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 -
It's an asymmetric weapon; campus protests, and especially administration-tolerated or -supported campus protests, tend very much to the left.
Who said this weapon only works on campus protesters?
Well, it only works for protesters who protest in areas where the police and/or the prosecutors are instructed to be friendly to them.
Essentially, this means Blues can protest anywhere they want under this sort of ruleset, because they dont want to protest in the suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas. Because Red voting in cities has been expelled by paramilitaries and general crime they dont have political power in those areas, despite being essential for the survival thereof.
Have a little imagination. People post all kinds of things under their real names online these days.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How far can it stretch before it stops being "this weapon", and shifts to being a different one? If the standard is "...her[/his] presence in the United States hinders the administration’s foreign policy agenda.", then campus protesters (or rally organizers, or similar) are pretty much the only valid targets.
The right-wing base doesn't generally shout their opinions from a soapbox in the same way, and therefore isn't as vulnerable to this.
Other than, you know, that one time in DC. And that one time in Charlottesville. And if they own a pickup truck, the bumper stickers and flags. Or the T Shirts. And the rallies.
If the most right-wing examples you can think of literally contain more left-wingers than right- (such as Charlottesville, if you include counter-protesters), then I'm comfortable calling them less vulnerable.
More options
Context Copy link
Those mostly weren't foreigners and thus would not be affected by this particular weapon.
The asymmetric weapons the left had were already quite sufficient to deal with the DC and Charlottesville people.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think that "hindering a policy agenda of an administration" could be applied much more broadly than that.
For example, a Harris administration could have decided to deport all Tesla or Twitter employees without US passport on the pretext of them harming their economic agenda. Or an administration could deport all foreign journalists which lean a way the regime does not like. Or you could kick out all foreign professors who do not fall in line with the administration. Or prevent international conferences on topics which you would rather not see discussed. Or deprive areas where the other party is in power of international tourism.
At the end of the day, it benefits a nation greatly if it can make binding commitments about permanent residence being revoked only with due process. In the past, the US was able to attract the very best immigrants. If a highly qualified immigrant is willing to forgo political expression as a condition of their residency they might as well immigrate to China -- getting deported from there as a Westerner is likely less of an ordeal than getting deported from the US is.
Yes, with the caveat is that if the reason for kicking them out is activity that would be protected under the First Amendment, the Secretary of State would have to personally approve each deportation. This is statute law; Trump isn't making stuff up here. It appears this was involved for Khalil; it doesn't look like it for Chung since they're accusing her of criminal activity, the details of which presumably they'll have to give when this gets to court. Again, deporting aliens who commit crimes is legal by statute.
More options
Context Copy link
Due process for being revoked also hinges on due process that does revoke, or deny, being honored and not undermined or circumvented willfully or publicly. Otherwise, there is no due process- there is only the binding commitments by those who are able to get away with not honoring commitments against those expected to be bound by them.
If you want a demos to be publicly on board with, say, refugee acceptance, then you need refugee criteria that are not transparently redefined and gamed to facilitate acceptance of people beyond the original concept of refugees. Similarly, if you want there to be public expectation of a judicial review of immigration cases, then there needs to be a basis for there to be an expectation of timely resolution and that migrants won't simply be let go and disappear into the interior. Absent a basis for public trust that the system would work properly, there is likely to be little political traction over concerns that the system won't work properly in other ways. It may be true, but it was already true.
This is not, to be clear, an endorsement. It is, however, an observation.
What we are seeing is a consequence of policy tools that can benefit a nation greatly being changed in ways that destroy public trust and legitimacy in said tools, often because said tools were used for partisan advantage or even abuse. The partisan utilization of said tools, often at the public advocacy of members of those very institutions due to ideological capture overriding professionalism, has led them to no longer being seen as great benefits for the nation as much as benefits to the partisans at the expense of their opponents. That things can benefit the partisans and the country alike has become outweighed by the desire to defy partisan impositions and the who-whom distinction of who has the power to get away with it.
This applies to other beneficial things as well. I think higher education is a good thing. But if you want cross-partisan support of public universities that employ talented foreign professors, then you need to maintain cross-partisan support. This is harder when public universities take open and consistently partisan stances on public issues and their own employment / admission processes. It becomes even harder when said partisans attempt to overtly and covertly circumvent unambiguous legal prohibitions to their partisan preferences. The demonstrated interest in such cases is not 'let's prioritize the public interest'- it is the preservation of partisan interest.
As partisan prioritization prevails, appeals to the broader nation grow weaker. 'Think of the good to the nation from tourism,' for example, will often fall flat if it comes a few years after tourist-centers were attempting to organize boycotts of other parts of the nation over ideological differences.
It might be 'beneficial' to have high public trust in public institutions, but trust does not follow the benefit of having trust. Trust follows from the actions. The more partisan the actions, the more partisan the trust, and thus subject to revocation / reversal with partisan changes.
Yes, this does mean things will get worse before they get better. This is an observation, not an endorsement. But it will not avoid getting worse / get better faster to simply respect an imposed a partisan preference system... particularly when the partisan coalition in question is not a social majority, but has/had conflated institutional capture with social persuasion.
More options
Context Copy link
This is the hard core of the debate. It's the same with treaties: on the one hand, how do you make a binding commitment when your government potentially switches between factions every four years? On the other hand, how do you make democracy work if you permit governments to bind the hands of their successors?
How fair is it that Biden or Starmer or Boris Johnson can import 600k immigrants in a program that has a guaranteed citizenship at the end of it and then say, "Har har, it benefits the nation that we can make binding commitments about permanent residence, suck it."
Don't get me wrong, your point is legitimate, which is what makes it complicated. I will go so far to say that I think it is a genuine flaw in democracy as a system, which only survived as long as it did because power was firmly reserved to an elite who tended to agree, and who were careful about issues of genuine contention.
With legislative supermajorities. If you can get 51% agreement on something, good for you, but there's no reason to expect that to bind others once a slight shift of political winds leaves you at 49%. But if you can get 60% (or 67%?)? That might be something worth hanging on to for longer, if it's not so soundly refuted that support drops to 40% (or 33%).
Why? If you have supermajority agreement on something, you don’t need a special mechanism to protect it - no government has attempted to legalise murder or indentured servitude for small children.
If you don’t, if it falls beneath 50%, why should the fact that 60% of people thought policy X was a good idea 10 years ago prevent it from being dropped when those people change their minds?
Technically, because a little hysteresis is beneficial in any case where a continuous (and worse: continuous plus noisy) input is used to determine a discrete output where switching between outputs is costly. We wouldn't even consider using a keyboard without a "debounce" filter; it might be reasonable to consider using a government with one.
Politically, for the same reason as we have a supermajority requirement for Constitutional amendments - to permit governments to, slightly, bind the hands of their successors. In the case of binding commitments it would also be sufficient to simply have a population who were mostly able to avoid hitting "defect" first in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, but here we are.
At least we're getting better. We had a government that legalized slavery for small children for nearly a century, yet now the thought of something similar happening again is worthy of use as a reductio ad absurdum. Maybe that's the paradox you're pointing out, though? The distance from "we should amend the Constitution to prevent voters from legalizing slavery" to "we can't imagine voters legalizing slavery" wasn't too great. Perhaps it's pointless to speculate about amending the Constitution to force voters to not make any game-theoretic screwups, if we couldn't actually get such an amendment through until we practically have an electorate who wouldn't screw up regardless.
Agree with you re: hysteresis.
Dubious on the supermajority requirement for political reasons. Bear in mind that I'm not writing from an American perspective here, but I'm dubious about the concept of a constitution and amendments. Partly because I'm not sure it's healthy for political life to move from "I believe that free speech of this form is good because..." to legalistic arguments about "The first amendment says...". Partly because the supermajority requirements seem both too strict and too loose: anything about 50% seems so strict that it's very rare to reach and yet precisely because it's so rare you basically only have to get supermajority agreement once and then everyone has to live with whatever wacky idea you had for generations.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The justification doesn't require it only apply to campus protesters, though. One could easily imagine a Dem deporting Jordan Peterson and other non-citizens for "interfering with foreign policy"
Deporting Jordan Peterson would be a lot less harsh than what happened to him. But yes, Democrats could do something with it; it's an asymmetric weapon but not an utterly one-sided one.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link