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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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It seems so far that the reaction to Trump has been muted which undermines this argument even more.

Of course Trump isn't great for rolling back the culture war excesses of the left because his administration shares plenty of ground with the deep state agenda. He might at best roll parts of it back.

There has been a right wing version of your arguement which is that right wingers would oppose it if Democrats do it but might support it if Trump does it. Which is about Trump's rhetoric for legal migration.

Neither Trump nor Harris was a good candidate for CW-temperature purposes

In my experience people who talk about CW temperature purposes are after retaining or expanding a cultural agenda that is too far to the left. If the other side to rolls over and accept this, it results in highest culture war temperature which isn't about conflict but also about enforcement of harmful agendas. Submission to that is worse than opposition.

Changing things from the far left excesses to a moral point and fixing things is how you reduce the culture war problems. I don't care about the problem of CW temperature if it means to retain or expand massive problems. Which would be the case with the Harris super woke agenda.

Trump's real problems is despite some rhetorical pandering he is still pretty quite aligned with neocons, we can see after his administration has been picked this is especially the case. There is also his rhetoric about mass legal migration where he actually didn't expand it in his first term but neither did he limit it, even as far as illegal immigration goes he wasn't that great even if a huge improvement over the Biden administration.

He even in his first term had an agenda for massive black targeted goverment spending with the platinum plan.

Another possible problem is perhaps too much corporatism and big pharma, weapon manufacturers collusion.

Or despite the rhetoric, deep state, secret services overreach continuing.

His problems are common problems with the republican party. We have seen constantly the right purge figures who aren't in fact too far right on the culture war, for being too far right on the culture war. The result has not been a reduction of culture war temperature. Even if someone promotes such counter intuitive strategies because they earnestly believe that they help things along, even if the strategies seem to be self defeating, then what they are proposing is something that we have repeatedly seen doesn't work.

I suspect most of our disagreement boils down to P(WWIII). I am assuming that in a large fraction of possible worlds, a nuclear exchange occurs and SJ dies in a fire due to disproportionate mortality + being blamed for weakening the West against external threats. This drastically alters the calculus.

Most of the rest, yes, probably boils down to different values.