This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
For years I've been seeing conservatives arguing that that Democrat line about "demographics is destiny" was more the product of wishful thinking than facts on the ground. I'm starting to feel that way myself. After every Presidential election cycle, centrist Democrats redouble their efforts in encouraging the DNC to do some earnest soul-searching and recognise the fact that non-white voters are a demographic (or rather, collection of extremely loosely affiliated demographics, each of which has its own interests, many of which are zero-sum) that must be actively appealed to just like any other demographic, and cannot be simply taken for granted under the increasingly tenuous assumption that "Republicans are racist so people of colour won't vote for them". Then the next Presidential election cycle starts and the DNC immediately resumes taking non-white voters for granted, then react with shock and horror when they lose even more of them than in the last election.
Trump making historic inroads among Latino and black voters in 2016 may have come as a legitimate surprise to the DNC in 2016. No one should have been surprised by it last month. In November 2024, any white Democrat rending their hair and asking "how could a Latinx person vote for Trump??? Don't they know how racist he is???" just comes off as pathetic, like an ostrich. How many times does Lucy have to pull the football away from Charlie Brown before he learns pattern recognition?
I'm honestly wondering if, within the next ten years, we'll see Democrats claiming that they never claimed anything as racially essentialist as "demographics is destiny" and the whole thing was just invented by conservatives as an antisemetic dog whistle.
I think Hanania had an article along these lines a few weeks ago: for a long time "demographics is destiny" was the consensus among Democrats and Republicans. This served as a convenient fig leaf for Republicans who want to appeal to anti-immigration voters without being accused of racism: "we don't hate non-white people, we just want to win elections, which is impossible if non-white voters can be assumed to vote Democrat" (as Democrats themselves openly believe, to the point of it being a major component of their electoral strategy). So the increasing recognition that non-white voters are up for grabs by either party is a bit of a double-edged sword for the Republicans. On the one hand, a new demographic is voting for them, yay! On the other hand, if they want to keep appealing to their white nationalist faction while still appearing respectable, they're going to have to come up with some new justification for being opposed to immigration other than racial animus or the still-unacceptable euphemism of "cultural homogeneity", and so far the replacement fig leaf of "immigrants commit more crimes" doesn't appear to be playing ball. I don't think there's any conflict between being a social and economic conservative while also believing that Diversity is our Strength™ (i.e. we will welcome people of any colour or creed to America, provided you share our values and are willing to work hard), but the impression I get is that is that there is a very large Republican faction who will accuse any Republican politician who isn't aggressively opposed to immigration of being a RINO regardless of their stances on other policy questions - a faction that no serious Republican politician yet feels comfortable marginalising or alienating.
Every anti-immigration Republican is already accused of racism
They don't
There are lots of them. The last ten years of Trump politics were run on them
Immigration is the most important issue
Of course, but such accusations are less likely to stick if the politician in question can defend their position on the grounds of shaping the electorate rather than more nebulous concerns about "cultural homogeneity" or similar.
"Immigrants commit more crimes" might work as a piece of demagoguery, but as I noted in the original comment, the facts don't bear it out, so the more Republicans push it, the more untethered from reality they'll seem.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My experience with these people IRL is that they’re ok with increases of legal immigration from Mexico and South America, but generally not elsewhere in the world, in exchange for cracking down on illegal immigration.
This echoes my own experience.
Again, one of those places where I think the stupidity of identity-politics is on full display is that i don't think a lot of the Blue and Grey tribe understand how much legal immigrants resent "queue jumpers"
They're all Hispanic aren't they?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
(While this is my third response to you in short order, I dont mean to pick on you)
If he had just repreated his old numbers, then Id agree. But he made gains again, and significantly bigger ones than last time. I think its pretty reasonable to expect at least diminishing returns.
I'm not sure if I understand the point you're making.
Hispanic Republican voteshare%:
2012 Hispanic: 27
2016 Hispanic: 28
2020 Hispanic: 32
2024 Hispanic: 46
Looking at the first three numbers, I would project the next one to be 32-36. Not 46. I think expecting people to predict that is unreasonable.
It would be unreasonable to expect anyone to predict a spike of that magnitude, yes.
It's not unreasonable to expect that the Republican share of the Hispanic vote would be broadly commensurate with recent historical trends. The impression I get is that there are a lot of Democrats (perhaps not senior DNC figures, but certainly pundits and ordinary voters) who still can't quite believe how popular Trump is among Hispanics, respond to all the evidence in support of this trend by sticking their fingers in their ears, take the Latin vote for granted, then get continually caught out when a larger and larger share of Hispanics vote Republican each campaign. Every four years, the same chorus of shock and horror: "how could you have voted for him?! Don't you realise he wants to sic ICE on you?!"
It was reasonable for certain Democrats to go into the 2024 presidential election anticipating that 68-64% of Hispanic voters would vote for them, then get blindsided by only 54% of them doing so. A jump of that size is hard to predict.
It was not reasonable for other Democrats to go into the 2024 presidential election expecting only a single-digit percentage of Hispanics to vote for Trump, then get blindsided when nearly half of them did. The idea that only a single-digit percentage of Hispanics would vote for Trump was wishful thinking, wholly unsupported by polling data or voting trends from recent elections. Anyone who believed this ought to have known better.
I guess Im not convinced they thought that. Like if you had that you could basically stop campaigning at all. Hillary at one point did seem to think she had won already, I dont think they did this time.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ruy Texiera, who has been mentioned here a few times, is one of the most eminent names back in the late 2000s and early 2010s that crowed about the emerging democratic majority that would render the republican party permanently on the backfoot. He wrote the book 'The Emerging Democratic Majority', crowing about the electorates changing demographics rendering the traditional republican base of angry old white guys a diminishing minority. Its not like he was the only one presuming as such, Lindsay Graham himself said that there weren't enough Angry White Guys for the republicans to rely on forever.
Yet, if anyone has followed Ruys work since about 2014 onwards, it would almost seem that Ruy is a hardcore conservative. While the argument tracks that the republicans may have moderated their rhetoric about migrants and social conservatism, the much more attributable fact is that the left went fucking crazy after Obamas 2012 victory, and thought that they had free license to go full progressive. Following Michael Browns shooting in 2014, the cultural left which was in the ascendancy in the USA went in the direction of intersectionality, merging disparate disparate outcomes into a semicohesive web that castigated all achievement as unfair exploitation by a legacy white male establishment. The leftward sprint was so fast (I blame Elevatorgate, frankly) that people who were actually succeeding on what they (mostly rightly) perceived to be their own merits started questioning the reality that was being presented by the left, and simply by questioning they were cast out as uncle toms. These unmoored agents were now receptive to the siren calls of normalcy. As Ruy keeps saying in his interviews (like in The Bulwark where the comments all call him a delusional ultraconservative), he didn't leave the left, the left left him. His language now has some cope that he never claimed the emerging democratic majority was inevitable and that he maintained that it required the democrats to continue representing the white working class fairly, and while I think this is a bit of an ass-covering exercise, it still somewhat tracks.
One of the most amusing aspects of media post-election 2024 cope is that the normie voters were tricked into believing a lie from a right wing media ecosystem that had been totally unknown and impenetrable to the left, and if only the democrats had just reached out even harder to spread their message to the unwashed masses they would have been converted to their point of view and have agreed that Trump was so manifestly unfit that there was no real choice but to vote for the democratic platform. Till now I have not actually seen any lefties consider that maybe the unwashed normie masses had actually listened to what the left had been saying nonstop since 2016, and that the message was rejected on its own merits. The left likes to pretend that the election started from July 2024 when Harris was appointed the knight to slay the dragon trump, ignoring that reality existed before 2024 and all the language spread nonstop by democrats and democrat activists was on public record for all to see. The greatest enemy Harris had in 2024 was not Donald Trump, it was Harris 2019.
I have been seeing this in online circles — by people who consider anyone who understands and knowingly rejects the democrat party message is a Fascist in need of reeducation:
Its the same as Islamic fundamentalism - apostates must be killed because to have read the quran and yet reject it is proof of the foundational incompatibility of the heretic with logical existence.
The difference of course is that I can unironically find at least five jihadis in my 1st order peer group who will take a few weeks break off their comfortable lives to go on a beheading spree throughout the holy land if airfare was covered and their legal immunity upon return was covered. Despite decades studying and working in the educated professional world I cannot think of a SINGLE progressive/leftist who would actually even pull the trigger themselves. The leftists want Someone Else to do the dirty work of executing their intellectual will. The jihadis at least bother to justify within their doctrine why the apostate must be killed. There is nothing in the leftist philosophies that mandate gulags, much less executions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How much of the GOP is actually white nationalist and how much of it is just illegal immigration radicalizing people? A lot of people didn't accept Roe or max abortion rights. Now that they get to vote on it again they almost certainly won't vote for the max pro-life position. But it's hard to tell how it'll shake out when Roe is a unifying enemy.
In my experience, almost none. In fact in my experience, the vast majority of white nationalists (or at least the most vocal ones) tend to vote Democrat either for accelerationist reasons or out of enimity towards the wider GOP coalition.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, it's an interesting question. My impression is that Republican opposition to immigration has been fairly constant for the last ~thirty years, but I could be wrong.
Speaking as a Republican living in the southwestern US, legal immigration and the requirements thereof are broadly seen as things reasonable people can disagree on.
It's illegal immigration and specifically the sort of immigration where some douche-canoe from NYC says "they're just doing the jobs real Americans wont" (tacitly admitting that they are trying to undermine the wages of people who are here legally) that is hated witn the fire of a thousand suns.
More options
Context Copy link
Opposition to illegal immigration has been a pretty consistent Republican talking point since Reagan’s amnesty, if not sooner. But Republicans’ opinions on legal immigration have been much more mixed. This chart only goes up to 2018, unfortunately, but it shows that around 30–40% of Republicans have supported current legal immigration levels for the past 20 years, and an additional 15–20% have thought it should have been increased. Even today, 71% of Trump supporters would like to see more highly-skilled immigrants allowed to come to this county legally.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is exactly the opposite of my experience of how the phrase is used. Consider the opening paragraph of this Time article:
To your next point:
Then how come a Democrat won the presidency in 1960?
Not OP but I imagine his argument would be that the policies of 1960's Democrats would have more in common with today's Republicans than today's Democrats.
Of course, but even in the sixties the Democrats were radically more economically and socially progressive than the Republicans. During the campaign, Republicans accused JFK of being a closeted socialist on the back of his healthcare policy proposals, and JFK appealed to black voters by publicly showing his support for Martin Luther King. If the argument is that "white Americans as a group can always be presumed to vote for the more socially and/or economically conservative of the two candidates", that invites the question of how JFK was elected in the first place, given the demographics of the 1960s.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link