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 -
In a similar vein:
UK voters: we want less immigration.
Boris Johnson: you want less Eastern Europeans? Heard you loud and clear! A million non-EU immigrants a year coming right up!
American conservatives: we're sick of the wokeness in universities.
Politicians: we will clear out protesters against Israel's atrocities immediately.
Most American conservatives like Israel. Certainly conservatives like Israel more than leftists do. This is a wish done as requested, not a wish twisted.
There's a huge age confounder afaik. Boomers do, because they have been propagandized for decades.
No? Because openly agitating against whites, males, conservatives is still acceptable? At best it's less perverse than the Boris Johnson case.
The people agitating against Israel and the people agitating against white males and red tribers(campus activists don’t seem to care very much about the actual beliefs of these people) are, in a lot of cases, quite literally the same people. They got the hammer dropped on them for one over the other, sure, but it did manage to bring quite a number of university admins more in line with the government’s demands that they stop giving in to grievance crap- in my own state UT has dialed back the grievance crap in response to state police wrecking Israel protesters’ shit to an extent that A&M(no anti-israel protests of note) is now the worst offender on grievance issues, because they didn’t offer that particular weapon to the state.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Both Vote Leave (Cummings, with Johnson as figurehead) and Leave.EU (Farage) made blaming the EU for specifically Muslim immigration a crucial part of their message. Cummings continues to insist (plausibly, given how close things were) that the Brexit referendum could not have been won without the "Turkey is joining the EU and then millions of Turks will come to the UK" lie. Cummings was also quite frank (on his blog during the period where he was out of UK politics) that "Get rid of the Eastern Europeans", while popular with core Brexit supporters, would have been a losing message with swing voters.
The debate between "near-zero immigration" and "continued mass migration but managed competently in the interests of the existing population" (at least in the UK, described as a "Canadian or Australian-style points system") is an intra-right one, not a battle for the median voter. From the point of view of the median voter, the immigration issue is closer to "nobody is illegal open borders extremists should be kicked out of the Overton window yesterday".
Can you clarify? If ever a sentence needed punctuation...
"nobody is illegal, open borders, extremists should be kicked out"
or
"nobody-is-illegal-open-borders extremists should be kicked out"
AFAIK the current level of immigration is very unpopular with the median voter, and it regularly comes high in people's concerns, but in that irritating British way they don't like politicians saying anything about it or doing anything about it, they just want the problem to go away. Which frankly we could do by issuing fewer visas.
What I mean is that the noisy left sound like they support open borders, and that it sure looks to the average man-in-the-street (certainly in the UK, the US, and most of Western Europe, though not as far as I can see in Australia, or Canada before Trudeau fucked things up) as though the current immigration policy is de facto open borders through deliberately ineffective enforcement.
The median voter does not support open borders, either de facto or de jure, and so the immigration debate when both sides are talking to the median voter is about trying to credibly claim not to support the status quo. The actual substance of a sane immigration policy is less relevant. Telling people that you want to kick out their immigrant friends/colleagues generally goes down like a lead balloon with people who are close to the median voter on the left/right axis.
I don't think the median voter understands immigration numbers. If you focus-group the question of which legal immigrants we should kick out, the answer you get in the UK is basically "violent Muslims" and not much else. Dominic Cummings says that moving to an Australian/Canadian points system (which would not mean a large drop in overall numbers) is hugely popular in the UK. There are definitely people who don't like using European immigrants for seasonal agricultural labour, but they are closer to the typical Tory/Reform switcher than to the median voter. (Before mass immigration, Ireland was poor enough that the Irish did a lot of migrant work in the UK, and they don't really count as foreign.)
More options
Context Copy link
I'm unclear about this last sentence. Are you suggesting that the political class could do something about it, but the public doesn't want them to?
Because as you say, the politicians could easily reduce immigration by issuing fewer visas, but there seems to be a post-Blair consense that more immigration = more economic growth (a lie that was put to bed by the Boriswave, or indeed the entire post-2008 economic stagnation).
I am suggesting that a big chunk of the public (20%? 30%?) wants less immigration AND will react negatively to any politician who says that immigration should be lower, or to newspaper headlines showing active attempts to dissuade immigration. They want immigration to go down quietly and out of sight, whilst retaining the moral high-ground by never supporting anyone who comes across as anti-immigration.
There is a decent chunk of hardcore lower-immigration voters who don't care, but they don't form a voting majority without the high-ground chunk. And the pro-immigration groups can therefore force anti-immigration politicians to back down by putting them into a position where they either have to abandon attempts to reduce immigration or defend them in public.
In a UK context, I haven't seen this argument in the wild since 2014 or so. I don't remember it featuring in Remainer discourse - they focused on the loss of UK opportunities to work abroad and avoided the topic of incoming immigration because it was an obvious vote loser. And as you say, seeing salaries plummet during the Boriswave and soar during Covid quarantine made it really impossible to defend.
It was pretty much what the Boris/Sunak governments believed privately, if not publicly. Sunak himself thought that if illegal immigration was under control, then the public didn't care what happened to legal migration. The assumption was that a massive increase in legal migration would supercharge tax revenues, reduce inflation (by suppressing wage growth) and give the Tories the best chance at winning the next election.
What they didn't realise is that non-European workers aren't nearly as productive as European workers unless they are heavily selected, which they weren't. Dependents are also unproductive. It was a completely unforced error.
What I found illuminating about this was that it really showed that even center-right to right-wing politicians mostly don't believe there are any actual group-level differences in ability to contribute productively in a highly developed economy. I think on some level I had assumed they recognised it but didn't acknowledge it publicly (for obvious reasons) but no, it seems they really did think that people from vastly different populations were all interchangable.
More options
Context Copy link
The actual story is slightly more complex than that. The dumb rules the Tories passed mean that the OBR has a lot of implicit power, and the treasury’s “projections” showed that immigration was necessary for GDP / tax revenue growth sufficient for planned borrowing not to freak out markets. That was coupled with the fact that 80%+ of Tory MPs, even on the socially conservative Rees Moggian wing of the party, didn’t care at all about immigration. That left Patel and Braverman relatively isolated. Boris himself didn’t care about immigration, and Sunak doesn’t really care about anything, but they alone aren’t responsible more than the party at large.
Yes I was considering talking about the OBR rules, with their explicit assumptions that all immigrants are going to be as productive as natives and the fact that they don't take long term tax and spending into account. All in all a profound failure of the political class, especially since the Boris-wave will all have been granted indefinite leave to remain before the end of the Starmer government. Permanently impoverishing the country for...nothing.
Indeed. But one can hardly be surprised with merely another decade of terrible decision making after almost 100 years of it, punctuated by only the occasional few years of sanity before it goes to shit again.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's true. I read them as being more concerned with avoiding potential economic catastrophe by cutting off the flow than actively believing that they could supercharge the economy by increasing it. The Singapore-on-Thames people were more willing to propose immigration up == economy up, but even then they usually talked about skilled migrants. Plus the internalised cringe that kicks in whenever a well-educated Brit tries to publicly or privately debate whether immigration is a good idea.
IMO this combination of cringe + PR + risk avoidance would explain why they continued the policy for so long and didn't implement selection or block dependents. But you may well be right.
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
Turkey being accepted into the EU seemed like a real possibility before Erdogan went all strongman, so was it really a lie at the time of Brexit?
No, it wasn't. There was no way in 2016 that someone could credibly claim that Turkey had zero percent chance of EU admission within, say, the next 15 years.
I'll go further.
Brexit only "failed" because post-Brexit politicians in Britain made all the same mistakes as their EU counterparts : mass immigration, heavy-handed regulation, anti-speech tyranny, etc...
Brexit was a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the revival of the British nation.
Despite everything, the UK is better off due to Brexit because it makes reform possible. Things can sometimes pivot quickly, and maybe within 5 years the reform party can take power and lead the country to a better path. But it would be a lot tougher with the EU barring the way.
Almost no reform was genuinely blocked by EU membership. Even stuff like mandatory ECHR membership doesn’t matter, because other member states routinely ignore rulings with impunity. The UK would never have been serious punished by the EU executive because there are always at least 2-4 other countries angry at Brussels for whatever reason. It was completely pointless and achieved nothing other than hugely accelerating mass immigration from the third world for no reason.
True, politicians could have worked around the EU if they wanted to, but they didn’t want to. Thus the performative shock when anyone suggests ignoring the EHRC.
Leaving the EU was necessary not because it gave politicians more power, but because it removed their biggest excuse for not using the power that they had.
(That, and avoiding Ever Closer Union. The EU as it was in 2016 was a moving target, explicitly focused on making it ever harder to leave. It felt very much like a now-or-never moment.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This was, and is, basically my attitude. The government drastically underperformed my expectations but even so, it’s GOT to be a good thing that they can no longer hide behind “the EU says we can’t do that”.
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