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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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To continue to riff on this a little bit, it strikes me there is already a more established Western intra-left movement that offers "traditional" left-wing causes like welfare state, trade unions, managed capitalism etc. while being more masculine than the current progressive left, patriotic, pro-economic-growth, sort of appealing to social conservative tendencies (less in the sense of religious conservatism and more in the sense of "why are we talking about gays and stuff when we could we talking about actually important things like economy and foreign policy?"), willing to "get hands dirty to get things done" etc, willing to work with the right when needed.

People supporting such things could be found in the Social Democratic parties of Europe, generally on the right wing of such parties. For instance, in Finland, such right-wing social democrats were the bulwark of Cold War era municipal governance in major industrial cities, forming "brothers-in-arms" coalitions (referring to the idea of class cooperation arising from the conditions of WW2 era fronts) with the Finnish right-wing on the shared cause of car-friendly, "YIMBY" urban policies designed to house the newly urbanizing workers and give them the comforts of modern life while also ensuring that businesses got their piece of the pie.

Of course, one thing that makes it unappealing or impossible for the tankies who might actually find it otherwise more to their liking is that the traditional right-wing social democracy was strongly pro-Western, pro-NATO and anti-Soviet, serving an important role in the Cold War coalition. In the US, these ideas were found in the part of SPUSA that eventually became Social Democrats, USA, which, as far as I've understood was then basically killed by Vietnam War making it toxic among American left. Many right-wing social democrats eventually became neoconservatives.

However, this "traditional right" social democracy was one of the victims of the Third Way, which subsumed it to general technocratic neoliberalism which, while sharing many similarities, was still different enough, particularly in class composition, to eventually lead to the development where the conservative parts of the working class that had found traditional social democracy much to their liking started shifting to right-wing populism, which has often recast itself as the new defenders of the welfare state and the working man (gendered term very much intended).