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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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Yes, this has been a traditionalist/progressive vs. liberals tension for a long, long time. Traditionalists argue that good behavior and virtue (i.e. cultural aesthetics) are terminal values, liberals argue the only terminal value are results, and the world turns.

Interestingly, if you look at other domains, the sides reverse. Liberals/Progressives attack the Trump administration on the grounds that they are not displaying the proper "good behavior and virtue" (i.e. "subverting our democracy," "norms", "rule of law", etc.) where Trumpist-rightists are arguing that, e.g. in the recent immigration kerfuffles, "the only terminal value [is] results" such that any district court which purports to order Tren de Aragua gangmembers brought back into the country after their deportation flight had already left US airspace cannot be legitimate on a fundamental level.

Even on family-planning issues, there's a similar dynamic between a progressive left that views upholding an ideal of women's role in society as the primary goal (virtue primacy), whereas the natalist right points at crashing TFR and marriage rates (material primacy).

Additional evidence that the mainstream left increasingly takes over the role of the status-quo conservative; If you're in control of the arbiters of good behaviour and virtue, critiquing it in your enemies is essentially free. This has been a conservative strategy for basically as long as humanity exists. This is especially obvious here in germany, where the churches increasingly openly align with the left (the Katholikentag [catholic day] barely even bothers inviting CDU politicians anymore, and the catholics are the less progressive wing of german christianity).

For this reason, "traditional conservatives" like Schmitz are in reality impotent regressives, harkening back to an old order nobody really believes in anymore.

People like Musk make much more sense in this framework; Obviously a shitposting technofuturist who wants to smash the status-quo has absolutely nothing to do with conservatism. And on the other side, Biden; A senile old nominal leader who not only doesn't, but simply can't, change anything is the archetype of (dysfunctional) conservatism.