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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   35863 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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I would recommend making sure to distinguish the ends and the means more carefully than you had done in the OP. Your last two paragraphs lay it out quite nicely.

Sorry I haven't had time to respond to this thoroughly yet. However, I have rewritten my private copy of the original post, with your feedback in mind, and I think it is clearer in the new draft that my fight is not with progressivism/liberalism/leftism (though I don't want to heavily edit the original draft on the Motte, because that would make it less clear what people are responding to in some cases). Here are the relevant excerpts from the latest draft:

  • America, and with it all of Western civilization, is now embroiled in a culture war. This war is often cast as a struggle of left vs. right. Indeed, corporate media pundits male their living peddling the left vs. right drama in the style of a pro-wrestling show. But the fact is that, in a sane world, conservatives and progressives are not enemies. They are people of different temperaments, who tend to have different blind spots, and therefore tend to make different sorts of mistakes -- and who need each other's input to see into those blind spots and to temper those mistakes. Of course conservatives and progressives often hold different opinions about how to achieve their common objectives, but that is not what makes people enemies. My wife and I often hold different opinions about how to achieve our common objectives, but that certainly doesn't make us enemies. At the end of the day it makes us a better team, when we can put our egos aside and work together.
  • But I do not think of wokeness as "the left". Wokeness is not progressivism -- or at least any sane form of progressivism -- and it certainly is not a movement for civil rights. Wokeness is to the civil rights movement what communism is to liberalism, and what the inquisition was to Christianity: it is a warlike tyranny, masking itself as a civil rights movement -- which has infected the progressive parties of the West, and is in transforming them into something unrecognizable to their well-meaning forebears.
  • In the long run, the real culture war is not against the left or the right, but against fundamentalism -- aka radicalism, aka extremism, aka supremacist movements -- of all forms. Basically, a fundamentalists are those demonizes their ideological opposition for personal or political gain. The fact is, tempting as it is to feel otherwise, there is some good and some bad on both sides of every argument and every conflict. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart. But fundamentalists are those who have rejected Solzhenitsyn's maxim, and, in their minds, redrawn the line between good and evil to lie between their people and certain other people.
  • Whether it wears the mask of the political left, the political right, or fundamentalist religion, fundamentalism has certain distinguishing hallmarks: the fangs that peek out from under its sheep's clothing. First, because fundamentalists vest ultimate moral authority in people (their people) rather than principles, they tend to abandon the precepts of the ideology they claim to uphold. So, if you watch a fundamentalist movement closely, you will notice that the things they do often predictably lead to the opposite of what they say they want (know them by their fruits). Second, fundamentalists feel entitled to suppress the speech of their ideological adversaries, as well as to forcibly control their behavior, seize their property, and target them for oppression of any sort they can get away with -- not as punishment for particular crimes they have committed as individuals, not even exactly because they are bad people, but because they are the wrong kind of people. The wrong kind of people could be Jews, heretics, the "bourgeoisie", or even straight white men -- whomever the regime finds it expedient to portray as a historical class enemy, and blame for all the world's ills.
  • Finally, a resurgence of wokeism is not the only ideological shift that we have to fear. While wokeism is the most visible threat today, in the long run we are also in danger of a pendulum-swing toward totalitarianism of a right-wing variety. Recall that in depression-era Germany, Nazism grew in just 20 years (approximately 1915 to 1935) from an obscure fringe movement to national dominance -- largely as a backlash against the very real and radical leftist threats of communist revolution and libertine excess. Such a quick swing from one form of extremism to the other may seem puzzling to those who view the culture war in terms of left and right, but it makes sense if we consider that fundamentalist regimes of the left and right are essentially more alike than different, and both grow in the same soil of moral decay.
  • Even if my theory of how and why is all wrong, the fact is that quick swings from one form of extremism to another taken place before, and not just in Germany. Russia was a Tsarist autocracy in 1900, and by 1920 it was a Communist police state. France had a populist left wing revolution in 1789, and then welcomed Napoleon in as a military dictator in 1804. It is true that woke leftists have a habit of gratuitously labeling people who disagree with them as white supremacists, Fascists, and Nazis -- but is also true that there exist actual white supremacist, Fascists, and Nazis, who love to see that name calling go on, because the fog of crying wolf gives them a smoke screen behind which to operate and gather power. "It can't happen here" are the famous last words of many a nation through history.

Below is a link to the updated draft in my Google docs. If you have time to look it over, I would welcome further comments.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_d0pip_lYB5utNiyHA3mJfmQWo8isSUzBECjyf1FyxU/edit?usp=sharing

NR

Ah, this is an unexpected and welcome surprise! I will try to review this over the week-end. Thanks for letting me know.

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