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I actually voted for Joe Biden in 2020, specifically because I thought his election would cool the culture war. In hindsight, this displays an unbelievable level of misunderstanding of the sources of the culture war and its continuing escalation.
I felt like it did cool the culture war?
To me it feels like both the left and the right have calmed down somewhat over the past few years.
It seems like the calming is partly just out of exhaustion, and because its no longer the 'new hotness'. It was a cultural fad, and such things tend to lose popularity mostly on their own.
Not to say the damage will go away.
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To be honest, I just don't know how this could be measured.
To be more specific about my feelings: I thought that Democrats winning the election would reduce the amount of grievance media generated by the left. I guess my thought process was: "We have had four years of loud, grating Orange Man Bad/white nationalism is the greatest threat to our country content. Well, now Orange Man is out, you have achieved what you wanted - we can all move on to something else, right?"
I did not realize the full extent, at that time, to which the media cycle is driven by generating fear and upset, and how little interest there is in the truth; nor did I realize to what extent many people take what the media tells them to be truth, without questioning it.
I suppose I actually agree with you - I think the war is less hot; but I also feel like @The_Nybbler was vindicated too many times, and the world continued to get worse.
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Do you think Trump’s election would have made things any better?
Other than avoiding the 1/6 circus, I guess.
It would also have avoided the endless Trump lawsuits or at least most of them.
But I think it would strictly make things better because it gets Trump out of the game. The culture war is probably an endlessly rising tide but for some reason Trump makes it rise much faster whether he's winning or losing as long as he's playing people are losing their minds and justifying literally any culture war item they support or reject on the back of his uncouth facebook-level news regurgitation.
It's also worth saying that it completely evades Kamala being the candidate which, in my mind, would lessen the culture war. It would have possibly stymied the idea that "my enemies are fascist and going to disenfranchise or even destroy any minority they encounter" not because it's true or not, but because it didn't work.
Trump, for all his faults, did not decide to try to arrest Hilary. The complete disregard for law or procedure maybe came earlier but to me it seems like it was fully ignited because of January 6 and dems implicitly saying that this "insurrection" not only defines any of our enemies but also empowers us to treat them as enemies in what should be neutral situations. Trump has some classified things or not whatever but a law that nobody respected or expected would be used in this situation is somehow exceedingly important because it can be used to attack Trump.
I am becoming more and more blackpilled about this but I do think the difference between waiting for Trump to finish and vanish and just lying, throwing away decorum and meeting him far below his level because you can get away with it doesn't happen if he's elected. It would have probably ended up this way regardless but Trump makes decorum decay at warp speed.
(maybe his level is that low, I don't know, but one thing's for certain in my mind, he would be ineffectual because he mostly has been.)
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I am perhaps not a deep enough thinker to analyze the many variables that would go into that answering that question intelligently. I also do not have a sufficiently complete model, still, of what drives the culture war.
I do think that one theoretically possible end state of the culture war would be: Both sides accept that the other side exists, and is too widely supported to extirpate; therefore, it is not worthwhile to spend energy on waging that war. A second Trump victory, in this model, could have sent the signal: "The Right is strong. We leftists do not have as complete a mandate as we imagined. We must modify our offerings to appeal to more people;" and I think this would cool the culture war if it happened.
However, that is more of a mistake theory model.. I am now a conflict theory thinker, and now I am not sure what could cool the culture war apart from shows of chilling authoritarian force, which I pray are never used. I'd rather have a healthy culture war, no matter how unpleasant I personally find its existence, than to have an environment where the war is no longer allowed to be fought.
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