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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37126 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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I disagree with your analysis. The two choices are, in my view:

  1. Take the high road, and by doing so gain credibility with the left which can be used to cool tensions, or

  2. Double down, expect the left to double down, and let it keep getting worse until both sides agree to stop. Which they may never, and it may not be in our lifetimes.

Option 1 is the clear superior choice in my view. Also note that in option 2, someone still needs to take the high road eventually. So long as people are thinking in terms of "fuck the other guy, it's his turn to get kicked now" (which is what many in this forum have explicitly argued for), the conflict in #2 will never actually end.

Would you show me some historical examples of when your choice 1 was successful? Mitt Romney is the favorite counterexample of how that strategy doesn't work here in practice. I don't think Gandhi is a good analogy, since the modern American right lacks many of the factors favorable to him (Britain's economic and military weakness after WWII, a shared Indian cultural identity, international pressure against colonialism, Britain's willingness to negotiate).

Literally every time peace has ever happened? Peace always starts by someone saying "no, I'm not going to hit them back, instead I'm going to try to appeal to their better nature and end this".

You would describe the end of WWII hostilities between the US and Japan as "no, I'm not going to hit them back, instead I'm going to try to appeal to their better nature and end this"? I was hoping for an example with more parallels between the current left/right power dynamic, showing that the underdog could expect a fair resolution by taking the high road.

I don't think that there is an underdog here, so that's probably the first point where we disagree. I see two roughly evenly matched sides which will produce a long, drawn-out conflict where everyone loses.

But let's say that the right is, as you say, the underdog. Isn't "the underdog taking the high road" exactly what led to the US-Japan peace in WW2? Japan started a fight they couldn't win, the US hit them back so hard they realized "oh shit we're not going to win this fight", and so they passed up the chance for vengeance in favor of appealing to the better nature of the US. Seems to me like your strategy would say they should have kept fighting the US until the Americans gave in and stopped fighting.

No, I do not think Japan was "appealing to the better nature of the US" when they surrendered. They lost the war, and had to agree to everything the US demanded of them. I do not think anyone on the right should view the surrender of Japan as aspirational, nor do I think the right is doomed to lose the culture war today in the same way Japan was doomed to lose the war in the Pacific after Midway (arguably Pearl Harbor, but that's a completely different discussion).

It's worth noting that Japan nearly chose to fight to the death. I don't know what motivated the Emperor specifically to surrender, but just the act of deciding on surrender caused him to nearly be couped by his ultranationalist military, as I understand it. Hell, the Japanese were preparing for the Americans to land on their shores, and were nearly ready to make a desperate last stand.

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