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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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It probably won’t come as any surprise to those of you that know me, but this is where my sympathies for the new American right evaporate. I disagree with the object-level historical take, not least because I think that moral feelings — especially the “rights of small nations” — played a key role in influencing British and American geopolitical strategy in both WW1 and WW2, and Hitler’s cavalier takeover of numerous small neutral countries (Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands) massively violated that important international norm.

More acutely, though, this seems like disastrous political strategy from reactionary elements on the American Right. There are so many easy wins to be had against progressivism, from defending the value of markets and pushing back against affirmative action to attacking the bizarre and incoherent ideologies of contemporary critical race theory and gender self-ID. Why on earth would you jeopardise these favourable battlefields to tilt at ideological windmills that the large majority of Americans and Westerners consider sacrosanct? Bad and stupid ideas, but also bad and stupid strategy.

Why on earth would you jeopardise these favourable battlefields to tilt at ideological windmills that the large majority of Americans and Westerners consider sacrosanct? Bad and stupid ideas, but also bad and stupid strategy.

As a poster here (actually back on reddit, but same diff) once trenchantly observed, bigots can't help themselves. The reason people from the New Right keep getting caught out doing Nazi apologia is that the New Right is shot through with Nazi sympathizers. Maybe they're not champing at the bit for an expansionist totalitarian dictatorship, but they often think Mr. Hitler had some interesting ideas about the use of state violence to enforce racial/cultural purity and fight degeneracy.

More acutely, though, this seems like disastrous political strategy from reactionary elements on the American Right. There are so many easy wins to be had against progressivism, from defending the value of markets and pushing back against affirmative action to attacking the bizarre and incoherent ideologies of contemporary critical race theory and gender self-ID. Why on earth would you jeopardise these favourable battlefields to tilt at ideological windmills that the large majority of Americans and Westerners consider sacrosanct? Bad and stupid ideas, but also bad and stupid strategy.

My question here is more: howcome an edgy journalist interviewing an edgier historian is enough to tar an entire political / intellectual movement, but academia gets to argue for pedophilia and family abolition, and high-ranking officials use their position to abolish the age limits on sex change procedures without anyone feeling like they have to answer for them?

Because the mainstream media is, by and large, willing to run interference for academia. It is equally willing to use its position to tar the right with one massive brush. You can argue right and wrong until you're blue in the face but the facts on the ground are that the American political left gets to push its whackjobs off to the side and the American political right doesn't.

So if you are a leading figure on the American political right, you really need to avoid giving the softest of fucking softball pitches to the mainstream media, because it will be used to discredit your entire movement. Professor Marx over at the political science department of Harvard doesn't have to make the same calculus.

Tucker Carlson is probably the most prominent journalist on the entire American right. In terms of impact on the public imagination, this is broadly equivalent to Rachel Maddow or Anderson Cooper giving a softball interview to someone who says that Mao and Stalin were misunderstood heroes.

this is broadly equivalent to Rachel Maddow or Anderson Cooper giving a softball interview to someone who says that Mao and Stalin were misunderstood heroes.

Looks at current, and several decades of, university protests, and the underlaying foundations thereof

And that would be surprising how? Stalin, Mao, the infamous Che tshirts- they are treated as, if not heroes per se, then respectable among a certain crowd in which Churchill is not. This has long been a source of disgust and confusion for me. I would fully expect either of them to behave much the same way as Tucker has here in that parallel situation.

This gives me a hilarious mental image of center-right college students ironically donning Che-style shirts featuring Churchill, FDR, or Eisenhower. Maybe even Patton as an edgy choice.

I still don't understand why anyone has to answer for Tucker, but no one has to answer for these weird academics / officials. More people watch him? Ok, but academics are taken more seriously. Position tends to trump numbers from my experience.

Also, I seem to remember some politician defending Mao on British TV, and only irrelevant internet Chuds getting upset over it.

I still don't understand why anyone has to answer for Tucker, but no one has to answer for these weird academics / officials. More people watch him? Ok, but academics are taken more seriously. Position tends to trump numbers from my experience.

Strategically, it is a good outcome to have academics who are taken seriously on your side. Serious academics are influential, they have a job where they get to espouse weird and unpopular ideas to students and other academics, and many people won't bat an eye. A decade or two later their ideas may be an established academic tradition with a peer-reviewed journal. Media personality who starts espousing weird and unpopular ideas might become weird and unpopular, and taken less seriously. It is unfair. Winning often is, from loser's point of view.

There are so many easy wins to be had against progressivism, from defending the value of markets and pushing back against affirmative action to attacking the bizarre and incoherent ideologies of contemporary critical race theory and gender self-ID.

Haven't basic bitch normie-friendly Republicans been trying to do exactly this at least since the appearance of the Tea Party, over and over, appealing to supposedly present normie sentiments of civic nationalism and economic liberty?

Yes, but progressivism is able to pivot constantly between "that's not happening" and "that's good, actually" and get away with it, thanks to their control of "normie" institutions. If they do overreach, they just cool it down for a while and everyone forgets.

It's a bit weird how late the Republican party was to discover wokeness, in the sense of the nascent leviathan of the media-academic-activist IDpol-complex. I remember already by 2014 there was a growing unease among classically liberal academics at the massive and comparatively new cultural revolution that was being impressed on young people, but very few people on the American right recognised the threat until comparatively recently; and of course, even when they did, it was usually pretty cringey (think Jordan Peterson/Elon Musk interview).

It's a bit weird how late the Republican party was to discover wokeness,

I love how over the course of this forum's lifetime we went from criticizing conservatives for freaking out over "just a couple crazy kids on college campuses" to "being late to discover wokeness".

even when they did, it was usually pretty cringey (think Jordan Peterson/Elon Musk interview).

???

Peterson was screaming about this since 2017 or so, and was pretty wildly hip with young people to the point the entire mainstream media complex was having waking nightmares about him?

I love how over the course of this forum's lifetime we went from criticizing conservatives for freaking out over "just a couple crazy kids on college campuses" to "being late to discover wokeness".

I think it's fairer to say that it took them this long to come up with any theory of the case or solution besides pointing and yelling about campuses being woke.

Everyone knew but conservative activists today like Rufo tend to take a very different tack than just complaining and hoping to win the cultural battle the way they perceived the wokes to have won it . Or appealing to "classical liberal" values and expecting the dam to hold.

That's now being done by left-wingers closer to the center like Haidt and Yascha Mounk. With a similar rate of success.

Haidt was on it pretty early on too, from what I remember, but yeah the classical liberalism thing is a bit of dead end, so I don't think he'll get anywhere.

So what would a non-cringey but anti-woke moderate Republican narrative look like in your estimation?

They weren't "late to discover wokeness" - they've been complaining about it - or its forebearers - since before I was born. They just were completely incapable of stopping it, for a variety of reasons that would probably take several large books to adequately address and provide supporting sources for. The TL;DR is that the circumstances of post-War America - chiefly, increasing technological and organization scale, along the mass suburbanization of America - meant that the Right largely couldn't articulate a real, workable answer to the rise of IdPol, because they believed in the conditions that would inevitably lead to its rise, and they didn't even know it. To paraphrase The Last Psychiatrist, the Right wanted to debate the conclusions ("schools should teach family values! the government should support traditional marriage!" etc.) but accepted all the premises, and the entire form of the argument (that we should have mass society that encourages hyperindividualism, that accepts it as given that kids are supposed to go to college far away and then have their own lives, etc.)

It's a bit weird how late the Republican party was to discover wokeness

The allegations that the Republican party is anti-intellectual are essentially correct, and one of the consequences of this is that they have a very limited perspective of expert institutions. Namely, an exterior view which tends to write off the whole edifice as a wretched hive of degenerate commies. The result is that the right is virtually always late to the party intellectually and their efforts to participate in the discourse are often pretty unimpressive (in this case, their constant efforts to equate the post-liberal bent of 'wokeness' with any sort of social liberalism mostly just delegitimized center-left left critics of the far left).

not least because I think that moral feelings — especially the “rights of small nations” — played a key role in influencing British and American geopolitical strategy in both WW1 and WW2

The diplomatic history doesn't really bear this out, at least for WWII, given how many small nations were thrown into Stalin's lap before he even had to ask. A more accurate take, I think, would be that moral feelings, such as the "rights of small nations", end up being outraged when and only when a violation of such moral feelings is also a violation of the prevailing international order. Moral feelings towards small nations act as a defense of geopolitical order, and are stirred up more by threat than by empathy. Hitler was violating the international order more gravely than Stalin in the run-up to war, by taking more critical states in a more flagrant manner, and by 1945 there was no international order at all save for what the Allies were constructing. This theory also has the benefit of continuity to the present day.

The revisionist take errs in a more simple way, by ascribing to malice what was actually incompetence.

"Rights of small nations" overlaps strongly with "Don't bitchslap the British Empire and expect no response" in practice.

British grand strategy between the end of the Anglo-Dutch wars in 1668 and the Brexit referendum in 2016* was built around preventing the emergence of a hegemonic power in Continental Europe. Putting a neutral Belgium slap bang in the middle of the most convenient invasion route between France and Germany was part of that - it prevents either side converting a temporary force advantage into a Sedan-tier victory by successful maneuver warfare. So from a British perspective the 1839 Treaty of London guaranteeing Belgian neutrality wasn't just a "scrap of paper" - it was core to British policy in the same way that the current "rules-based" international order is to US policy. Accordingly, violating Belgian neutrality without asking the British nicely suggests that the Germans don't take Britain seriously as a Great Power able and willing to defend its interests, and was therefore perceived by the part of the British establishment that didn't already favour a full defensive alliance with France as a bitchslap, and produced (largely without thought on the British side) an appropriately robust response.

The bitchslap in WW2 is even more blatant. At Munich, Hitler tells Chamberlain that Nazi grand strategy is about reversing Versailles, and that the Sudetenland is the last major territorial adjustment needed to complete this project**. Germany signs a treaty explicitly guaranteeing the borders of rump Czechoslovakia, and Chamberlain sells Munich to the British people on the basis that it is "Peace in Our Time". When Hitler invades the rest of Czechoslovakia six months later, he is basically saying to Chamberlain and the British voter "I have altered our agreement. Pray that I do not alter it further." This goes down differently when it is said by the Empire vs when it is said to the Empire by a short Austrian corporal with one ball. Both AJP Taylor and Orwell (in The Lion and the Unicorn) agree that the resulting British policy was a largely unthinking response to being bitchslapped.

* This is one of the reasons why I agree with this blog post suggesting that the core supporters of Brexit were assuming the EU would collapse following the withdrawal of the British net budgetary contribution - I'm pretty certain that not even the Brexiteers saw the UK facing a united, hostile Europe as a good outcome.

** This is more plausible than the modern schoolboy version of history says it is - AJP Taylor in the serious-but-moderately-heterodox Origins of the Second World War points out that Hitler had plans for a second Munich-style deal to avoid an attack on Poland, and had it worked he was not expecting to grab any Polish territory - just to annex Danzig (which was a majority-German city under League of Nations administration, where the local Nazis dominated local elections) and get better transit terms for German rail freight crossing Polish territory between contiguous Germany and East Prussia.

Hitler’s cavalier takeover of numerous small neutral countries (Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands)

Were these any more objectionable than the Allies’ invasion and occupation of the small neutral countries of Iceland, Iraq, and Iran?

Signalling incentives exist on the right as well as the left - being the edgiest and most daring in your online bubble is more immediately appealing than going for any kind of mass appeal. Better to be captain of a small boat than a junior technician in a flotilla.

I don't really have a strong take on Darryl Cooper, whom I'd never heard of prior to this post, but certainly I think Tucker Carlson makes more sense if you interpret him as basically uninterested in winning elections or in getting public policy done. Being king of his own small mountain is more lucrative, and probably more emotionally satisfying as well.