With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
I think Trump winning is a huge victory for wokeness and a huge loss for liberalism, just as it was in 2016. Trump in office will give institutions the excuse they need to clamp down on dissent. Speaking on issues like free speech and meritocracy will become impossible, since the #Resist movement will occupy 100% of the airtime for the next four years, and anyone making the slightest criticism of leftist idpol will be labeled a Trump-supporting fascist. Young white men will be demonized at levels never seen before. Meanwhile Trump/Vance will likely erode civil rights and liberal values from the right, with things like porn bans, social media IDs, religion shoved into schools, etc. Basically, it's joever.
The level of vitriol I'm already seeing from my boomer democrat family members is even bigger than 2016 or Jan 6. Living in the blue bubble for the next 4 years is going to be hell.
I would agree with you if this weren't entirely politically irrelevant. It's the philosophy of vaguely autistic fandom guys. It's a story people tell themselves to play pretend. Your involvement in Democratic politics is as real as D&D licensed fiction. Nobody outside of here even hears you.
What you believe in died fourteen years ago. Get through the grief, cut it out of yourself, and go live.
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Maybe wokism gets worse. It's definately a possibility. But I am not convinced. The woke policies under Biden never really moderated. They just leaned on the messaging less hard. I don't see any reason to believe they wouldn't have ramped right back up once they secured a victory. Just like Biden running on a 'moderate' veneer.
At the end of the day, Kamala was the final boss of woke ideology - an unaccomplished diversity hire who rose to the the highest level possible, unelected, annointed all through intersectionality, surrounded by true believers. Her winning would have been a confirmation of everything woke, not a repudiation.
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Having a government which supports clamping down on dissent also gives those institutions the excuse they need to clamp down on dissent. And it's a much better excuse.
By your reasoning, voting for Trump is bad for Trump supporters because of the backlash, but also good for Democrats, and you should be recommending to all your Democratic friends that they vote for Trump because voting for Trump helps the Democrats.
You might think so, but as far as I can tell, Trump did absolutely nothing to protect free speech or slow down cancel culture. The most egregious cancellation of all time imho (James Damore) happened under Trump. And the biggest cancellations under Biden have been by right-wingers (e.g. the ivy league presidents).
I don't think voting for Trump helps democrats win elections, I think it helps woke leftists gain power within the democratic party. Which I think is very bad for democrats longterm. The best thing for democrats would be to campaign hard for a reasonable, principled liberal candidate in the primary, and then vote blue no matter who in the general.
Rescinding the Dear Colleague letter, for example
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Man, we need some Catalogue of Cancellations, because I've lost track of what happened to who, and when. In any case I'd say the Twitter Files and Zucks confession of the government putting pressure to censor dissidents is probably more egregious.
The Twitter Files were mostly about attempts to censor Twitter by the deep state while Trump was President, not attempts by the Biden administration to censor Twitter. In other words, they are a point in favour of "1st-term Trump was too ineffective as President to do much about pervasive censorship," which is what @LiberalRetvrn seems to be getting at.
I'm pretty sure I recall that it was both, with a marked change in how hamfisted it was the moment Biden got into office.
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What he did was not deliberately try to make it worse which the Biden administration did. Merely doing nothing is an improvement over censoring Facebook.
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Only if it remains a bubble. Musk bought Twitter, and it's interesting to note the giant seachange for Trump in young voters, those most exposed to the big social media platforms. Bezos may be starting to exert editorial control over WaPo. I would assume that Vance at least has a plan to dismantle Grievance Studies programs. You might find that that bubble bursts and people deradicalise.
(Or you might find that that bubble literally dies in nuclear fire. Never forget that awful possibility.)
That's the problem, though. Vance isn't opposed to Grievance Studies programs for the same reasons I am. I oppose them because they're illiberal and divisive and force an absolute moral framework onto me. I'm fairly certain that Vance would replace them with something I dislike just as much.
Like what? Do you have a specific policy in mind, or is it more of a vibes thing?
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It's going to take a huge amount of effort just to move directionally towards more fairness. Actually taking such good control of the institutions that they reach fairness, go beyond it, and tilt towards the other side is pretty much impossible.
You're assuming that fairness is some bright line in the middle of a spectrum. I think this is incorrect, there are a lot of ways to impose your will illegitimately/immorally that don't require reaching 'fairness' from a position of disadvantage first.
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Back in 2020 some people here tried to say a Biden win will the blue tribe to de-escalate, only for all the things you're warning about here to happen anyway. They'll keep on clamping down on dissent no matter what, they're doing it even in countries with no Trump. The idea they'd go easy on us if we let them win is hard to take seriously at this point.
Well from my point of view, things did dramatically de-escalate with Biden. But I think what I'm trying to say is that it's easier to critique idpol leftism when idpol leftism is explicitly in power. Trumpism is a backlash to idpol leftism, and is therefore perfectly optimized for providing it endless outrage to feed on. Trumpists and SJWs are having a conversation that I have no interest in participating in, I want to have a different conversation. If I'm over here arguing with a leftist that we should strive for equality rather than equity, it really doesn't help if a Trumpist starts yelling about how both equality and equity are for cucks. That just causes the leftist to stop listening to me.
Maybe you should try cutting a deal with the Right instead?
Progressivism lost its mind in 2014, and their excesses have done significant damage to our nation and its institutions. Maybe it's time to cut the crazier fringes loose, rather than bankrolling them at every turn. And if you can't do that, why should we on the Right consider you distinct from them?
Well I might have thought that was possible back in 2016. But the right are moving away from liberalism, not towards it. In 2016, Trump held up a rainbow flag, and now in 2024 his campaign is at least 25% about how transgenderism is destroying womens' sports. There was a brief time during G*mergate when we had a liberal backlash against wokeness, but the anti-SJW movement has long been replaced by unironic family values christian conservatism. On the other hand, it seems like more and more democrats are waking up to the flaws in the idpol system.
In what way is that against liberalism?
Well personally, I don't think MtF trans people should compete against women either, but it's not a political issue. It should be decided by individual sports leagues.
A minor criticism, even though I sympathize with your views: what stops individual sports leagues from just all agreeing to lump transwomen in with ciswomen anyways, and leading to a sort of "market failure"? These kinds of organizations are probably prone to follow-the-leader, which is something that happens in the corporate world across many specific kinds of markets, and many sports leagues are basically just corporations anyways. I happen to agree with the take that market failures may often need government correction to cut through market actors' inability and lack of motive to solve market failures.
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Womens' sports leagues are an explicitly political creation, so their policies are a political issue.
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There's things like college sports where a women's divisions were established by a supposedly-liberal state decree in the first place (Title IX, I think). What's illiberal about enforcing that they remain women's divisions?
I wouldn't consider sex-segregation to be liberal, I would consider it a form of identity politics. The liberal approach to sports would be to give everyone equal access to the facilities, and let everyone compete in the same division. Of course, that would only mean everyone has equal opportunities, not equal outcomes. A 5 foot male probably wouldn't be winning at basketball, and no women would probably win at any sport involving any kind of athletic ability. Sports are unfair like that. Things like sex-segregation and weight classes are a nice form of affirmative action that let more people have a chance, but they still don't make sports 'fair'. You can have a womens' division for sprinting, but the winners in that division will be the most male-like women who can qualify (Caster Semenya, for example). Deciding where to draw that cutoff is messy and there's no clear solution.
Luckily, I don't consider any of this to be an important political issue, so I don't have to form a strong opinion, except that I don't want the government spending its time on it.
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To a first approximation, liberal = trans because "my body, my choice". "Bad for society, thus should be prevented" is usually the illiberal take.
Sure, you can have a liberal "my body, my choice" based argument on transgenderism, but it's about adults making their own decisions about their own bodies, not about abolishing sex-segregation in sports and all other spaces. Somehow liberals managed to go on a couple centuries without arguing for that, until like 5 minutes ago.
I think it's vibe-based. Culture doesn't have enough room for more than one bit, or more than one direction on the lever. Because trans is left and anti-trans is right, moving the lever towards trans moves it in a leftist direction (pro women), and moving the lever against trans moves it in a rightist direction (against child grooming).
From that perspective, "I am against trans participation in women's sports but for 18+ transition and cautiously in favor of puberty blockers given parental approval or a three month waiting period or idk" would simply have too many bits; no serious politician would dedicate that much cultural mindspace to the topic. "Against trans to protect women's sports" is already relatively nuanced. (Yes, the mind weeps, but that's how it is.)
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Was it anything specific that gave you that impression? As far as I can tell to the extent things got better, it was a result of Reds escalating, not Blues de-escalating - Elon buying Twitter, the Bud Light boycott, Red states banning gender affirming care for minors...
I'm not interested in critique that doesn't result in anything.
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