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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   9747 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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But liberals, for the most part, don't even seem to know of the existence of these people. Most of them seem to think there are no enemies to the left of them, or if there are any, it's just a handful of crazy college kids. The largest criticism I've seen is "nice going you berniebros, you got Trump elected", but nothing besides. It's a far cry from how the right wing tends to exist in this country, where they are all very cripplingly aware that there are enemies to the right of them that must be disavowed when discovered.

Is this perception not an artifact of awkwardly projecting onto a 1D left-right axis? To the Western normie, "more left" now means "more LGBTQI+ and environmentalism" - if pushed on it they might actually contend that tankies and Bernie bros can very well be enemy because they are actually to their right. This in fact tracks with some local instances of discourse I have seen - there's often a sense of betrayal when casual SJWs learn for the first time what old-school commies actually believe, and how even though they were sold as the legendary leftiest of them all the positions of theirs that the normie cares about actually reek of "fascism" and "right-wing disinformation".

Yes, I suppose it could be due to that kind of motivated reasoned mental mapping of where "left" and "right" are. You see this with the right wing in the exact same way: some righties say that actually the Nazi Party was socialist, see, it's in the name, Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party! To me, it reads as a cope (our side is just, and those other guys that got it wrong weren't actually our guys), but even if it was true, it is just proving horseshoe theory correct.

Well, the mistake is in thinking that "left" and "right" as used in practice represent any object-level political positions at all. The true extensional definition, as I understand it, is that "left" means that you imagine yourself as a rebel fighting against an oppressive system, and "right" means that you fancy yourself holding the line against chaos and decay. These are constraints on form, not on content, and even the form is merely a constraint on mythology that can survive a lot of friction with reality (so Trump's unpredictable bulldozing of norms and institutions still can be perceived as "right", and the SJWs' reliance on the same and treatment of their opposition as a wild element that needs to be dealt with by managerial techniques is "left"). However, the Left can never rest easy without believing in the existence of a greater, more powerful and more organised enemy they are fighting as underdogs against, whether it is the Patriarchy, Trumpism or international capitalism; and the Right needs to believe that its enemies are less structured, more unstable, and ultimately incompetent.

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