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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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This epitomizes general differential expectations of conservatives and liberals. Conservatives are regarded (and to a shocking degree, regard themselves) as lacking in agency to the point of being almost animalistic.

Liberals, though. They're supposed to be better, smarter, more accountable. Apparently.

They're supposed to be adults in the room.

As a liberal (both in the classical sense and in the liberal/conservative dichotomy sense), I feel like this is exactly the correct state of things. Because the only good justification I see for picking a particular side is if one believes that that side is, in some real meaningful sense, better than the other side. And liberals being actually responsible for getting decisions right, being the adults in the room who think through their ideas and the consequences of implementing them, while conservatives being animalistic emotional creatures following their base whims and needing faith and tradition and religion to keep them from falling to their base impulses, is one of the most meaningful ways to differentiate the former as better than the latter.

Because you get rid of that, then what do we have left with, just that this set of ideas labeled L are better than this other set of ideas labeled C? But how could I justify holding such a belief, if the process by which those L ideas were produced wasn't, in some meaningful way, better than the process by which those C ideas were produced? Because I've reasoned to myself that those L ideas are better than those C ideas? Why should anyone, especially myself, who grew up in an environment that was biased heavily towards L ideas and away from C ideas, trust that my reasoning on this preference is sound, when the more likely explanation is that I have a set of preferences inculcated in me by my society, which I've used motivated reasoning to justify as "correct" in my mind?

Now, I've seen enough to recognize that most people on any side are just tribalists blindly following their animalistic urges, but even so, in the world of ideology and politics, I'll always insist on double standards, where my side is held to a higher standard than the other one, so as to make myself feel more secure that I've actually chosen the correct side. Otherwise, it's basically guaranteed that I've just chosen the side that happens to match up with my preferences and reasoned my way backwards that it's the correct one (even with double standards, this isn't off the table, but it at least helps to make me feel somewhat more secure in it).