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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Ok, but, seriously what's the point? I mean yes this is an obscure internet forum on which people advance their technical theories about political topics for no reason beyond being right on the internet and if that's the case then you can stop reading here...

On a bigger scale though when I see this argument employed on the internet in general it seems like proponents of the theory seem to think of it as some kind of "gotcha". I just don't really see it. If the woke or critical theorists all threw up their hands and said, "you got us, we are cultural marxists and will go by this term form now on," what do you expect to change? Socialism polls higher among 18-30 year olds than Capitalism. They're the main group that the woke try to persuade and recruit from. The red scare is a distant memory at this point. The woke didn't rise to power in the USSR or China, if anything these places seem resilient to their influence. They came to power in turbo USA, the most capitalist country ever finally ridden of it's cold war rival. You could make an argument that capitalism is just using cultural marxism and regardless of their roots they are just useful idiots (and many old left types do).

At best you're achieving some weak guilt by association, mostly that will work on people over the age of 65, at worst you're actually making woke sound cooler to younger generations. Just attacking how irrational woke ideology is seems far more effective than all the ink spilled over the cultural marxist label. Pointing out that the woke has its roots in marxism, and then just assuming that people associate marxism with bad and capitalism with good seems intellectually lazy. If conservatives want to win people over they need to be better about pointing out both the flaws in communism and admitting and fixing the flaws in capitalism otherwise at the current rate it seems like both communists and capitalists will be relegated to some stupidpol type forum where they complain about how both the actually relevant political parties aren't "true" left or right.

If anything the failures of both systems seem eerily similar. Focus on material gains neglecting cultural or spiritual growth and interests, using stats on increases in material wealth to hand wave away deep dissatisfaction and malaise. Focus on equality as a selling point (meritocracy in which all people can advance is implicitly part of the western social contract) motivating both groups into ridiculous beliefs, lamarckism for the USSR, blank slatism and "magic soil" in the west. Increasingly centralized power to increase efficiency and productivity, resulting in swaths of people losing agency and corrupt out of touch power centers. I guess i'm not a paleocon at all and more of a post liberal or something so i'm not typical right wing, but the boomer right wing type people need to fix these issues if they want people to just reflexively like capitalism and dislike marxism again.

Ok, but, seriously what's the point?

First, naming the beast. Second, denying dishonest actors the rhetorical victory of obfuscating the beast's name.

What is the utility of 'naming the beast'?

The pages linked in the top-level post openly use words like 'socialist', and denounce 'capitalism' without a moment's hesitation. They don't seem to be hiding their agenda. What is revealed about them by using an alternative name?

I think remzem's point holds up - if you or we want to combat them, they need to make a substantive cae against socialism as such, and a substantive case for capitalism (or better yet, for capitalism as a component of some more integrated political vision). If you got everyone to call all left-wing politics Marxism, then people are just going to shrug and say, "Okay, I like Marxism". There's no substitute for actually convincing people.