site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This is basically the thread ended right? The imagined scenario doesn't even exist as the gender politics gap hasn't changed and has deceased if anything, age is apparently where the big gap is actually.

Admittedly, the stated scenario of:

Imagine that the electorate of a democratic country (call it Exemplavania) comprises two political groups, A and B, constituting 40% and 60% of the electorate respectively. As a result, Exemplavania's government is run largely in accordance with the interests of group B. However, group A is significantly more powerful than group B in terms of its capacity for violence. Under what circumstances is this arrangement sustainable?

seems to apply about as well to a country divided politically along age lines as along gender lines. And if the US continues to have an aging population with declining fertility, the %s might not be that far off, either.

Interestingly partisan stratification by age is also (according to Pew's data) a pretty recent phenomenon. According to their partisanship of generational cohorts it basically didn't matter what age range you were in during the 90's, the distribution of Democrats and Republicans was very close. By 2009 the 20-29 cohort was significantly more Democrat but the others were still pretty even. Then by 2023 the 24-33 cohort was even more Democrat and all the 54+ demographics were significantly more Republican (proportional with age).

seems to apply about as well to a country divided politically along age lines as along gender lines.

I mean if that's the case then the age thing applies as much as the gender thing as far as being a proxy for war goes. A 63+ year-old American man is not going to be any more useful in a war than the average woman.

Wrong. The numbers are only that even because of old people. 80 percent of Gen Z women are liberal and 70 percent of Gen-Z men are conservative.

Do you have a citation for that? According to Gallup men in the 18-29 age range as of 2023 (not quite entirely GenZ) break down their identification as 29/44/25 between Conservative/Moderate/Liberal. This is compared to women's 21/37/40 split of the same. A PRRI report purporting to be specifically of GenZ also has GenZ men as quite liberal (38% identify as liberal compared to 31% who identify as conservative) though not as liberal as GenZ women (47% liberal to 24% conservative).

I will point out that self-identification is not an amazing barometer of political division, because "what counts as moderate" is highly subjective.

A bunch of people confuse "The vast majority of young conservatives are male" with "the vast majority of young men are conservatives."

It’s also probably true that a significant majority of loud young conservatives are men, and loud young liberals are women, but groups analogous to the “silent majority” are silent for a reason.

I am reminded for example of a recent poll on X/Twitter about presidential preference Elon posted which Trump won handily. This tells you quite a lot about Twitter users that follow and engage with Elon’s posts and not much about the United States’ actual voting population, which people in the comments crowing about “sample size” seem to have completely missed.

As I've said before, a lot of of the overreaction about young men turning right is from two sources -

1.) Right-leaning people hoping that they're not doomed in the long run 2.) Left-leaning people shocked there are still young right-wing people.

The other thing is 14-17 year old boys are pretty terrible for somewhat sympathetic reasons (ie. they're horny with no real outlet), and the vast majority of them that get girlfriends (which most still do) calm down the first time their girlfriend makes fun of them.

Also, I think a lot of 'redpill' content is being consumed by non-American male audiences, which also shift things.

Exactly, polling is hard. Random sampling is hard.