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Notes -
Cthulhu always swims right.
A common argument that pops up from time to time is that history generally moves in one direction. One prominent example of this historically has been Whig history, which has a narrative of human society generally moving from a barbaric past to an enlightened present. People like MLK Jr. have implicitly endorsed this view with the quote "the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice". It's a nice idea... but it's clearly wrong when you bother to think about it. People believe their current values are where true justice lies, and their current values are highly predicated on their environment whenever they grew up. Nobody can look into the future, so we look to the past instead, and it's a story of people gradually becoming closer and closer to our present selves. But if we had the capability to look into the future, there's a good chance that we'd be shocked or horrified about where we eventually end up. People in 2000 BCE would probably think our present world in 2024 CE is terrible in a number of ways. Neither side is correct or incorrect, it's just a difference in the baseline.
Given the negativity bias of the internet, more recent takes on "history generally moves in one direction" can mostly be summarized as "[thing] generally gets [worse]". One example is conservatives telling you how progressives always eventually win on basically everything. One popularization of this idea is "Cthulhu always swims left", which people have claimed on this site many times, example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, etc. If you’ve been on this site for long, then you’ve almost certainly encountered this idea at least once. This rebuttal is a better critique than I could ever give. The gist is that things only look like this if you gerrymander history in a pessimistically partisan way. Yes, progressives always win if you only include their wins and exclude all of their losses… duh? But that’s a goofy way to cut history. Conservatives might then try to come up with reasons to handwave away any progressive losses, either as trivial (“they lose the small things but win where it counts”) or as simply delayed (“they haven’t won… yet!”). But these are never particularly convincing to an unbiased observer. History really doesn’t move consistently in any direction but the most vague and basic ones, and trying to force it into this box or that serves as little more than a glimpse into that person’s pessimism.
Freddie deBoer posted an article today that espoused that idea that “Cthulhu always swims left”, but flipped so that, effectively, “Cthulhu always swims right”. He doesn’t say those exact words, but that’s his general conclusion. In the aftermath of Harris’ defeat, many in the Democratic party are claiming that the party needs to move to the center after being too far left for many years. Americans mostly agree with this idea, but the remaining leftists like FdB are horrified at that conclusion. To people like them, Harris basically ran as a Republican, and so saying that the party needs to go even further right is anathema. If this all sounds utterly ridiculous… I wouldn’t disagree with you. Saying the country always moves right shares all the flaws as those saying it always moves left. I explicitly disagree with this piece, but I still think it serves as a useful example of what it’s like when the sides are reversed.
At some point in the last two years, I read an article which charted how self-identified Republicans and Democrats responded to Gallup questions on a range of social and economic issues over a significant period of time, maybe 30-40 years. It argued, contra the standard woke narrative, that the polling data clearly indicate that Republicans have been remarkably consistent in their responses to questions about a range of issues during the period, while self-identified Democrats have grown increasingly radical. The only social issue on which the median Republican in 2024 would give a significantly different response to his equivalent in 1990 is gay rights.
If you're in the Motte, you're reading all of the above and thinking "well, duh". But it's remarkable how durable this idea is, that the Republicans have slowly drifted into becoming a far-right party while the Democrats are the ones who've stayed in place (Know Your Meme has a catalogue of these comics which starts with the opposite framing in which Democrats became progressively more radical while the Republicans stayed in place, but my recollection is that that comic was itself a reaction to a comic arguing the reverse). After all, endorsing the Democrat policy package just means "being a decent person", and surely the definition of what a "decent person" looks like can't have changed much in the space of a mere thirty years, can it? The eagerness to maintain this façade is probably a significant motivating factor behind woke people's propensity to rewrite the past and pretend that we've always been at war with Eastasia e.g. paraphrasing a 1993 RBG quote to make it seem more trans-inclusive than it really was. Hell, you don't even have to go back as far as that: you can make some Democrats uncomfortable simply by quoting Obama's speeches concerning immigration circa 2008, and the "what is a woman" gotcha question with which to embarrass Democrats simply didn't exist thirty years, twenty or even fifteen years ago. It'd be interesting to play a clip of one of Bob Dole's 1996 campaign speeches for a group of self-identified Republicans and see how they react, and specifically to observe the ratio of "spluttering, appalled disbelief":"embarrassed agreement":"YesChad".
From Freddie's perspective, if the median Democrat became increasingly radical on a range of economic and social issues in the last ten years, but the Democratic party did not fully embrace this shift and instead remained stubbornly committed to being boring centrists with some woke window dressing (preferred pronouns, land acknowledgements) - it's easy to understand how this could feel like Freddie and his ilk are demanding the same things they've always demanded and the Democrats are shifting further and further right. Someone once compared it to parallax, or the illusion of relative motion: without optical frames of reference, it's difficult for humans to tell the difference between "I am stationary and that object is moving away from me" vs. "that object is stationary and I am moving away from it".* Freddie might even be a special case, in that I get the impression that, owing to his politically engaged parents, he was significantly more radical than the median Democrat in the nineties and 2000s. It might be literally true that Freddie and his immediate social circle have been demanding the same package of policy proposals since he was in high school, but the DNC have only had to sit up and take notice of their growing far-left faction (if only to fob them off) in the last ten years, as those policy proposals shifted into the Overton window as a result of Occupy Wall Street and the Great Awokening. I imagine Freddie must have found the last ten years quite confusing, as the cool kids started expressing some of the same opinions he's professed for most of his adult life, but he still isn't allowed to sit at the cool kids' table.
I think Freddie is correct that Al Gore's campaign was essentially "Clintonism minus Clinton", and which clearly exposed that Clinton's personal charisma was necessary to sell the whole package. In fact, I'd go even further than that: the package was largely irrelevant. Clinton was so charming that he probably could have run on a bizarro world mirror image of the package he actually ran under (protectionist, openly pro-gay marriage, doveish on the international stage etc., unlike the real Clinton) and would still have won a first or even second term.
The parallels are obvious in explaining why I think Hanania is dead right that we're unlikely to ever see a DeSantis presidency. Anyone arguing that "DeSantis is offering Trumpism without all the grandstanding and narcissism; and he's actually competent and focused so he can get policies passed rather than wasting time getting into fights on Twitter" is fundamentally misunderstanding how the median voter thinks. Trump being shameless, grandiose and larger-than-life is half of what makes him likeable to ordinary people. The fact that he spends so much time shitposting on Twitter is part of his charm: it makes him seem human and down to earth, unlike career politicians who are obsessively focused on "optics" and whose every lawyerly, carefully worded public announcement might as well have been generated by ChatGPT for all the passion and colour it conveys. Even if DeSantis spent 20% more time getting into pissing contests on Twitter, voters would be able to tell that that was something he'd been focus-grouped into doing, not something he was doing because he wanted to. Voters like Trump: they grudgingly tolerate DeSantis as one of their teammates, but they aren't shy about telling him "Governor, you're no Teflon
DonRon".Before the election, my uncle who lives in Massachusetts was visiting. If anyone can legitimately be said to suffer from TDS, it's him (at one point before dinner he even raised his glass to toast to "our next President Kamala" - brrr). Over dinner, he was making another of his interminable rants about how he simply couldn't understand how Republicans could just overlook how nasty and dysfunctional Trump was, just because he endorsed many of the policies they wanted. I pushed back on this, and said - of course you can understand it. Clinton was probably the sleaziest POTUS the office has ever seen (as big of philanderers as JFK or indeed LBJ were, I'm not aware of them being accused of rape - or if they were, Clinton surely bested them in terms of sheer number of accusations). You ignored this, because he was charming and he was on your team.
What I was most surprised by was that my uncle actually conceded the point, and unlike many people to whom I've made a comparable argument (about Clinton or other Democrats), he did not play the "no that's totally different, all those women who accused Clinton were vindictive liars/Russian assets" card.
*Does anyone know if there's a term in psychology for this specific cognitive bias, wherein the default is for people to believe that what they currently believe is what they've always believed? [EDIT: Someone DM'd me to say I'm thinking of consistency bias: "Incorrectly remembering one's past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour."]
It really does seem to be something that people actually believe, rather than something they're knowingly lying about. I know that my opinions on a range of political issues have changed over time, and acknowledging this in any particular case only sometimes makes me uncomfortable, but a lot of people I know get very defensive when you point out that they used to believe something other than what they currently do.
Al Gore won the popular vote and lost the electoral college over a microscopic margin in Florida. That’s not ‘Clinton’s personal charisma is a necessary part of the deal’ that’s ‘bad luck is bad luck’.
Wouldn't have come down to a microscopic margin in Florida if he'd won his own home state of Tennessee or Clinton's Arkansas.
Or is it bad luck in all the other places he didn't win by a wider margin?
Sure, he wasn't as good a candidate as Clinton(Bill, that is). But a hair's breadth of winning in an era when elections generally were not close is evidence that the party is competitive.
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I think this is off base. Clinton was charming, but he won his first term with a plurality because Ross Perot won 19% of the vote. And immediately he had to govern far to teh right of how he campaigned. All that "Triangulation" stuff was Clinton being a shrewd political operator and figuring out that the country didn't want his ideas, they just wanted his face and interpretations on a Republican policy platform.
The Democrats got smashed in the '94 elections (where Joe Scarborough got his start as a firebreathing Republican). Clinton made political hay out of the defeat, and it won him re-election. Welfare reform, the '94 crime bill (notice that year?) etc.
But no, there is no way in hell the people who were in power and voting back in the '90s were in any mood for very liberal policies except perhaps a narrow range of gay rights and general fun-having. If you think liberal criminal justice policies were popular the year murder peaked in the US, you didn't observe it up close.
We'd just won the Cold War, had the Gulf War and no one wanted the stern Republican daddies in charge anymore, but they certainly didn't want the policies of the seventies back. And marginal Republicans weren't as worried about the existential nuclear threat and ideological superstruggle anymore, and were willing to vote on other issues. Hence, Perot picked up a lot of people from both sides who were looking for an option to the old ideologies. Clinton was the one who wound up seizing the moment to change the policies and interest groups of the left-wing coalition, which is what is being reacted to with the current re-alignment.
Only this time it is Trump who is doing the moving around, liberalizing the old Republican doctrines that no longer serve their new political base.
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This is, I fear, a great misunderstanding.
First of all, this is all a question of timescale. When Moldbug brings up the phrase, he is talking about modern history, of everything since the French Revolution.
Here we are talking about a few measly decades. Barely a century. It would have been similarly easy to say that right wing victory is inevitable during the Thermidorian Reaction. And yet Moldbug's point is that even that was ultimately advancing the leftist agenda. Napoleon the monarch did more to liquidate monarchy in Europe than anybody.
And yet, even this view is itself a narrow trend in the whole of history.
Spengler, Vico and all the theorists of cyclical history whom Moldbug is very obviously cribbing from, would instead argue that history repeats itself. That it has seasons. That right wing victories are the stuff of certain periods, whilst left wing victories are the stuff of others. Both causing each other.
And this brings me to my second point, which is that understanding Moldbug to say "the left" in the common sense of the word is a mistake.
The man has an explicit definition he goes by in this context: the left-right axis is that of nomos, of either increasing or decreasing the formalism and bondedness of a society.
This is what leads him to state the aphorism about the w-force. That definition of the axis and the oft remarked upon shape of history as short periods of creation followed by long periods of decay. To Moldbug, the "left" is simply the party of decay. You'll notice that when he means "democrat" he usually uses the word "blue" instead.
This leads to unintuitive conclusions that blow up direct comparison between this contemporary lament and his broader historical point.
For instance, FDR, which is very obviously left wing (or rather, blue), is viewed by Moldbug in this context as a right wing figure. He is after all, a monarch, who reshaped and reconstituted the US government after a period of decay. An American Napoleon.
Moldbug's point here is really better stated formally by Nick Land and the Deleuzian concept of reterritorialization: that the forces of history (capital) work through destructive transformation cycles that will take a concept and its connections (territory) and destroy those connections (deterritorialization) and then take that now meaningless disconnected concept and reconnect and recontextualize it in a way that makes it mean something entirely different (reterritorialization).
Cthulhu swims left means that the process of recontextualization actually helps to destroy the original meaning of the concept. That Reaction in the simple sense or a want to return to a past state of things is a vain process because doing so only helps to destroy the past.
First, this isn't how people often use the phrase on this site or others. When they speak of Cthulhu, they're often referring to things happening on the scale of decades or years, and sometimes even less.
And second, while MM may want to relitigate enlightenment ideas broadly, in this case he uses examples that are a few decades apart:
On this part I agree. MM does that obnoxious thing SJW's did by redefining commonly used words to suit his political purposes. Like the left redefining "racism", MM redefines "left" to be basically "everything bad":
It's a big sneer at the outgroup. MM dislikes where society has headed, so he puts everything he hates in a big bucket, calls it the "left" and says it always wins. It's pure gerrymandering.
This doesn't match my experience. This phrase is so niche that I don't often run into it, but my memory of it is that decades is roughly the minimum timescale involved, i.e. they're talking about decades or perhaps even centuries, not decades or years, and certainly not even less than years. Timescales of under a decade - or even a handful of decades - are so short that extreme, unsustainable things can win out - and often do, akin to a last-place team beating the first-place team in one of their dozen match-ups during an MLB season - such that people seem to believe that they shouldn't talk about them in such grand, sweeping outside-view terms, but rather with the actual inside-view specific factors.
I've seen Cthulhu mentioned in reference to Trans topics, which haven't been relevant for very long, certainly less long than multiple decades.
Someone will post a headline of the woke left winning some minor flavor-of-the-month battle, then someone will chime in with "Cthulhu always swims left" as a stand-in for "[things] always get [worse]" and "the left always wins".
Trans topics haven't been mainstream for a long time, but they've certainly been a part of the progressive movement for a long time, at least decades. It's merely another instantiation of the concept of equal rights being expanded to cover minorities, following the success of the gay rights/gay marriage movements of a couple decades ago. Heck, the mere existence of trans topics as a mainstream political/ideological topic over the past decade or so is an example of swimming leftward.
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I'm more generous about redefining words because any serious attempt at philosophy has to do this and in this particular case, he is actually using the historical meaning from the French Revolution rather than the colloquial one. Arguably his definition has more historical legs than the economic ideology classification from the cold war.
In any case, "left" and "right" are such diluted words and he's open enough about his definitions that I find it hard to argue that it is, in fact, malicious. A malicious actor wouldn't hold to using red and blue as alternatives.
Philosophy can be done well enough by using existing words as they currently are. If that's unfashionable, pompous philosophers usually invent new words rather than redefine old ones. Hijacking existing words is almost always a bad idea if the point is clear communication. It's outright deceitful in many cases by seeking to harness the pre-existing emotional valence of words for different ends, e.g. "racism = power + privilege". Alternatively, it's used to wobble between the real definition and the made-up definition at will to confuse people and claim "you just don't get it". I'm not sure if MM himself does this, but people who quote his work certainly do!
You could say the same thing about leftists redefining "racism". They were quite open about their definitions, often giving them to you unprompted!
I notice you don't address the historical precedence argument. Anybody who uses the term "right" to mean anything but loyalty to the King is guilty by your standard are they not?
Terms do shift meaning, and that change can be used as a political tactic. I don't think that condemns any such change or attempt by nature. And in fact I find that organically promoting memes is a lot more faithful of a technique than prescriptivism.
The word didn't change vis-a-vis monarchism so much as the underlying conditions did. Monarchism became functionally irrelevant.
It's like how "living animals" once included dodos, until dodos went extinct, and then it didn't. The definition of "living animal" didn't change, yet one morning dodos were no longer included.
I don't disagree that words can change, but change usually happens gradually and organically.
And pray tell, what is the mechanism for this gradual and organic change, if not intellectual discourse and its fashions?
Why do people use "gender" to mean something else than category? Why do people use "democracy" to mean something else than mob rule? Why do people use "well regulated" to mean something else than in good working order?
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If this is an accurate gloss of Moldbug's perspective, "Cthulhu always swims left" doesn't sound merely trite (according to the stipulative defintion of "left" that Moldbug's using) but actually tautological. If you believe that things used to be good, but now they're bad, it logically follows that they became bad in the interim. Like, duh.
If you use the common definition of "left", as most people implicitly do when using the phrase "Cthulhu always swims left", then the phrase is simply wrong for the reasons I described in the original post.
On the other hand if you accept MM's vague redefinition of "left", then "Cthulhu always swims left" is basically tautological as you say, but you're smuggling in the ideology with the silly definition.
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On a minor note, I find it somewhat irritating that Freddie dismisses all cultural politics as meaningless, and then, barely a breath later, says that he dislikes or opposes Clinton due to him taking right-wing positions on cultural issues.
It can't be the case that simultaneously gay marriage in the 2010s wasn't a real win for the left, and that DOMA in the 90s was a real win for the right. If gay marriage was meaningless in the 10s, then surely opposing gay marriage was meaningless in the 90s. You can't have it both ways. Either cultural politics matter, or they don't.
Yeah, I came in prepared to defend FdB because he's an actual Marxist and from that PoV he does actually have a point. But then he brings in culture and hahahahaha what. I suspect he may be dissembling to appeal to Democrats.
I think you mean "DOMA in the 90s was a real win for the right".
Oops, fixed. Thanks.
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I can very definitely tell that Freddy is an actual Marxist communist when he rights ‘America has two right wing parties’. Both parties are, by global standards, pretty centrist, progressive on social issues(one of them only moderately so), pro-business capitalist(one of them only lukewarmly), moderately nationalist, anti-isolationist, and liberal. The GOP is well to the left of major right wing parties like Likud and PiS on social issues; the DNC is well to the right of major left wing parties like die Linke on economics. By global standards, our parties are pretty compressed on a spectrum.
If you take the USA as a wealthier Latin American country, we ‘should’ have a have-not party which claims to be socialist but is actually more interested in corruption, and a party of the haves which is anti communist and tough on crime, and a populist far-right party which openly praises the idea of becoming a fascist dictatorship. If you take the US as an eccentric European country, we ‘should’ have a socialist party, a Green Party, two centrist right wing parties, and a far right party. In reality we have two centrist parties.
And while ‘Cthulhu always swims left’ is an oversimplification to the point of inaccuracy, ‘Cthulhu swims right’ is true only in stupid definitional games.
If you look at the US political spectrum through a lens of economics and authoritarianism, both parties do look pretty far right compared to most of Europe: European-level levels of tax and social benefits are well outside your Overton window, most pro-corporate policies like Citizens United and the DMCA have strong bipartisan support, both parties are in favour of prison terms and conditions that would make the eyes of Europeans water, and both parties are in favour of foreign interventions and maintaining the size of your military-industrial apparatus.
In Europe, support for US-style business-friendly policies exists but generally feels pretty artificial (backed by politicians recognized to be US plants and understood as the cost of doing business with the US), US levels of taxation and benefits are not backed by any serious party, US-style punishment is sometimes advocated for particular cases by tabloids but I have not seen it as a general platform, and support for militarization has only noticeably crept up since about 2014 (Ukraine) or perhaps 2016 (Trump's first term).
What do you mean by ‘authoritarianism’? From my POV as an American I am much freer than a typical European, because Europeans don’t have any of the bill of rights. I have protections from search and seizure, protections in my speech and religious expression(and my religion is genuinely unpopular among some segments of society, which are disproportionately elite segments), can own a gun(although I get the sense that in large chunks of Europe I could own a gun with significantly more paperwork- still, not having to pay for a gun club membership because that’s what France requires is a benefit), and have expansive rights to defend myself and my property against criminals(which Europe drastically limits). That’s before getting into parental rights, or other merely customary legal differences.
The UK has more people in legal trouble over speech than Russia; these are not merely theoretical differences.
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I watched non-authoritarian Europe beating elderly people bloody when they protested against strict lockdown policies. And then I watch as they imprison thousands for rather mundane political speech on social media platforms.
Is there a single party in all of Europe who supports free speech as a principle? Or gun rights? Or religious freedom? Or education freedom? What about one which didn't wholesale endorse vast totalitarianism over its population and lock them indoors for over a year in some places?
As far as I can tell, this sort of frame is impervious to any experience. I regularly see boomers in the US talk about their guns being important if authoritarianism ever really showed up and yet they were few and far between when US sheriffs were arresting priests for holding church services, an act which has been constitutionally protected conduct at the federal and state level for hundreds of years.
It's like a security blanket: at some point in the future, when "authoritarianism" happens, they'll be ready. Just like we still have Europeans who are ready to criticize the "authoritarianism" of the US while they cheered police beating the elderly for violating totalitarian public health mandates for years. Surely. they'll also oppose it when "authoritarianism" ever makes it to the shores of the old continent.
What does "authoritarianism" even mean if it doesn't include the years of ridiculous behavior during the covid hysteria? Europeans will cheer authoritarianism whenever they think they need it to accomplish their bureaucratic meddling in every part of life and it's mostly by chance it hasn't more often. Europeans don't have militaries because they're satropies of the United States and expect its military's protection. If they thought they needed it, we would see vans going street by street and kidnapping military aged males just like we see it in Ukraine. And I bet I would still see Europeans talking about "authoritarian" United States, as opposed to Europe.
You raise a good point that it's at least not so clear-cut regarding authoritarianism, because each side weighs and interprets the freedoms they have or don't so differently. Through my Euro eyes, US prison terms and the circumstance (responding more to @Hieronymus's point) that police turning up to perform a search in the US are likely to shoot me without asking questions if they are having a bad day and don't like how I move my hand weigh a lot more than the right to have guns (especially considering that the possibility of me having guns in the US is what creates the near-necessity of police coming in like an infantry platoon clearing an enemy building), or that the US has some more arcane rules that may restrict when and what police can search a wee bit more. Our absence of "education"/"religious freedom" reads as freedom from the ability of having one's life ruined by crazy parents. I will grant the superiority of the US free speech principle, but that flags me as an unusual European; most people would say that things such as a "right to be forgotten" and protections against libel and slander actually make the individual more free from the tyranny of the masses.
On COVID, neither side has made a good showing, but I actually get the sense that the intensity of the response in Europe was nontrivially fuelled by imported TDS.
It's really hard to communicate to Europeans just how manipulated their perspective on America really is because their news sources are typically worse, at least with respect to American news, than the worst of American media. I admit my experience is rather limited to a couple years in a few Western European counties, but their media is like if a person with MSNBC proclivities and bias only watched MSNBC for all their news and then crafted it for a European audience. Many of the worst things about American society is imported to Europe through this process. Perhaps that is unfair for the rest of Europe. My friends and their experience are also confined to those places. For e.g.,
Without looking it up, how many people do you think are shot by police in the US, a country of 330,000,000?
Without looking it up, how many times do you think police engage in "police coming in like an infantry platoon clearing an enemy building"?
For Europeans I've had this discussion with, they vastly overestimate this by multiple magnitudes. Americans also vastly overestimate these things, but not as badly. Both are the result of the journalist class who are simply awful, but Americans have real life experience which serves as an anchor to prevent believing more ridiculous things. Or at least that's how I've rationalized the difference.
I don't think there is much for either of us to convince the other w/re policing; my experience with European police is rather limited and my experience with American police is extensive. In general, I find American police to be more friendly and less aggressive, but that may be the perspective of a foreigner/native in both situations.
As you said, Europeans and Americans have very different perspectives. Americans would characterize this as state ownership of children and very authoritarian. Individuals being prohibited the ability to act on the world and forcing them to outsource it to the state is authoritarian. Addressing every societal ill from the perspective of the bureaucratic state is authoritarian, but it a common European perspective.
When Europeans call America authoritarian, it comes off as preposterous to us. Putting people in jail for mild social criticism is nuts and authoritarian and has nothing to do with "libel and slander." It's a fundamental antipathy for individuals' ability to speak their thoughts into the world. Americans react in disgust to state censorship, Europeans broadly agree with it. There is a long list of ways Europeans act far more authoritarian than Americans and expect obedience as part of their culture.
Beyond these differing perspectives, we can see which society is "authoritarian" based on how they respond and enable state policy. Covid gave us a frontrow seat:
Having lived in the worst places in the US and their covid hysteria at least part of the time, it was still never as bad as places like the UK, Spain, Germany, or Italy, and not as long either. Neither side made a good showing, but Europe was worse and more authoritarian in pretty much every aspect with the lone country of Sweden being significantly different and getting ridiculed for being right the entire time.
It's hard for me to swallow the "Europeans aren't authoritarian like the US argument, look at how their police behave" when we saw how Europe behaved when significant portions of their populations didn't obey. Authoritarian cults don't look authoritarian when all their members go along with their dictates, the authoritarianism only becomes evident when people don't.
Unfortunately looked this up already in the context of the argument earlier, I think it was 600.
I would guess significantly more - if we make it something well-defined like SWAT dispatches, perhaps on the order of 100k? Is that data collected anywhere or is it another thing where you could only find local data and not everywhere due to how fragmented the police force is?
I think there's a general theme that relative to Europeans, Americans are more concerned with impositions by the state but much less concerned with impositions by non-state actors, even though from the perspective of an average citizen the two might not be readily distinguishable as lofty authorities. As a caricature, we figure that an American would get very upset by the government banning him from soapboxing for some political position, but would see nothing wrong with it if a corporation bought up all roads and public squares in his city and instituted a ban against voicing the same position on company property (along with a host of other house rules). Moreover, if someone then proposed to force the company to surrender roads or parks to the public hand, or circumscribed its right to enforce rules of its choosing on it, the American might be up in arms about that being an intrusion upon the company's free speech.
Right, and putting people in jail for 25 years to life for all sorts of one-off transgressions comes off as nuts and authoritarian to us, as to million-dollar fines and jail terms for software piracy (...).
I'm unsure where Radley Balko got his data and I'm not sure where my copy is, but my memory of his book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, claims the figure in 2013 to be around 50,000 annually, although whether or not each of these raids where SWAT teams are used can be correctly characterized as "police coming in like an infantry platoon clearing an enemy building" is another question.
it turns out this has happened, or something akin to it, and the public was broadly against it and resulted in multiple SCOTUS decisions prohibiting that activity; the first examples were "company towns" (Marsh v. Alabama) and another more recent example was malls (Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robinson)
the state didn't propose to force the companies to surrender property to the public hand, they forced the companies to be restricted in similar ways to the state when it comes to first amendment protections; I am unsure about the public's response to the SCOTUS decisions
unless you're talking about "one-off transgressions" like premeditated or felony murder, this doesn't really happen
million dollar fines and jail terms for piracy, like when the Pirate Bay founders were imprisoned for a year and had to pay $1m fines? or the kino.to guy who got like a 4 year sentence? I agree the US gives stiffer prison terms and fines for piracy, but let's not go overboard here.
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Please don't attribute your views to all / most Europeans. There's nothing wrong with their prison system, and the last time I interacted with them, their police force was way friendlier and more professional than any I saw in Europe.
Huh, where are you from? My very first impressions of US police (when I came for the first time as a tourist) consisted of a border guard interrogating me for half an hour because he wasn't convinced I would not illegally enroll to study without authorisation on my one-week trip to visit a friend at MIT, and two NYC cops getting into a fighting posture when I asked them for directions before settling down and merely staring at me like I am insane, and finally barking a useless answer. I have never been to a place in Europe where you couldn't ask police for directions and get a helpful and detailed answer.
I'm sure there are exceptions to the view I described, but I stand by most. It also is to be expected that exceptions would be highly overrepresented on a right-leaning American politics forum.
I won't get specific, but I'm from Eastern Europe, and currently living in the west.
Ok, I didn't like the border guys either, but it's easy to not have a bad impression of their European counterparts when you're essentially out of their jurisdiction in the overwhelming majority of the continent.
New Jersey cops would make small talk, and I'd shoot the shit with them every once in a while. Once I wanted to go for a walk on the beach and it looked like they were blocking the entrance, it turned out they weren't it's just a spot they picked to stand around on patrol, and when I asked if I can cross they were almost apologetic. I was in NYC too, and might have interacted with cops there too, but I don't really remember.
Police in Europe tends to be cold and distant, and gives off a strong "don't question my authoritah" vibe. If you argue with them they'll fuck with you just to prove who's boss, though that may be a universal thing in any country. One time when I had a minor car accident and the other guy decided to call the cops, I was put through some bizarre shakedown at the hands of a sargent trying to impress 2 new trainees for absolutely no reason, since I freely admitted my culpability. Another time my car had an oil leak that I dutifully reported the moment it happened, and the cops decided to pay me a visit at 6AM on a weekend morning to interrogate me, trying to pin on me a completely different leak that happened a few streets away.
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So, you’ve had a grand total of two interactions with American police - at least one of which seems like you just getting unlucky with two local beat cops whom you may have caught off-guard or who may have been occupied by something else when you approached them - and you’ve used these two interactions to form, and double down on, a perception of American policing which even you seem to acknowledge diverges wildly from the available statistical data?
No, I never said those were the only two...? Those were just on my first visit to the US. I later came back to spend several years there, which involved a few more interactions of my own that were mostly not any better, and many stories from people I knew personally that were significantly worse.
Huh? Germany continues having <20 people killed annually by police. That's <1/30 the killings, at ~1/4 the population. I'm not going to try to dig up statistics to compare every single detailed scenario, because where comparable statistics are easy to find it clearly backs up my narrative - for just about any possible hostile/violent action by police, US police do it at a higher rate than European police. I'm completely sympathetic to explanations along the lines of this being inevitable/justified because the population being policed is much more dangerous and unruly, but this does not mean you have to deny the basic discrepancy of symptoms
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Do you genuinely believe this is an accurate description of reality? What percentage of interactions between police and the public in the United States do you believe result in the use of deadly force?
Others have compiled stats on the number of injuries and deadly shootings, but note that I was talking about searches, not all interactions. It seems that there are on the order of 2000 federal searches a year, but I can't find either data on how many of those resulted in discharge of a firearm or how many search warrants were issued to non-federal police, so I guess the only thing I can say is "up to 25% deadly and 100% attempted" for searches. My somewhat arbitrary guess would be that it's about 2% in reality for searches where the target individual is present.
Im having trouble deciphering what your claim is. Are you saying that 2% of federal searches result in a deadly shooting? Or are you saying that 25% of them do?
Also, why are “federal searches” - a vanishingly small percentage of the total interactions between law enforcement and the public - an issue that weighs seriously on your perception of law enforcement practices in the United States? The vast majority of policing in this country is done at the local level, and to a lesser extent at the state level. Federal law enforcement is a tiny segment of American policing.
It was an example. As I said in response to your other post, in every easily-delineated scenario where there is evidence that can be compared, US police look worse. To try to rebut this by dismissing each easily-delineated scenario as an irrelevant small sample seems like a god-of-the-gaps argument to me - "surely in some other domain that we just so don't happen to have good data on, US police are actually nicer and more professional than European police! What, they're also hostile and violent in this one? Guess they must be nicer and more professional in one of the many others!"
I said that I think that 2% do, but based on the data I could find the only thing that can be proved is that there is an upper bound of about 25% (about 600 total killings, of which an unknown percentage happened during federal searches, vs. ~2000 federal searches).
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I see this talking point a lot and it always irritates me. Britain has 200 H-bombs. France has about 200 H-bombs. The European half of NATO has about 1.5 million professional soldiers, several carrier squadrons, huge numbers of tanks, aircraft and submarines... They have BAE, Rheinmetall, Eurofighters. They have 450 million people! It does not matter whether they spend 2% of GDP or 3% or 1%, what matters is the actual balance of capabilities.
How does Russia threaten Europe? This isn't 1978. Russian conventional forces are outmatched and pure demography is massively against them. There's no way 140 million people conquer 450 million when tech and wealth leans vaguely towards the latter.
The only thing the Russians have that Europe does not is a much larger nuclear arsenal and large-scale munitions production. The notion that Europe is somehow leeching off the US makes zero sense. They already have broad conventional superiority. Even with higher munitions output Russia is not capable of rushing through to Warsaw, let alone Berlin and wouldn't take such risks anyway. Why would they get into a war with several nuclear powers?
The US is actually a major threat to Europe, causing retarded wars in the Middle East with damaging flow-on effects into Europe. Or their rather successful gambit to split Russia from Europe. No more cheap energy from Russia, get excited about expensive energy from America! Of course the Europeans bear much of the blame for passively sitting back and letting the US protect them from competitive energy prices and homogenous, high-trust society. Nevertheless, the US is ultimately at fault.
The US's real dependants are in the Pacific - Australia, Japan, South Korea. They actually face an industrially, demographically, militarily potent foe in China.
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On economics, I buy it. But authoritarianism is slipperier. On issues of speech, religious freedom, gun rights, or search and seizure, the U.S. is far from perfect but far better than most of Europe – certainly than the European countries most visible from this side of the pond: the U.K., France, and Germany.
'Authoritarianism' is equivocal. Sometimes it means a strong executive leader overruling the bureaucracy and consensus-making institutions to implement policy. (This sense usually comes from the blue tribe.) Other times it refers to a reduction in civil rights for private citizens. (This sense is used by everyone, but different sides disagree about which rights to complain about.)
A good example: 2020 Republicans decrying the 'authoritarianism' of government Covid policy, while 2020 Democrats were decrying the 'authoritarianism' of Trump trying to interfere with government agencies implementing Covid policy.
"Authoritarianism" isn't equivocal; the Democrats were just wrong.
Perhaps StoneToss demonstrates the difference a bit clearer.
A common meme in the western world is that a strong leader not bound by constitutional/bureaucratic restraints and low personal freedom go together. They share the same word: it is all 'authoritarianism'. Whereas it is clear to me that oppression of personal freedoms is a possible for every node within the Polybius cycle, and if anything democracy tends to more restrictions and a more ant-farm-like society.
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I think Freddy's argument here, and the cthulu swims left meme are both examples of extending the left/right political model way beyond its usefulness (to the extent that it is ever useful in the first place). Reducing all of politics to a single axis in modern times is already suspect, but the model only gets worse in the past. If we're only talking about social issues, maybe you can define "right" as adherence to traditional values and "left" as rebellion against those values, but when the values completely change multiple times over, that doesn't really mean anything. Today, traditionalist christians might be considered right wing, but in the Roman empire they were the weird commie leftists who wanted womens' rights and equality under god. But is that inherently more right wing or left wing than paganism? Is banning abortion right wing because it upholds the sanctity of life, or is it left wing because it's dysgenic? The "left" and "right" have flip-flopped on this even in the last 50 years, let alone centuries.
Right wingers in the seventies were not generally pro-abortion, and eugenics being associated with the right is itself Cthulhu swimming left. In point of fact views on eugenics in 1930 are more predictive of current-day views on abortion than views on abortion in 1930.
because cthulu swam past eugenics and now it's toward the right? Or are you saying that doing more eugenics is directionally leftward?
Maybe it's because swimming only left means you swim in a circle.
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FDB although he makes many good points, like about IQ and education, does not really have a consistent worldview. I have seen him make the argument that the Democrats going too far to the left like on defund the police, or education policy, or social justice, also has hurt them, so...The dems lost because they didn't have good candidates, having put all their eggs in the Biden basket. They need seething closer to Obama or Bill Clinton , which Kamala didn't fit the bill.
This shows the limitation of memes, as only approximations of reality. I would say American society has moved right in some ways, leftward in others. It's not that useful of a framework for understanding society even by meme standards, imho
It partly depends on personal perspective too. If you are left you might see Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr joining Trump as proof they shifted right, whereas if you are right leaning you might see it as Trump moving the party left. Who is correct?
Neither - it is a realignment on a pro/anti establishment axis instead of a left/right one.
MAGA is anti-establishment right, and now control the Republican Party. Corporate America and the shooty bits of the Deep State are pro-establishment right. The crowning heights of academia, the MSM, the non-shooty bits of the Deep State, and the Democratic Party are pro-establishment left. The anti-establishment left currently control no important centres of power, although they have burrowed into less-important parts of academia like English departments.
If you are on the anti-establishment left and your pet issue is something other than economic inequality or wokism (foreign policy for Gabbard, medical quackery for RFK Jr) then you are now closer to the anti-establishment right than the pro-establishment left. Something similar was going on with pro-Palestinian activists. (Particularly the ones who mean it, see the election results in Dearborn). On the other side of the fence, the pro-establishment right is mostly NeverTrump (even if they end up holding their noses and voting for tax cuts).
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Those aren't contradictory views, both those things can be true. They could have met in the middle.
Lol that is similar to how I described that merge to my ma, I said they were putting America before politics. I was adding another reason that framework isn't particularly useful - it depends on your perspective aligning with the speaker's.
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I hate it when anyone says this and it is a dead giveaway they are a completely dishonest extremist. You could equally accurately say we have two left-wing parties of varying extremity because neither party supports slavery.
Both parties are anti-monarchist, so by a literal definition they’re both liberal parties. Freddy is an actual Marxist repeating the actual Marxist claim that anybody who isn’t a socialist is a right winger.
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I think the Cthulhu meme only really works short term. He seems to be pretty cyclical over longer periods of time. In times and places where this are stable and prosperous, he goes culturally left and economically right. In bad times, he reverses course moving right culturally and left economically as people seek relief in traditional beliefs and habits while demanding economic relief from the wider society. Current trends only really apply to the relative quite of the 1990s to 2010s or so when outside of 9/11 really most of our society is pretty stable. There wasn’t a huge war like WW2, there wasn’t a huge Great Depression that lasted for years, it was pretty much a time when it became possible to allow greater social freedom because why not?
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Sorry to dismiss a high-effort argument with a one-liner, but: so "meaningless" that he'll fight to the death for (at least one of) them, and literally ban all discussion of them on his Substack because his audience refuses to agree with him.
My offer to these "the culture war is distraction" people is always the same: you get the economy, or whatever else you find "meaningful", I get total uncontested control over culture - deal?
I think the biggest problem with this proposal is that I don't think there are easy levers to just control culture. That, plus the fact that some cultures might not be able to support some kinds of economic systems. Like can a trad maximalist culture really support a globalist socialist economy, for example?
The biggest controllers of culture are education and the media. Both have been captured by blues for decades, and thus the average American is inundated with blue cultural messaging from the time they enter school, and the media is available to people 24 hours a day, every day. So the culture is constantly pushed in those directions: statism, atheism, pro-LGBTQ, DEI/woke. In other countries, you’ll find these same institutions pointing in other directions. In places like Iran, it pushes religion, which is why that news media seems so weird to us. We generally don’t see religion displayed as a prominent part of people’s lives, people making references to holy books, praying, etc. religion isn’t taught as true in public schools, at best you’ll find them having passages from different holy books in a literature class and taught as literature.
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The short answer to that is "you go take care of the economy, I'll worry about the culture". I think deBoer's economic ideas are pretty much a pipedream too, but I think it would be absurd for me to demand that as a part of this compromise he convinces me that he can implement his ideas.
The slightly longer answer is that a lot of the damage can be undone just by removing funding from people pushing the culture in it's current direction, and granting it to people who will move it away, and doing the same things with various forms of accreditation and licensing. I imagine that in deBoers socialist economy using carrots and stick will be even easier.
Yes. A fun fact that Westerners have little appreciation of: Eastern European communism was pretty trad as far as culture goes. A part of it was that they had to deal with a trad population after they took over, but another part of it was Stalin realizing the post-revolution cultural reforms are ripping society apart, and hitting CTRL+Z on them pretty hard.
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It's a fantasy scenario for sure, but Arjin's point is sound - hell I'd say he doesn't go far enough. They don't get the economy or something else, they can have everything else - the economy, the administration, the military, healthcare, the media, education - if someone else controls culture you are going to be swimming up a waterfall.
I mean, the the logistics of this fantasy scenario are hard to imagine. Is a genie just snapping their fingers here, or do we actually have to think about the logistics of how a society could sustainably keep Culture A with Economic System B, given some starting point close to contemporary American politics?
I'd be happy enough to use a genie, but it is an interesting thought experiment so I started considering how you'd go about it - and instantly realised we already have an example - The West. The US has controlled the culture of the West for the past century, particularly through television and music, and the rest of the west has been becoming more American as a result. That's why everywhere in the west outside of the US has a national media arm producing local content - without it their national myths and memes get replaced with those of the dominant culture (which is also why those media organs have channels or carve outs for their native populations).
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If we're entering this politically impossible situation where @ArjinFerman gets these powers, it's fairly easy. Does he want to reverse the sexual revolution, as a random example? Illegalize over-the-counter contraceptives and abortion clinics. Mandate >90% male:female ratio in colleges and technical schools. Remove mandatory maternity leave and allow discrimination against female hires. End no fault divorce. Lower welfare benefits for single people (Edit: Perhaps this falls under 'economy', so nix this.) Done and dusted.
The CRA is a fairly modest law that radically reshaped American culture over time. With a literal culture czar, you could steer the country at least that effectively.
But will the people accept that? When I say there's no easy levers, I'm thinking about how hard it would be to enforce some of these things in practice.
The US struggles to stop illegal drugs from coming over the border from Mexico. How would we stop oral arbortifacients and condoms from coming over the Southern border? How would we stop women from making intellectual salons for teaching college and technical topics - and stop employers from letting these qualified women work for them? How would we stop women from poisoning husbands they can't divorce?
I'm not saying it's absolutely impossible to be brutal and efficient here, but I'm not actually sure the state capacity to do all of this actually exists.
LOL. With the full power of the culture (and a not-insubstantial portion of law) pushing women into technical subjects, engineering and computer science remains skewed 4:1 male. Take that away, and you will be able to maintain 9:1 ratios with no problem at all.
I'm not talking about STEM. I'm talking about all of college and technical/trade schools.
If the people want to resist your lawful efforts to change the culture, how do you stop women and sympathetic men from creating university alternatives where women are trained in a field and then hired even without a degree? Like, how do you actually put the genie back in the bottle here?
How do you stop people from creating samizdat, and passing down trades within their familes and a dozen other things that people who remember the old regime will want to do?
Umm, how many of the women in non-STEM college majors are there to study and how many of them are taking a vacation for four years? It certainly seems like very high percentages of the latter.
Of course the real problem is that for non-underclass women, there is no alternative to a college degree. You don’t see female plumbers and cops and infantrymen and the most reliable route to being a housewife is… through college.
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The idea of society organizing bottom-up in such a manner, on a scale that is any kind of threat, is kind of dubious to start with. The way universities work and what they teach has lots of detractors too nowadays, they even have dedicated alternatives, but none of it adds up to anything.
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STEM education is difficult and people who are doing it are too busy to teach it; this also applies to trades, and they have other requirements anyway.
As the jobs become less technical, the advantage yielded by those who could train their children is correspondingly diminished.
Market forces. Because the credential spiral is mostly fake, and there's nothing of significance that separates a worker with an Arts degree from one that only graduated high school, this will impose a ceiling on the price of labor for those with a fake degree.
As far as "training in a field and then hired without a degree", this is another way to state that they're receiving the level of education that much more closely matches the demands of the job; this is better for the students, and it's better for the part of society that isn't employed in academia. It's a good thing that academia did not spend 50 years agitating for a destruction of wages for those without degrees or anything like that, or they could be in real trouble.
Trades are already captured by licensing boards and apprenticeship requirements. Some of what they teach is fake, but not to anywhere near the same degree as academia in general, and you get paid which offsets some of the cost.
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