site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I don't know if he is on the path to leaving, but I want to pull on what seems like the subtext here: is it the case that a large subset of Americans overtly identifying their national identity with historical European Christianity bad for the Jews, like Ben Shapiro? Right? Like, I assume that you are suggesting that Walsh taking this stance puts him at odds with the owners of Daily Wire.

I want to put it this way, because I think that topic is itself interesting and non-obvious. If you look at the original neocons, a LOT of them were Jewish (and many former trotskyites), and, in the 80s, a lot of them seemed to think that some version of very pro-Israel evangelical Christianity in America as the default public religion, as long as certain kinds of separation of church and state were followed and anti-semitism was still heavily stigmatized, was, in fact, Good For The Jews (tm). I read the interesting book "The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy" by Murray Friedman not too long ago, and it takes up exactly this topic. And in particular, some of those thinkers might well have come to see an ideology of secular, leftist third worldism (especially after the 7 days war) as Bad for the Jews, and a default European evangelical Christianity as a bulwark against that, given the deep chasms between that form of Christianity and secular, leftist third worldism, as well as that strain of Christianity instilling certain kind of salutary personal moral discipline in citizens anyway. And certainly we are seeing a repeat of history with the current leftwing Israel-is-Genociding-Palestinians stuff, the deeper internal Black-vs-Jew power fight within the Democratic party, and the response of some American Jews to all that.

If you go down this road, I think it raises a bunch of other, bigger, interesting questions. Recoiling against antisemitism is, itself, rooted in certain Christian-derived values (Tom Holland's Dominion is a really strong book on a lot of these ideas). Is the rise of China and its ability to avoid being rotted out from within by Western liberalism and capitalism, China with its internal culture that is unabashed racialist in a way that late 19th century would find recognizable... is that rise Good for the Jews? Would a world run by the current culture of China be hospitable to Jewish people and Jewish power?

I'm reminded of an observation that Glenn Loury has made. He made the point that it wasn't at all obvious that it was in the best interest for African American descendants of slaves for America to be flooded by immigrants. And his point was that, while there was this naive belief that everyone would team up against White-y, over in reality, because of the Civil Rights movement, American blacks could make a certain kind of moral claim on other white Americans whose ancestors have been here for a while. "I'm not so doing well, but your ancestor enslaved me." But it seems deeply unlikely that newer immigrants from East Asia or South Asia, as they gain power, are likely to be moved by such claims. Far more like is for them to see the deep pathologies of black communities not through a lens of guilt, but rather through a lens of disgust.

Obvious Jewish people aren't a monolith, and there are more Jewish opinions than there are Jewish people. But, in America, for a bunch of reasons, the concerns of powerful Jewish people do matter a huge amount. And I think it is the case that there are probably versions of "America was founded as a white Christian nation" that some such people could find useful and tolerable, and there are some such versions that aren't. I'm not sure where Walsh's current views fit on that front (and, of course, Catholicism is it's own deeply interesting, deeply complicated topic here too, for that matter).

I don't mean China as the people of China, here, or their material conditions. I mean China as the political entity run by the CCP. And by "rotted out from within", I meant the CCP having their sovereignty dissolved and capacity to act undermined... which is very clearly what liberalization is supposed to do to political regimes. I've seen this discussed at great length by western political intellectuals in the past; this isn't some kind of giant secret. Globalization and integrating China into the global economic order was supposed to weaken their government and dissolve the insularity of Chinese culture.