if the fertility gap effects future generations then the trend would accelerate going forwards. And there are indications of political identity becoming more hereditary in the white population over time.

I would say that the growing gender divide on politics is more important than generational shifts. It doesn’t matter much if Gen Y is 50/50 red and blue if Gen Y males skew 80/20 red. Of course young women can fly a drone or shoot a gun in principle, but young men are both more suited to combat and more amenable to it.

This is an interesting point.

Right-wingers have been doing this cope for decades. Does anybody remember "Generation Zyklon"?

Well, realistically it will take at least a lifetime. Fertility rates between blues and reds weren't all that different until the 90s, but since then they've kept increasing. Blues are well below replacement. They're dependent on converting red children. Can they do this? Yes. Indefinitely? Probably not. They're picking the low hanging fruit right now, but it's like a parasite breeding resiliance in the host. Eventually, it will become harder and harder to convert red children, because they will increasingly be descended from a cultural and genetic lineage that is resistant to that conversion. The easiest converts are currently being sterilized, and so there won't be so many easy converts around in the future.

Will this all happen? I dunno. Perhaps the only way I can see modern blues achieving a sustainable fertility rate is pure technology--growing babies in artificial wombs.

Well, this time there's actually some evidence (for example, the notable drop in support among the younger generation for gay marriage since 2018) but I'm not sure that translates over to "incredibly red." However doglatine's point re: the gender divide is well taken.

What’s the big actual object level disagreement between the reds and the blues here? In the 1800s the country was divided over slavery. Now it really seems like a bunch of tiny object level issues plus a big aesthetic one, and nobody is going to have a civil war over aesthetics.

What’s the big actual object level disagreement between the reds and the blues here?

The proper way to live and the ordering of society.

(More practically, most Americans are way too comfortable (and in many cases, literally too fat) for anything like an actual civil war. Something like the Troubles is more likely, though even that I find doubtful, if for no other reason than the most dedicated Reds and Blues live in different places)

The troubles came about in large part because of incomplete state control due to marginalization of the Catholic population. We don't have that, and not only because Catholics are just normies and not an identifiable tribe.

The red tribe isn't welcome in the higher academy, but generally considers itself to be treated fairly by the police and mostly in the labor market. The red tribe mostly has a higher standard of living than the blue tribe at the same point at the socioeconomic ladder(granted there are proportionately more red tribers at a lower spot on the socioeconomic ladder- but the red tribe mostly understands full well that the blues kick their lowest performing members out of good standing and the reds don't. You basically need a college degree to be a full member of the blue tribe and you just need to 'want to work' to be accepted in the red tribe). These are not the conditions that result in actual or perceived marginalization which pares back state control, even if we leave out who the cops are.

As a general principle, if enough people consider the "aesthetics" important, it is becomes a cause, which is important for recruitment. Causes attract the real object-level issues, and object-level questions (economic or otherwise) may attach themselves to aesthetic causes. Or find themselves attached; sometimes the aesthetics may take the driver's seat.

I agree chances of classical civil war is quite low. There is still possibility of other forms of super-unfun-bad-times, though. (The Troubles. Italian years of lead.)

Takers versus Makers, and ethnic conflict. The blues are really more like the browns and yellows.

Certainly by the time the civil war goes got, it will be an ethnic conflict between all the foreigners imported in the last half century against those already present.

Who are the "takers"? Both tribes would contend that their own are valuable hard workers and the other side are parasites taking more value than they contribute.

The takers are public sector unions, HR and DEI, management and bureaucracy in general.

Would they? They talk a lot about being the ones to "equitably distribute" value to people according to their needs, not producing it. Like I worked in the nonprofit sector for years, nobody ever talked proudly about creating value.

Working in academia, the predominant perspective is closer to saying that everything of value is produced by the blue tribe anyway, so they should have the right to choose how the surplus is redistributed as well.

Yes, that's the sort of thing, but in our case nobody even thought about where all the grant money came from. It was just "our due"

Couldn't that just be because "creating value" is not a general blue-tribe value? They could believe that all value is produced by their tribe without particularly feeling compelled to brag about it or try to claim personal credit for part of the process.

I don't see any indication that this is the case, however. Even though I'm sure that we've ended up importing more gang members than I feel comfortable with, overall violence and law-abidingness among immigrants is still way at least a good chunk lower than for born-Americans. I just don't see the ingredients right now or for the next two decades in place for this kind of large-scale ethnic violence to happen.

And speaking as someone who lived in Miami for a while... man, the United States cultural assimilation process is fucking fast, it's insane. At least for most immigrants. I saw kids who spent all of 4 years in country and they already were hardly distinguishable on their own from kids who grew up in the same city the whole time and actively despised and avoided speaking Spanish (which was a shame, in my opinion).

Even though I'm sure that we've ended up importing more gang members than I feel comfortable with, overall violence and law-abidingness among immigrants is still way at least a good chunk lower than for born-Americans.

There is no way at all this is true if you control for race. Certain segments of our population commit a ton of violent crime. Most do not.

Which ones are the Makers, though? Quick googling shows there's no clear mapping of donor and recipient states to their political affiliation.

Quick googling shows there's no clear mapping of donor and recipient states to their political affiliation.

This is partly because of things like counting retirees and government contractors the same as welfare recipients.

Retirees are welfare recipients.

Depends on your perspective. If you NPV their fica payments and benefits, maybe it’s just a small tax refund.

And significant black, Hispanic, and Native American populations in otherwise red states like the deep south, the Dakotas, Alaska, etc.

If something like a second American Civil War were to take place, my layman's estimation says it would almost certainly start in the next ten years if it happens at all. I could be wrong as tensions could yo-yo for longer than I, personally, might find sustainable but the population can accept.

As far as time to walk it all back goes, well. I think the American population has balkanized both further and for longer than most might admit or realize. The fractures within the major factions might prove to be the new political faultlines of whatever comes next, something like the death of the Whigs and subsequent rebirth of the Republican Party after the Civil War.

I am loosely of the opinion that we've already passed the maximum likelihood of civil war in this generation. If anything, the Culture War as a broader battle seems to be calming down, although this particular incident perhaps points the opposite direction. Both sides seem to have reached a point of being too tired of apocalyptic rhetoric to be energized by their own positive attributes: last I checked, both candidates have higher unfavorable polling numbers than favorable numbers.

More broadly, I'm coming around to a personal hypothesis that the introduction of the Internet as a social medium is starting to have run its course. We had a good couple decades where it was almost the exclusive domain of the young and well-educated, decaying September by September as normies have gradually settled the digital frontier. For a while, the discourse was Blue (with a strong helping of Techno-Libertarian) because the population was more generally. And as that faded, left-partisans were able to evaporatively cool dissent (cancel culture) in the space to maintain the partisan atmosphere. But evaporative cooling only works so far: at some point it cools to the point where people start noticing that the emperor has no clothes: I think we saw the peak of this in 2016, where the strongest efforts of blue partisans weren't able to completely ban online red-tribe rallying points. The Internet can no longer be maintained as a partisan territory for either side.

And I think that's generally still true. The forced-to-be-online interactions of 2020 seem to have had major effects: renewed efforts to ban red-tribe online spaces and such, but forcing everyone online doesn't really change that evaporative cooling is played out. Instead, it seems like the period of rapid social (and possibly also economic) change that the Internet has wrought seems to be coming to a close.

It's not the best-supported hypothesis, but it seems plausible enough for me.

I actually heard a radio segment on NPR of all places talking about how in marketing, companies are going back to politically neutral-leaning stances. Partly, according to them, because people are getting economically pinched and some of the worst woke stuff is in some sense an economic luxury, and also because a lot of the performative stuff plays just as bad with some big audiences as it does well with others. So, the general trend is: back to traditional marketing, you won't see as many of the Pepsi police-line ads anymore.

So yeah, I really don't think that we're going more nuclear. I'm always struck by most interviews by reporters - you get a few nutjobs that reporters sometimes seek out on purpose, but by and large people are just incredibly normal and down-to-earth more often than you'd think, and also on the individual level, more heterodox as well. The only caveat is if we manage to find ourselves in a war again -- wars have special social forces that can be very problematic.

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