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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Trump is not a vote for restoring norms. That’s just stupid, I’m sorry but Trump did and continues to violate norms regularly. He still won’t concede the 2020 election and J6 may have been small potatoes(it was), but it’s definitely not within the norms.

Now all that being said- democrats are a lot worse. As Scott correctly notes, democratic backsliding in the real world, as opposed to Netflix shows beloved by progressives, is one party that packs the courts and colludes with private media to censor the opposition and finds three felonies a day reasons to go after dissidents after spying on them and ending meritocracy in economic and educational opportunities to distribute spoils to supporting groups. Sort of like what we have with democrats. You know, the things they’re actually literally doing. Not the ones we can imagine Trump doing.

Do you think Erdogan is going around saying he’s ending judicial independence to consolidate his own power?

This is an election between two sets of norm violators. Trump will do far less damage.

I don't see how you can restore the norms until both sides want to restore the norms. If the left doesn't want to restore any norms acceptable to the right - and they clearly do not appear to - then "restoring the norms" for the right means capitulating to whatever new norms the left is going to want. And doing it again and again, repeatedly, with the "norms" shifting arbitrarily far left, and taking flak as "norm-breakers" at each squeak of disagreement. I think it can only be "norms" if they are acceptable and agreed on if not by all than by the majority of the society, and I don't think there's anything the current left could offer that would fit the mold. If they want to go back from "western culture is racist" and "everybody who says is a woman is a woman" and "the left should control and police every public discussion" and "any speech not approved by the left is violence" and "violence against people lower in oppression hierarchy is not real violence" and so on - then there will be some norms. Until then, I see the talk of the "norms" as psychological warfare aimed at convincing the right they have already lost, they just don't realize it yet, but it's time to accept it.