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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   2711 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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New long article from N.S. Lyons in which he argues that Trump represents the end of the "Long Twentieth Century". Basically, his argument is that societies are experiencing a profound shift away from the "open society model" that was established after World War II. Trump marks the end of an era defined by an emphasis on diversity and inclusion, which were central to fostering progress in post-World War II societies.

I think we are in a civilizational crisis. And the crisis is the seeds of the twentieth century and the hubris it represents coming home to roost. We’ve convinced ourselves that we are the exceptions to civilizational laws, that we can afford to ignore reality in all kinds of ways that only work when we’re protected by the natural fortresses created by oceans, seas and mountains, and guarded by military forces with huge technological advantages. When we were the only ones with a strong manufacturing and innovation. That was probably true until the end of the 1990s.

Because of those advantages, we tried to get away with all sorts of things that turn out to be really bad ideas, and lead to really bad outcomes. We no longer push for achievement. In the turn of the last century we absolutely celebrated great achievements. We celebrated big business doing great things, and people who discovered important things. We also pushed our citizens to production and industry and held education out as aspirational. We were forthright about teaching our own culture and heritage, and unabashedly claimed Christianity as the Western religion. We insisted on public and private morality and promoted heterosexual monogamous marriages that formed strong families and raised healthy children. We didn’t mollycoddle those who refused to do any work, if you didn’t work, you wouldn’t expect to live on food stamps and in government housing.

I think it gives far too much credit to DEI and "political correctness" as examples of an "open society" and "individual liberation". They may well be outgrowths of such a movement for that, but they are cancerous outgrowths. Their tools and methods -- cancellation, punishment of speech, discrimination against individuals for being members of the oppressor classes -- are diametrically opposed to those goals. It may indeed be true, as many on the right say, that classical liberalism inevitably leads to that, but even if so, that means classical liberalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, not that those things are fulfillment of its goals.

that means classical liberalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, not that those things are fulfillment of its goals.

How much of a difference is there? If your goals are inconsistent, then by principle of explosion, anything might be your goal. There is something like "The vibe I got from the initial description, you know what I mean" - but is that something "real"?

This piece has some interesting and well-written and well thought out passages, but I can't help thinking the conclusion is just too extreme. Trump and his political equals or coalition members obviously represent reactionary push backs against a lot of the left-wing political and social overreach, but claiming that it's an end of the open society, liberal personal focus, global interconnectedness, forbidding to forbid, when that Trump coalition embodies a lot of them just to a slightly lesser degree than the most progressive 'liberal' forces in society reminds me of how any curtailing of Christian social pre-eminence is met with cries that they're banning religion in society, when opponents on the other side would claim that they're just slightly removing some of their domination.

Obviously it's possible that this only began 5-10 years ago and the author is exactly right, and that Trump not embodying every single idea of where we're ending up doesn't prove we aren't in that direction - and credit to the author for trying to write some history in the middle of it happening (a difficult thing to get correctly) but I remain skeptical for the above reasons.

Yeah, the track record of these types of works is bad. Prediction is hard, and authors who would write grand explanations of human history are almost always recency biased. Relevant examples include "The End of History" and "The Population Bomb" but you could pick pretty much any book in this category and it's the same.

That's not that these authors are uniquely wrong, only they don't have any explanatory power. They reflect the biases and thoughts of our current time, and will inevitably look silly in 10 or 20 years.

Great piece. I especially liked this section:

Mary Harrington recently observed that the Trumpian revolution seems as much archetypal as political, noting that the generally “exultant male response to recent work by Elon Musk and his ‘warband’ of young tech-bros” in dismantling the entrenched bureaucracy is a reflection of what can be “understood archetypally as [their] doing battle against a vast, miasmic foe whose aim is the destruction of masculine heroism as such.” This masculine-inflected spirit of thumotic vitalism was suppressed throughout the Long Twentieth Century, but now it’s back. And it wasn’t, she notes, “as though a proceduralist, managerial civilization affords no scope for horrors of its own.” Thus now “we’re watching in real time as figures such as the hero, the king, the warrior, and the pirate; or indeed various types of antihero, all make their return to the public sphere.”

I very much agree that most of the energy Trump and his supporters thrive on is archetypal, or "vibes" as is it less formally called. Generally just the idea that there is a band of courageous heroes fighting stagnation that makes it seem as if nothing is possible, that heroism is dead, and that everything in our lives is managed. I am very much a part of this energetic movement even if I am sometimes a bit concerned at where it will end up.

200-300 years of Caesarism says Spengler.

Though that's supposed to be gradual, so we probably are some decades into it now.

We’re seemingly at the first Triumvirate- Trump, Musk, Vance.

If the Chinaman is even in the 20th century apocryphally reluctant to make definitive statements French Revolution, it seems the American will less than two months into a presidency declare a new era.

Personally I would mark the end that time period on 2022-02-23. Not only are there a lot of 2's making it easy fir future schoolchildren to remember, but crucially it is the day Ukro-Russian War began. It marked the end of the peaceful cooperation of the West and Russia, the end of peace in Europe, the end of disarmed Europe.

Trump's legacy lies in the future, while the Chinaman is too cautious, the American much too eager. American judiciary is, unlike under FDR, eager to constrain the president. Then even the Supreme Court bowed down to the Executive, now each of the hundreds of federal thinks he obstruct the President. As we have seen already EOs are getting blocked, there is no telling if they will ever come into force.

The idea that after WW2 even looking only at the US the consensus until Trump's second term was anything resembling DEI is absurd. Segregation wasn't ended on VJ Day, Operation Wetback happened in 1954.

If people in 1945 US would be given a charitable explanation of the principles underlying DEI, and asked to come up with policies in-line with these principles, they wouldn't come up with exactly what DEI means in practice in 2025. Maybe they would even suggests policies which DEI advocates today explicitly oppose. This show that one cannot just view history as a sort of cableway up the mountain of DEI, but more like a walk on its mountainside: sometimes down to get up, sometimes up but quickly down, sometimes just down.

Personally I would mark the end that time period on 2022-02-23. Not only are there a lot of 2's making it easy fir future schoolchildren to remember, but crucially it is the day Ukro-Russian War began. It marked the end of the peaceful cooperation of the West and Russia, the end of peace in Europe, the end of disarmed Europe.

This seems to be recency bias in action. Unless it leads to nuclear war, the Russia-Ukraine war will be a footnote in history. It's a final pimple in the denouement of the Cold War: Russia's last attempt at global influence despite representing only 2% of the world's population and GDP.

No, the story of this era of history will be told with two letters. And it will change everything.

This is within the context of defining the "Long 20th Century". Maybe 9/11 fits better, it certainly is closer to the end of the actual 20th century. But I am not married to any of these events, and "recency bias" is something the article linked by OP is even more guilty of than me. The War started before Trump came into power the second time, and the consequences thus had more to manifest than for the former. And they have, meanwhile Trump's reforms haven't changed anything other than regularly scheduled denunciations by the Reliable Sources of the republican president.

I would argue the cultural 20th Century ran from the summer of 1914 to Christmas of 1991. The 21st century began on September 11, 2001. The 90s is a historical liminal space that serves as both an epilogue to the 20th century and the prologue to the 21st.

Great comment, I think you’ve convinced me. There was a lot of really weird stuff about the 90s, from the eXtrEme monster truck era to weirdly grotesque trends in western cartoon animation, all the way to that end of history emptiness of suburban prosperity thing, which you saw especially in 98/99 in American Beauty, The Sopranos, Fight Club, the Matrix to some extent, all of which gets more interesting the more you think about it.

90s were indeed the golden age of the west.

Trump has not yet abolished FDR's America, but he's making a serious attempt on it, and that alone is extraordinary (especially in light of the fact he failed to do so the last time around).

Whether he succeeds and solidifies his win will be the true test of whether we entered a new era. But even if he fails, it's hard to imagine by which miracle the legitimacy of the managerial state could be revivified at this point.

Who knows what's going to happen, but we certainly stand at one of those crucial points in history, and the protagonists are well aware we are.

Trump isn't trying to abolish the New Deal. The main radical thing he is trying to do is to abolish the nominally apolitical permanent civil service - including bringing the USPS back under political control. That takes you back to the immediate post-Civil War era before the Chester Arthur administration and the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act.

The stakes are a lot higher when Federal spending is 25% of GDP vs 1.5% in 1883.

But of course, the whole reason we're here is the civil service is not apolitical, but 90% in the bag for one party. Even if Trump replaces whole departments with political appointees, the federal government will still be a Democrat-dominated institution.

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