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 -
I think the critics from the right are at least partially correct that Donald Trump wasn't "supposed" to win, that after eight years of Obama and nearly unmitigated cultural Ws many on the left had convinced themselves that the pendulum would not swing back, that they would never have to live through eight years of George W. Bush again, and then...
There's obviously a danger that the pendulum will swing back on the righties, but if Elon keeps going like this for four years it will take more than four years to rebuild the absolutely gutted institutions. And it's quite possible (looking at Trump's favorability ratings, the meh Democratic slate, and the popularity of downsizing measures) that the GOP will get another four years or more.
Which is why I think people on the left and the right should be careful about memeing "Brazilification" into being. Maybe instead lefties should take this opportunity to consider the many benefits of federalism that righties have been screaming about for literal centuries and maybe righties should let them beat a graceful retreat back to California instead of fighting to the death over the scepter of federal power that was never meant to be.
I'm not exactly pro-abortion but trans-border abortion bounty laws are sort of proof for why that won't work out. That, and the fact that states can't tax nonresidents to prevent people from taking advantage of their services but living in a lower-tax jurisdiction. (America as a whole can tax nonresidents, and that's a good thing-- citizenship has privileges and duties.)
That being said, as a thought experiment, I do actually wonder how a truly federalized america would actually work out. I imagine the federal government would tax states by their land value to fund nationally-relevant institutions like the military, NASA, and NOAA, but leave control of welfare and commerce to the states. Probably there would be pretty complicated internal politics as states take competition-over-industry to the next level, with the larger states involved in dirigiste intervention to make sure the businesses providing services are headquartered within them. California could tariff texan companies as a retaliation for Ted Cruz existing, for example, while floridian anti-trust law could force google to operate a local subsidiary with partial state ownership and knowledge transfer.
Mmm yes this reminds me of fugitive slave laws in some ways.
Arguably this is a feature. But states can tax nonresidents. For instance, if you aren't a resident of a state, but you keep a car there, you are supposed to register the car in that state.
Well part of the point of the OG Constitution was specifically to prevent this by gently removing commerce from the hands of the states, while letting them retain power over most local regulatory and criminal law. Nowadays the federal government has a lot of say about that!
Let's be real here: the vast majority of these laws are toothless. I guess at least in theory states could mandate the tracking and taxing of out-of-staters at all times, but that doesn't remove the concern of sick people demanding residency so they can access services... unless, I guess, we make state residency requirements as onerous as federal nationalization requirements. I can kind of see how that system would work-- after all, I'm in favor of open national borders so people can come to live and work here without restriction, but see the utility behind withholding, e.g. SS, medicare, medicaid, etc. until after the ~10 year naturalization process. (Birthright citizenship should stay, but that's because babies are power. If you have your kid in on american soil they belong to uncle sam now.)
You have to remember that the "OG" wasn't the constitution, it was the articles of confederation. The constitution was a reaction to the articles being too weak. To the extent that the federal government is too strong, the constitution is to blame, because it was developed with the specific purpose of forcing the states to cooperate. Maybe the supreme court could have interpreted specific clauses differently, but in the end, it wouldn't have mattered-- the constitution can be amended, or worked around. Neither of those things are trivial, but they're bound to happen when the structural incentives are strong enough. Just look at the department of education, for example. Countries that require and encourage a high level of trans-regional political-economic-cultural unity are inevitably bound to develop some sort of centralized control apparatus for education. The fact that "regulating education" isn't one of the enumerated powers doesn't matter, because it's not strictly illegal for congress to fund educational institutions, and large carrots are isomorphic to sticks.
The only way to make america permanently less unitary would be to give states back the instruments of economic belligerence-- border controls, tarriffs, their own coinage, etcetera. Not that I think that's a good idea, of course. (Ref: constant EU dysfunction.)
I mean - it's not really practical to bar out-of-staters from enjoying your parks and highways, I agree. If you want out of staters not to access your schools or disability benefits you can simply require a state-issued ID or other proof of residency. I think this is probably typical, actually, although I haven't tried to access anything along those lines for a while and therefore can't speak to it.
I mean I do think they could have decided what constituted interstate commerce in a...more restrained fashion, yes.
I think there are other, less forceful ways to do it! America is permanently(?) less unitary because the Obama administration decided not to enforce federal drug law, and by the way that the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs, for instance. You could likely continue to make America less unitary by removing direct election of Senators, by (to take your example, and something that plausibly may happen soon) trimming the Department of Education into a machine for distributing block-grant funding and administering student loans, by shredding federal firearms regulations, etc.
Now, you might object that these changes can be rolled back - and fair - but that's also true (as you point out) of giving states back the instruments of economic belligerence. I'm not sure that making America less unitary is by itself a laudable goal, though - but what I do think is laudable is ensuring that the states can function as "laboratories of democracy." This requires the federal government to do some things (protect them from invasion), permits the federal government to do others (highways I guess) and I think should discourage the federal government from doing others (e.g. writing a federal housing code).
I think either I misspoke, or you misinterpreted what I wrote. If the government gave the states back their commerce power that would permanently increase federalization because it would dramatically change the incentives available to the states and their citizens. But short of that, not much would change. I think across the multiverse that most versions of america would convergently evolve something like the department of education, even if it had a slightly different role or function in response to the initial conditions of its creation.
Now, there is a caveat to all this. Though many aspects of the federal bureacracy serve a real purpose, that doesn't mean that they're destined to grow indefinitely. For that reason, I suspect that trump will manage to-- in the medium term-- cut the DOE back. In fact, I think the very existence of trump is proof that there's a sort of logistic growth curve for federal agencies. Agencies start small, grow rapidly as they become popular for solving the lowest-hanging problems, then exceed their carrying capacity and become bloated and therefore unpopular and subject to cuts. And we're obviously in an "exceeded the carrying capacity" era, vis-a-vis deficit spending.
But in the longest term, I think the DOE is more-or-less guaranteed to bounce back. The state apparatus is something darwinistically selected for the ability to increase its own carrying capacity. If we were at the knife-point of optimization where no additional changes could be made to the government to increase its absolute ability to generate revenue then it would be permanently doomed, but we're far from fully-optimized in terms for taxation. Even ignoring the possibility for technological economic growth, we're quite far from the bureaucratic state-of-the-art. Switching to the land value taxe, for example, would permanently move the laffer curve to the right-- governments could extract a higher total share of taxes for any given level of free-market economic performance.
Meanwhile, the "federal housing code" thing you mention would be, I think, destined to fail for essentially the same reason the current "federal drug code" is failing. That being, that housing-- and drugs-- are locally and culturally specific in a way that doesn't benefit from the federal government trying to enforce nationwide uniformity.
Putting that all together:
Removing direct election of Senators would plausibly alter the power calculus, but trimming the DOE is either structurally predetermined or guaranteed to fail.
Or people wouldn't like it and would return the commerce power to the feds, just like they did last time – that's what I meant.
This is also true of education! Which, to sort of play in to your point – it is possible that the path that worked in the past, or that we took in the past, was not guaranteed to be the best path forward, or the best path now. Even if, as your suggest, certain outcomes in the past were predetermined, that does not necessarily imply the same thing in the future. If Team Trump transforms the Department of Education into a block grant funding machine, it's possible that will work considerably better than the prior department and nobody will want to change it back.
I am not convinced history is quite this inflexible.
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
More options
Context Copy link
Obama staffers read and evangelized The Emerging Democratic Majority. A book fantasizing that changing demographics would make future national Republican electoral wins impossible. They thought they were approaching an era of total victory. At least in the sense of congressional majorities and winning every presidential election and then those presidents appointing federal judges. Which is a clear path to total federal control.
But it just didn't work. Trump won Hispanic men 3 months ago ago. The more Hispanics are eligible to vote, the more they vote like white people. I see a future in which a significant minority of Americans are Hispanic, and when they fill out government forms they check the "Hispanic (and white)" box, then vote accordingly. And as of 8 years ago, 1/3 of American Hispanics married non-Hispanics. They are assimilating into American white culture in a rather literal sense. Barely behind American Asians in interracial marriage rates.
Yes, I think this is correct. From what I can see, Hispanics often aspire to become American, and that means owning a small business, getting married, sending kids to school, having enough money to have a nice house...all the things that make you a quintessential GOP voter.
I'm reminded often of the fact one of the first, if not THE first, official Presidential campaign ads in Spanish was from the Bush 2000 campaign. The fact that hispanic voters are by every metric natural GOP voters (religious, family-oriented, anti-socialist, pro-immigration control) yet continued to vote Democrat was one of the great political headscratchers of the 00s-10s. It's been surprisingly vindicating to watch that vote trend in the way I long believed it "should" trend.
Hispanics aren't that religious(less so than blacks) or socially conservative(again, less so than blacks, muslims, or republicans). Notably up until recently church attending white Catholics were far more likely to vote D than church attending white protestants, too, and we can probably expect that to generalize.
Hispanics are normies with some quirks. When the democrats are wedded to insane ideas about gender and an anti-growth mindset, that makes them natural republicans, but in 2010 democrats were not, so hispanics voted mostly D because they're poorer than average. Assimilation(and red tribe culture is much easier for poor second gen immigrants to grok- football might not be their sport but they understand the concept of sports pretty easily, country music might not be their genre but it's closer than rap, upward mobility as a good thing even if it isn't huge status boost, suburban lifestyles are popular with anyone who has access to them, etc), the move of church attending Catholics towards the republicans(driven by social issues polarization changing from 'one party is mostly liberal and one party is mostly conservative, with considerable exceptions' to 'one party wants to make social conservatism illegal or at least officially frowned upon and one party wants to enshrine protections for social conservatism'), and the recent insanity of the democrats are the main factors. Add in racial/ethnic tensions between blacks and hispanics(seriously, the two groups do not like each other) that don't exist between hispanics and whites, and upwards mobility which makes the GOP more appealing, and you've got a formula for hispanics moving towards the 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