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 -
Have we considered how destructive having the political left be angry at you is to the sanity of people who aren't cut out for it? That is, people who aren't politicians?
As a prior example, I'm thinking of Jordan Peterson, who seems to have followed a similar trajectory of brilliant man becoming increasingly unhinged as political attacks step up.
Musk got on the political left's shitlist during COVID. I believe he was irrecoverably poisoned on the left when he expressed interest in hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment and complained about labor restrictions in California right as he saved Tesla from bankruptcy.
His fallout with Sam Harris over losing a bet re: the number of total COVID cases there would be in the US seem like early hallmarks of Musk's decline.
Since then it seems like the left's hatred of him has only intensified, not that he didn't help himself by indulging in trolling them back. Basically, having an irresistible urge to troll and being a target of the left can drive some men to ruin.
I believe it was specifically the factory closures that did it, because Musk would have seen it as a potential death sentence for his businesses if it carried on. Before this, blue tribe tended to act in ways that were either neutral or positive for his business. That suddenly flipped to extremely negative.
But this is always going to be the elephant in the room for any Trump/Musk is doing a wrecking ball argument. Progressives just drove a wrecking ball that was at least an order of magnitude worse through society, which can justify a pretty big wrecking ball in response if that prevents it from happening again. Or halts it, even. The US avoided some of the worst of it but parts of Europe were still doing severe restrictions in late 2021, after the vaccine rollout, and thus long past any logical stopping point. Worst case scenario for the minimally Trumpy world that Hanania wants is that we're still doing them in 2025.
And to reiterate the below comment, the result is that I’m also okay with pretty much anything if it means driving out whatever political faction we should call this thing.
More options
Context Copy link
I think you have a very good point here. I suffered through a set of proto-Woke struggle sessions in the mid-2010s and it does leave certain scars.
The result is that I’m okay with pretty much anything if it means driving out the woke and the people/ideas that produce wokeness. I’m not proud of it but it’s true.
More options
Context Copy link
I think the crucial question in this respect is what does it mean to be cut out for it. After all, the trajectories of Musk and Peterson are by no means universal.
Musk and JP could have avoided so much self-inflicted misery if the bottom 99% of their tweets were deleted instead of posted, with hardly any loss in upside.
Being cut out for it means being cool in the face of ugly attacks. It means "acting Presidential". Refusing to be trolled. Refusing to engage in trolling. Have principles, but if you don't, at least pretend to instead of pitching them to own the libs.
A publicist could have saved them each boatloads of treasure, their reputation and their sanity.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To some extent I'd argue that that's the crux of the entire culture war. The left, via their march through institutions as well as their early control over new media, gained access to a super weapon; the ability to point the whole of society against any individual. Western democracies, influenced by Hobbes, had gone to great lengths to make sure this could not be done without considerable hurdles. But suddenly this super weapon was not only available, but at the beck and call of anyone on the left with a good enough narrative. The only constraint was that it could only be pointed rightward.
So for a decade, we had ever increasing use of this weapon against a large number of people. But more often than not, those who were targeted were the "powerful", that is to say, successful people with something to loose . Anyone caught in the crosshairs was ruined; their career, social life, in some cases even freedom suddenly forfeit. But at the end of the day, those people were still alive. Still part of society. And as you said, I think the experience of having your world ripped away for seemingly no reason is enough to genuinely drive someone mad.
And that's what we're now seeing. A horde of these people, crazed to the point of mayhem, ripping apart the core foundations of society. And the left, like a child who shot their parent in a fit of anger, suddenly waking up to the fact that they destroyed their primary means of protection, and that there is no way to wind back the clock.
And while I think quite a few of us might take some grim satisfaction in that last statement, it doesn't change the fact that we're all on this ship as well. If it goes down, every one of us is going to suffer.
I actually have a different issue to raise than my earlier remark: very little of this is new. American business elites have been trying to roll back regulatory oversight, labor laws, and the welfare state since the minute they were created. Certainly the proposition that Musk et al are reacting to being 'ruined' is laughable. Even before he managed to make himself un-elected shadow president, he was one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. Sorry bud, libs hating billionaires isn't new either. All you have to do to get away from them is uninstall twitter.
The only thing new is that the conservative movement has become more reactionary and overtly illiberal.
fitting it would be in reaction to the lib covid hysterics' extreme illiberalism turning the state into a weapon against all of society with its fingers permeating every part of life and causing enormous harm to them
conservatives are the last liberals and it's why they've been losing for many decades
standing atop history yelling "stop!" to the rightwing who were desperately trying to roll-back what the leftists had managed to scheme their way into accomplishing a mere 10 years ago
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This wasn't some ambient power that the Left decided to wield one day. It's a newly developed power, enabled by technology and the virtualization of society. Before ~2000, there was no way the whole of society could be pointed at anyone. Everything was too fragmented for any group (even the elite!) to act coherently, and information was collected, integrated, and acted upon in a much looser cycle. "What should the world do if a random person does a Nazi salute in her car?" wasn't a question anyone considered, because it was entirely unactionable. Now, though, a picture gets taken and shared online, millions of people can see it within an hour, her employer can be easily identified and be communicated to, public relations can carefully track negative sentiments, and she can be fired by lunchtime.
Why was it initially wielded by the Left? Good timing and proximity to the tools of symbolic production.
More options
Context Copy link
This isn't really true*, but it gestures towards something true: the fairly novel experience for social conservatives of not being in the normative driver's seat. For a very long time, social conservatives defined collective norms while social liberals rebelled against them. Every so often the liberals would win a fight and move consensus, but the center of gravity remained with conservatives. Even institutions that tended to be dominated by liberals in composition (e.g. Hollywood) still had to submit to a broader conservative consensus.
In the Obama era, this was upended and for the first time conservatives were in the uncomfortable and bewildering position of being censured for failing to adhere to liberal values rather than vice versa. The cultural center of gravity shifted away from conservatives. Liberals were defining standards of public behavior, and generally not in ways conservatives found agreeable. The entertainment industry shrugged off the aforementioned conservative consensus and started pushing overtly progressive themes (e.g. LGBT/minority representation) in a way that challenged conservatives' sense of rightful cultural hegemony.
This is part of why we get the peculiar phenomenon where conservatives seem to care far more about what liberals say about them than vice versa. The former were accustomed to being able to demand respect and unaccustomed to finding themselves on the outside;the latter were already acculturated to a certain amount of social opprobrium and often took pride in it.
*social media cancellation overwhelmingly affected people in liberal-dominated spaced and was an emergent behavior rather than a directed one. Rupert Murdoch was in no danger of being canceled even though left-wingers absolutely despised him; we can argue about why Musk shifted right
I don’t think conservatives have been in the cultural drivers seat since at least the 1970s. Liberals, up until Obama were just much more careful about showing their power level until the long March was over so they could consolidate power. Hollywood had always been liberal, and even if the movies made in 1970 would be conservative by modern standards, they were absolutely liberal by the conservative standards of the day. Soylent Green was an overpopulation/environmental piece, blaxploitation was an entire genre of film, anti war themes showed up in movies, tv shows, music, and so on. Liberal protests on college campuses have likewise been a thing since Kent State.
I think there are two catalysts for the change. First, social media vastly extended the reach of social opinion, such that private opinions could be easily disseminated online and thus weaponized. You ended up saturating the culture in political opinion, and liberals realized that there were lots of them in cultural power. And it also indexed people’s views for easy reading, thus allowing a purge of crime-thinkers from political and cultural power. The second was the retirement of the old guard who came of age in tge 1950s. They were 60 in 2010, and so a lot of these early boomers retired. They might have headed up a department at a college, ran a music label or tv/movie studio, but they’d imbibed the notion that politics shouldn’t overwhelm the purpose of the institution itself. Entertainment existed to entertain, not preach, colleges were about education. Once those old guys retired, the new leadership felt little compunction about turning the entire thing into a propaganda machine.
I disagree. The fact that American conservatives don't make very much art isn't especially material*, both because popular art still tended to defer to conservative sensibilities and, more importantly, because I am not just talking about art. Piecemeal challenges to conservative cultural hegemony didn't change the underlying fact that you had to convince conservatives to let you succeed and conservatives were still ultimately setting the baseline. ∃ liberals who have substantial breaks from conservative orthodoxy is not the same thing as liberals driving culture. It took 45 years to go from Stonewall to Obergfell, and that issue still isn't exactly settled. Hell, you had Prop 8 in California in 2008. The 80s were full of conservative backlash to the cultural turmoil of the 70s and the 90s were marked by Clinton's 'triangulation' strategy (i.e. pivoting right on a lot of issues) and a general sense that everything was fine, don't rock the boat.
*Although perhaps a better metaphor then would be that conservatives were in the back of the cultural limousine, being chauffeured around by liberals.
I think art and education are the critical components of gaining control of the culture. Culture is the water you swim in without thinking about it. So if I want to normalize an idea, I would absolutely want to push it into every bi5 of culture I can get away with. If I want to normalize gays then I slowly inject that idea in every story told and song would be written about gay life. If I wanted to normalize Buddhism, you’d see a lot of the heroes of your favorite tv series and movies and references the dharma and meditation and quotes from the sutras in your music. Eventually you’ll not notice it so much, but it will affect you.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And what of the other 5 thousand years of human history?
I believe the Flintstones comic proposes that it was Clod the Destroyer, who punches the liberals in the beef.
More options
Context Copy link
I think like everything else it goes in cycles. The modern age (basically since the 1860s has been a time of Cthulhu swimming left, but there are other periods in which Cthulhu was swimming rightward. The rightward swings tend to happen in times of cris, but they do happen.
More options
Context Copy link
I am fairly sure American conservatives were not in the cultural driver seat for the other 5 thousand years of human history either.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Or rather, what "conservatism" was started to cut over at that time. This is a consequence of the Boomers taking over as the primary political power bloc in the US from the generations before them (enough of them had died off at that time to make this possible).
Progressives (which you both do and don't call liberals, and hints at part of the problem for the real liberals and one they've been grappling with for some time) are conservatives, because they act like everything they complain about conservatives for doing. They attempt to enshrine a self-enriching lie that makes them feel better. There is no difference between a Moral Majoritarian of the 1980s and a Moral Majoritarian of the 2020s outside of the fact that the 2020s one no longer feels the need to pretend to be Christian (the '80s Moral Majority wasn't either, of course)- they're both majority-female-led movements, too.
This is what the modern liberal movement, typified by Musk/Trump and those who voted for them, is starting to rediscover. It's going to be really destructive for a while because the only lever any liberal-minded individual knows how to pull is the one that flushes conservatives (and any good they did) right down the toilet, and so you're going to get people who are more hardened than usual against conservative caterwauling to the point they enjoy it, at the expense of more stable reforms.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This description gives me Wheel of Time vibes, and that is terrifying. Granted, in WoT, it wasn't the women driving the men mad, but it was their failure to work together that tainted Saidin, drove male channelers mad, and led to the Breaking of the World. And if there's a single madman who could break the world ... it'd be
the DragonElon Musk. ... Wait, what was Ishamael's true name, again? 😱More options
Context Copy link
The ship was heading for an iceberg anyway and they were running articles called "Why Hitting Icebergs is Actually a Good Thing".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
JBP was fine until he started using twitter regularly. So were lots of people. I genuinely think that the human mind isn't built for high stakes conversations with thousands of people at once. Let alone doing those every hour of every day.
It takes some character to tell a roomful of people that they're wrong to their face, but imagine if you were brought back to a new roomful of angry people every day for the rest of your life.
I do notice that Elon's zaniness has increased in proportion to his shitposting. But who knows which direction the causality goes there, if any.
Peterson has been a particularly sad one to watch - in some of his early appearances he seems relatively articulate, but watch anything from him later on and it's like watching a man destroy himself in slow motion. My first reaction to Peterson was that he was uninteresting but basically reasonable. Now my reaction to Peterson is a kind of tragic pity.
He used to be a lot more interesting, Maps of Meaning, which is what put him on the map remains a genuinely interesting work if you are into comparative religion from a Jungian perspective.
I want to be fair here, it does seem like he lost some of his wits, but his recent Bible stuff isn't that bad. It just doesn't hit as hard as his old lectures for some reason.
Maybe we've all just moved past such ideas in some sense.
I haven't read that book yet, actually, but I remember Rowan Williams' review of it. Williams is certainly a theologian and biblical scholar of some depth, and one whose judgement I have a good deal of respect for, so that warned me away. It sounded more like Peterson reading the Bible and then using it, no matter what it says, as an excuse to get on one of his regular hobby-horses. This much harsher (and more entertaining) review made it sound quite self-indulgent to me.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You're onto something there for sure. If you ever draw the ire of a Twitter hate mob, the first hundred people that are angry at you make you feel bad. But by the time you've seen the thousandth you have fully dehumanized them and wonder how you can use this power.
It wasn’t a Twitter hate mob. The thing is that in the case of Peterson, they basically got him turned out of university, forced him into choosing between “training in woke” and not being able to practice psychology. And this wasn’t Twitter, a lot of the hate came from news media, political pundits, the students at his university. Basically he was fortunate to have popularity with young men and thus could still earn a living.
I stand corrected.
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