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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   28530 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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Wokeness was a particular expression of the politics of the Coalition of the Ascendant logic.

I first remember encountering this logic from Michael Moore in his abysmal Dude Where's my Country? circa 2004:

Just for once, wouldn’t it be nice to win, especially considering how liberal most Americans are? It’s time to start thinking outside the tiny box that exists in our minds. For starters, let’s stop believing the president has to be a white guy. White guys are a shrinking minority in this country—making up just 38 percent of voters. Plus, as I’ve pointed out before, all the Democrats who’ve won the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt (with the exception of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide in 1964) have won by losing the white male vote. They won by getting an overwhelming number of white women and black and Hispanic men and women to vote for them.

If the Democrats would stop watering down their beliefs to appeal to all the dumb white guys out there, they’d win. Women of all colors are 53 percent of the electorate. Black and Hispanic men make up nearly 8 percent of the vote. That means that women and these minority men represent about 60 percent of the entire nation, an overwhelming majority and a powerful winning combination.

This was the core Democratic logic from the Obama era to today. The POC coalition concept, that everyone other than White Men naturally had similar interests. That White Men held such a large proportion of the pie that splitting up those spoils, once captured, among blacks/women/gays/jews?/hispanics would be so profitable as to mask any conflicts between those groups.

This logic mostly held through the second Obama term, and the wars of the first Trump term were about trying to preserve and expand it.

The Biden era saw the coalition fracture.

Israel did a lot of work. Biden's vast incompetence did a lot. The pursuit of ever more baroque goals did a lot.

But largely, the logic of the coalition just ran out, in that their ability to expand the power of all coalition members by seizing power from white men ran out. Choices started to need to be made, between blacks and asians, between gays and women, between immigrants and the native born underclass. This always existed at some level, the famous anecdote about Shulamith Firestone:

“They laughed at us,” Freeman recalled. “The chair said, ‘Move on, little girl. We have more important issues to talk about here than women’s problems.’ And then he reached out and literally patted Shulie on the head.” Soon afterward, Firestone and Freeman convened Westside, the first radical-feminist group in Chicago. Yet many of the women in Westside, and its successor, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, thought that the concerns of the male-dominated New Left should take priority. Naomi Weisstein, then a young neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, recalled, “The first thing the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union did was vote to give half our money to the Black Panthers.” Firestone, who had no interest in what she called “Ladies’ Auxiliaries of the Left,” united a faction that called itself, simply, the feminists.

But they've come to a head in recent years. Consider racial conflicts on campuses. When 90% of students at elite colleges were white, and the leaders all male, it made more sense for ascendant Asians and Blacks to try to expand their numbers and power from that reservoir of whites than it did to fight each other. Now that whites are down to 34% of Harvard students, and many of those are some form of Jewish or gay or other semi-protected status anyway, minorities have to fight each other for influence and power.

This is a great insight.

I'd just like to comment about incredibly WEIRD white people are.

Moore, a fat stupid white guy, thinks that the problem with the world is that there are too many fat, stupid white guys in charge.

Pretty much no other cultural group other than northern Europeans think like this. The pro-outgroup bias is insane.

Pretty much no other cultural group other than northern Europeans think like this. The pro-outgroup bias is insane.

This is such an odd meme online. The world is full of people who have a pro-outgroup bias, and probably always has been. In-group, out-group, far-group dynamics are not exclusive to Europeans. Asians who prefer whites, Africans and Arabs who prefer European institutions, so on and so forth. I recall seeing a nice little chart passed around from a study "Proving" that liberal whites are unique compared to other ethnic groups in America...without even trying to break down those ethnic groups by politics.

Moore is just another Charlie Manson type racist, who assumes that he is different from everyone else and special and will be spared in Helter Skelter. He can't defeat the Republicans he hates himself, but he can enlist the blacks and the women to do it for him, and at the end of the process the grateful blacks and women will turn to Moore for leadership.

The world is full of people who have a pro-outgroup bias, and probably always has been. In-group, out-group, far-group dynamics are not exclusive to Europeans. Asians who prefer whites, Africans and Arabs who prefer European institutions, so on and so forth.

I think most of these either aren't about the same subgroups of each category (some Africans prefer European institutions, others want to kill the Boer) or they're about the fargroup part, not about the ingroup part.

Christopher Hitchens on Michael Moore:

The laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious, and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all those qualities.

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