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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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But neither Red nor Blue can be rightly deemed the tribe of individualists, per se.

I would argue that they are both quite individualist, but don't get marked as individualist because invididualism is so baked into American society that it's invisible to Americans. Both Republicans and Democrats discuss their ideas in terms of individual rights ("2A! Religious freedom! Freedom of speech! Right to life! My body, my choice! Constitutional right to an abortion, that SCOTUS took away! Trans people's right to exist! Civil rights!") and while there are grumblings of genuine collectivism in both parties, such views don't have much power.

Collectivism believes that rights come with duties -- and even the French Revolution's great document included disussion of "the rights and duties of man and the citizen." When's the last time American discourse had a real discussion of "the duties of man and the citizen?"

I mean, read some of the stuff even the French Revolutionaries wrote:

The obligations of each person to society consist in defending it, serving it, living in submission to the laws, and respecting those who are the agents of them.

Every citizen owes his services to the fatherland and to the maintenance of liberty, equality, and property whenever the law summons him to defend them.

No one is a virtuous man unless he is unreservedly and religiously an observer of the laws.

And my favorite two:

The one who violates the laws openly declares himself in a state of war with society.

The one who, without transgressing the laws, eludes them by stratagem or ingenuity wounds the interests of all; he makes himself unworthy of their good will and their esteem.

But of course American discourse involves no discussion of such things; they're anathema. Even the farthest of the far right would shudder at saying such things out loud! Even our legal system involves many complex financial instruments designed "by stratagem or ingenuity" to avoid taxation, and a major theory of American legal thought argues that there is nothing immoral about breaching a solemn contract!

Pure libertarians are definitely individualist, but also marginal, because most Americans have some level of collectivist ideals even if they fall well short of the global and historical norm.