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 -
I'm increasingly fascinated by how counter-productive the current modus operandi of political discourse within the Left and Liberal wings of Western society has become.
When in a political discussion, I try to rarely make sloganeering arguments - very few buzzwords, no contentious examples, generally attempting to keep a big picture in mind, clearly distinguishing between what I believe to be a core principle and what I think could be a likely hypothesis, etc. Of course I sometimes take the bait or let spite and Schadenfreude get the better of me, but generally I think I'm pretty good at discussing politics and have been able to have nice and constructive conversations with people across the political spectrum : I think it's precisely because of the rather tentative way I go about defending or questioning ideas that the discussions almost always conclude on a cordial tone, completely irrespective of how close we are ideologically or if anyone involved was really convinced of the other's perspective.
It has long been remarked that the Left has an issue with both internal and external discourse, pushing for alienating purity tests and distorting supposedly open discussions into show trials the moment an unsavoury subtext or implication can be gleaned from the other's words - no matter how minor or semantic. From a Marxist-Leninist perspective, this makes some sense to me as an internal approach to maintain ideological unity - it has a martial aspect to it that places a very high value on cohesion and loyalty, exactly what you want from an organised Vanguard movement waiting to strike. As an external form of discussion geared towards convincing the public at large or gaining new recruits to your cause, it's obviously abysmal and essentially filters out normal people in record speed.
As a former Marxist-Leninist myself, who was in such a "Vanguard party" in my home of Austria way back during Obama's second term/Trump's first years in office (and who now, over a decade later, feels more sympathy for Mussolini than Lenin), it's been interesting to see how this internal form of discourse (which I guess we now would call wokeism or cancel culture) has also completely taken over any approach to external messaging and discussing. When I was in a Marxist org over a decade ago, we would go to worker's clubs, employee's strikes, union meetings and such in the hope of recruiting or latently indoctrinating the working-class there. The explicit modus operandi that we were taught and regularly coached on was to insist on opinions of theirs that were bauchlinks - "left-wing by gut feeling", essentially. Even though by the mid 2010's most working-class people in Austria outside of some flagship unions were already comfortably captured by the far-right, we spoke to them exclusively through the lens of what we could agree on, not what they were wrong about believing. Of course, this made for a lot of friendly conversations and momentary feelings of having made progress. But in the end, these actions had next to zero effect since most of the Marxist org members were bourgeois students slobs and therefore neither trusted nor taken seriously by the workers, and we really didn't have a good answer on immigration and the refugee crisis (since we were wrong on this issue, as the Left still is today).
Still, this approach to engaging a political conversation seemed to me productive and understanding of how politics functions - you need to get people on your side. That's easier when you make them feel like you and they already believe alot of the same things.
I won't belabour how much cancel culture et all has ruined the Left and tarnished its public image - we all know. What's more interesting to me is that even among less overtly woke or even moderate/conservative liberals, there is a growing attitude of guilt by association and implication - and a pleasure to brand someone as far-right, a nazi, a "populist", especially if said person has any kind of public presence and influence. We see this across the UK, Germany, Austria, especially when it comes to Trump or Ukraine. It's practical effect is essentially them saying "please see yourself as our political opposition and consider yourself excluded from our political project" - the exact opposite of what you want to achieve in a political discussion! Joe Rogan has of course become the archetypal example of this. The list of influential people who became right-wingers because one side of the political spectrum welcomed them with few strings attached and the other told them they were irredeemable and devoid of decency is long and growing.
What's the idea behind this kind of discourse? It seems so alien to any kind of strategic understanding of politics and campaigning to me, especially now when the liberal order is more vulnerable than ever. Are they still this oblivious to the disillusionment and loss of trust in institutions that is well entrenched in Western society today? Is it some kind of some kind of moral self-validation first and foremost? Where does this desire to grow your own political opposition come from?
I think that partly, the strategic failure of the left is an instance of tragedy of the commons: individuals following their personal incentives, to the detriment of the collective outcome.
Basically, people don't optimize their behavior for big picture success, but for personal success. Being a moderate is boring, especially among the people who are into political activism. Perhaps the most electable Democratic candidate would be a reincarnation of Bill Clinton. But it is trivial to score political points by saying "we do not want another rich cis-het male white candidate". It will boost your standing in your group so much, signal that you are not some sell-out but a hardcore believer in the cause.
On the right, things are a bit different. The Fuehrerprinzip is a right-wing idea, after all. Sure, you get a few radicals who show their bravery by flying the swastika, but mostly they realize that Nazism is a toxic brand. This tendency to form a cohesive block is somewhat frightening compared to the squabbling left, where fission is common.
The failure mode of the US left is the French revolution, where every day the radicals will find their enemies of the state so that the guillotine baskets will be full by nightfall, while the failure mode of the right would be fascism, where party loyalty prevents any insiders from speaking out against crazy ideas.
Yeah, but there are plenty of left-wing ideas that rhyme. Lenin's "vanguard party" establishing a "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a contemporary example, with Lenin, Stalin, and Mao's cults of personality rivalling or surpassing Hitler's own.
More options
Context Copy link
The left does not seem very good about speaking out about crazy ideas either. And in fairness, I do not think the Right is immune to filling baskets with heads. I'm not sure this distinction works either way.
To put on the Hlynka hat, both extremes are guilty of both of these things.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Generally speaking however, I think you're slightly off the mark in your observations. The style of discouse you describe, in which a party is described as irredeemably evil due to an excessively right-wing position, is usually directed at third parties. You and your politically agreeable interlocutor paint someone who is not actually a participant in the discussion as an acceptable target and not part of polite society. It's not directed at a participant in the discussion, because you, a respectable progressive, would never have a discussion with a nazi in the first place! The whole exercise serves to strengthen in-group alignment on common friend/enemy distinctions. It's a rallying cry for allies, a measure to ensure uniformity, not an attempt to convince someone who might disagree with you - because outright disagreement is evil, beyond the pale, and marks such a one as unfit for discourse. The evil must be deplatformed, not given opportunity to voice their intolerable views.
Funny, I was just listening The Young Turks, as left-wing as it gets, fire a former contributor for doing this to their CEO.. Cenk Uygur is in no way an outsider.
Yes, a lot of the uncharitable and unprofessional things she said were about Cenk and told to allied leftists. But it doesn't change that she basically lost an ally by talking crazy about them with other leftists because he only wanted trans athletes to compete up to the high school level or thought Democrats should go on Charlie Kirk.
It only strengthens in-group bonds if a) your asks are reasonable enough that most in-group members see no need to defect and b) you're perceived as a winner.
In reality, TYT is one of the older and larger progressive media channels. Losing them (this isn't the first time an employee has declared them rightists and detached) doesn't strengthen the tribe at all. I think some people's faces are just stuck like this now. They're used to talking like this about their enemies and they simply can't help but slip into it when they see traitors pulling away as their influence recedes after a loss.
With maybe bad incentives due to social media. A smaller figure thinks they gain from punching up at an insufficiently doctrinaire one, and never consider the downsides.
More options
Context Copy link
I agree to an extent. I've had many discussions specifically around Ukraine where even non-opinionated mentions of basic facts - like how the country has always had an extreme cultural and political rift between it's Western and Eastern regions - will garner accusations of relativising Putin or "playing into his hands".
I think you're right in the sense that the subtext is always "you don't want to be on that side, outside of polite society, do you now?" Unfortunately for them, this kind of threat of social exclusion only really works if you want to be socially included to begin with, and if the power relations are sufficiently one-sided. But why would I want to be included in a social paradigm that treats me as lesser and deserving of retribution for my gender and skin colour, all while failing to deliver on the basic quality-of-life promises of it's post-war social contract? At least pre-Trump and wokeness, there was one clear side of the sociopolitical spectrum that was cooler, younger, made better art, etc. none of which is really the case anymore.
I'm very curious to see how this continues - already, the AFD is inching towards overtaking the CDU in the polls and becoming the largest party in Germany, at which point virtually every single major player in the EU (not counting Spain since it's irrelevant) will have far-right electorates. The fever must break at some point, right? Or is the doubling-down going to turn into a tripling-down?
I'd predict that it will turn into a change of strategy. So far the way of it was to contain the AfD through social engineering to dissuade the electorate from backing them, and political firewalling to prevent them from affecting the running of the country. The social part isn't effective enough, and the political part will cease to work if they should grow any further.
So I expect that the fever will heat up more yet. We may see increasing sabotage, honeypots, agent provocateurs, political violence and other more proactive measures to prevent the AfD from functioning as an organization and to discredit it as not just evil but incompetent. Key actors within the party might be bought off, imprisoned on flimsy evidence, or personally assaulted on a broader scale and with more decisive violence. Perhaps a party meeting will be bombed. Maybe trustworthy intelligence agencies will discover incontrovertible proof that the entire party leadership is a bunch of pedophiles, or something similarly odious that not even right-wingers would tolerate.
This might be further facilitated by funnelling more money into "pro-democracy" NGOs that serve to coordinate activists and provide them with financial and legal support.
"Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?" - Robert Habeck, 2025
Jokes aside, I think you're right that there will be more escalation and use of dirty tricks and institutional malpractice - Romania seems to be the EU's current testing ground for how openly they can get away with an outright, unambiguous coup d'état. It feels very Weimarian in the sense that not even the liberal order really believes in liberalism (separation of powers, due process, free and fair elections) anymore, just maintaining power by increasingly draconian means.
Whether violence will ramp up to the level you predict remains to be seen, I think the liberal establishment can influence these things semi-indirectly by just bombarding the population with alarmism and moral hysteria until some of the more deranged and disaffected listeners decide they need to get on the right side of History by stabbing an AfD politician (this is essentially already happening since a while and seems like the only logical conclusion of the "Nie wieder!" sloganeering anyway) - is the endpoint of all this civil war?
The comparison to Weimar is apt, IMO. Back then democracy showed a failure mode in being young and not having the people's trust so that power players could just run roughshod over it; now it shows another by being old and all the players knowing how to exploit its loopholes while the people have become so accustomed the status quo that the liberal order is taken for granted.
I think the endpoint will probably be constitutional reform that further enshrines progressivism, to such a point that any significantly right-wing platform becomes legally untenable. We can see the first attempts at this in the recent inclusion of "Climate Neutrality By 2045" in the constitution - if that works, then similarly ideologically-charged items can follow, until it becomes impossible to campaign for materially right-wing goals without first campaigning for simply undoing those changes, which wouldn't be attractive to voters.
Whether the road there is cleared by weimarian violence or just another long march probably depends on how rapidly, if at all, the right grows from here on out.
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
As someone who spends time on Tumblr (and thus sees a lot of people on the left behaving the way you describe), I've written a lot about this, both here and elsewhere. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
In short, they're operating on a very different definition of "democracy" than you are.
No, you need to get elite institutions on your side. The peasant masses are irrelevant.
Except it's not "our political project" they see themselves casting people out of, it's "polite society," it's "the right side of history"… in short, you are being excommunicated from the One True Church, cast into the outer darkness with the damned, unless and until you repent and make penance. And, of course, shunning only works if everyone does it, thus those who fail to shun must be shunned themselves.
How does a firebrand Puritan preacher accumulate a flock? Not by friendly chats "exclusively through the lens of what we could agree on," but through fire-and-brimstone sermons denouncing them as damned sinners, and demanding they repent.
I come back to my classroom analogy (it's in one of those links above). It's long been a noted phenomenon — the subject of jokes, even — that whenever someone on the Left says "we need to have a conversation about [X]," what they actually mean is "I'm going to lecture you about [X], and you're going to sit down, shut up, and listen uncritically to what I say." Which I bring up because it's also what a teacher usually means when saying they "need to have a conversation" with a student and/or their parents about the student's behavior.
How does a teacher "get students on her side"? By asserting her authority, telling them to sit down, be quiet, and listen up; and punishing those who fail to obey.
That's the way the classroom works. The Expert speaks, and everyone else listens. Your grade, your status, is based on how well you absorb what Teacher says, and how flawlessly you parrot it back. Then you get to college, and its more of the same. Professor gives you the Correct Position, and your progress is based on how well you parrot it back. And then you get your degree that says you're an Expert now, so you either stay and become Professor, and tell the kids How It Is; or you leave into the world… and tell all the non-Experts How It Is. In both cases, when you speak, everyone is supposed to Listen to Teacher; that's how it's always worked.
And if students aren't learning the lesson? Well, maybe the teacher isn't matching their learning styles ("Democrats have a messaging problem"). Or maybe the kids are being distracted ("pipelines for alt-right disinformation like Musk's x.com") and you need to shut down anything that keeps them from Listening to Teacher. Or maybe they're just being stubborn and refusing to accept that the curriculum is Correct, and thus they are misbehaving and need to be punished; perhaps even expelled. In any event, the curriculum, the Lesson, is never wrong, no matter how large a fraction of the student body disagrees with it.
No, from what I've seen, they're quite aware of it, and do see it as a problem. They just don't see it as a problem with the institutions, but a problem with the people. If you don't find the mainstream media credible anymore? Then you're willingly choosing to believe lies over The Truth, and you're what needs fixed. You need to be made to trust the institutions again, even if it means literal re-education camps.
It's not a desire to "grow their own political opposition," it's a desire to make people submit, to punish disagreement until people stop disagreeing with them. To make all the Bad Students Listen To Teacher. To denounce all the sinners, heretics, apostates, and infidels, and impose all the punishments their priestly powers allow them to inflict, until all repent and accept the dogmas of the One True Church. Because error has no rights.
I think you accidentally hit on a pert of the appeal of this style of discussion and why it’s so popular. The people who tend to be on the left are basically overeducated and therefore have adopted the ethos of the classroom in which you are to sit and take notes and regurgitate the answers given by an authority. We’re sending most of our current crop of young adults through a system where by the time they reach full maturity, they’ve spent 20 years in school under the thumb of a teacher, and any sports they played were on teams with a coach.
I’ve had run ins with some of them when I suggest that it’s perfectly reasonable to get some education on the arts and literature by reading texts for yourself, learning to draw by simply getting some very basic instructions and doing it yourself. Or that history can be learned by … reading about history. I don’t think it’s possible to become a professional without a bit of classroom teaching. But im often shocked at how completely the very concept of autodidacts breaks modern brains when it used to be the norm. Abraham Lincoln was basically an autodidact— most lawyers of the time began by studying law on their own and taking an exam. That was it. And up until the advent of the modern Prussian model of education, even classroom instruction was more of a discussion than a lecture. It was structured, but kids were reading and talking about what they read by mathematics equivalent of high school.
This is something that often makes me fear for the future. The entire society is over structured and therefore any thinking for oneself, creativity, or initiative is being slowly ground out of society in favor of more formal education and activities.
I think it's superimportant not to discount the effect that social media has had on this, too. People of all political stripes are easily seduced by "likes," and nothing gets more passionate likes than when one stakes out positions that make themselves and their followers feel more virtuous than the baddies over on the other side. It's not just an echo chamber, in which one hears their own positions reverberate, but a stadium in which the response is the roar of the crowd in deafening agreement.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I find it rather telling that the one regime this tribe constantly holds up as the bright shining light of model liberal democracy is the FRG i.e. former West Germany. It makes sense, as it’s an otherwise nonsensical polity that was artificially created by first merging America’s local zone of military occupation with those of Britain and France i.e. states that economically and militarily depended on the American empire for their very existence after 1945, and then absorbing another fake state, the GDR into it in 1990 and then lying that this constituted the “reunification” of two sovereign states. It’s clear as day that this whole power structure exists under the tutelage of the US Deep State (also under the strict understanding that it continues to economically aid Israel) and that there’s not a single citizen of the FRG that may assume any high-level position of local authority of any sort before being vetted for years by NGOs, foundations, universities and other tools of said Deep State. This in itself explains why this whole political organism is heading straight towards voluntary self-abolition and annihilation.
///
Just to nitpick in a friendly manner: I suggest that instead of linking to two dozen or so comments, you post the first comments of comment chains / discussions where you participated.
I don't remember where I read it — if it was Unherd or Compact or elsewhere — but I recall about half a year ago or so reading an essay by a German about German politics, and specifically why the AfD should be banned. The author argued that the West German constitution — and thus modern Germany — was basically set up to be a system with three major parties that would pretty much set the limits of political options, and thus the space on which the electorate may vote. That where those parties are in agreement on an issue — such as immigration — then the voters simply don't have a say. And especially that trying to form a party around such a forbidden view, particularly those beyond the rightward edge of elite-acceptable views, must be shut down.
That modern "democracy" is when elites decide most issues, then let the electorate vote from a carefully curated and limited menu of options for the remaining issues (because anything less restrictive risks another Austrian Painter Party).
Except I tried to make sure those comments were all from different comment chains / discussions (though I may have gotten one or two from the same). They should be spaced out across various discussions over the past several months or more. Thus, that would still be about the same number of links.
When I said I've written a lot about this, I meant it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree with everything you say, but it seems obvious that this entire liberal consensus perspective and method of curtailing dissent hinges on having a critical mass of support - you downplay the electorate's power in this process, and I agree that institutions are the bigger players here, but there are still points of contact between the two. Think of the absolute fiasco for the progressive project that happened when those Ivy League Deans - all women who were very obviously hired for diversity points and were completely unable to handle the gravity of the situation - were questioned by Congress and unable to deny even the most outrageous accusations against the campus culture they fostered because the institutional jargon they use to defend it only worsens their case in the eyes of the public.
A Dean of Harvard getting easily out-dribbled rhetorically by some Republican congresswoman seemed unthinkable even 15 years ago (or maybe I just have rose-tinted glasses of the Democratic coalition before Obama), but the liberal project has allowed their own echo chamber to become so narrow and restrictive that they have no idea how stupid and hypocritical they sound to anyone outside of it - all while doing all in their power to push as many people out of said space as possible. There's also just been a massive cratering in terms of intellectual standards, which I guess was to be expected of any environment that punishes skepticism.
Regardless, Trump's rather decisive re-election (and it's equally significant flip side, the electorate's clear disapproval of Kamala Harris) should have been the writing on the wall for how useless this style of politics has become - the liberal establishment still has a lot of strings it can pull, but these strings are increasingly being stress-tested, dismantled, and in some cases, outright disregarded by the current administration. By keeping up this arrogant and deliberately antagonistic style, the establishment seems to be heading for a scorched Earth policy rather than any serious attempt to recapture their lost electorate - how long will it last?
Because I don't see the electorate as really having much power, nor their temporary, merely-elected representatives. To quote the Dreaded Jim:
You say:
I don't see how that was a fiasco. The Ivy League seems pretty undiminished in institutional power to me. And if the NYU hack was any indicator, they're probably actively defying the recent Supreme Court ruling (as they declared they would), and I'd say they still have good odds of getting away with it. (Because who's gonna stop them?)
My point is that as the system is set up, working within the confines of the law, they don't have to care how stupid and hypocritical they sound, because all real power centers lie inside their bubble, and the people outside it, including the many people they've pushed out of it, are mostly powerless, no matter how numerous.
I doubt Genghis Khan's inner circle had highly rigorous intellectual standards, and that didn't stop him. So long as you have power…
"Should," but from what I've seen, it hasn't — only that they haven't tried "this style of politics" hard enough.
I'd say way it's too early to tell if this really is the case, and there's plenty of people in the circles I frequent who are highly skeptical, viewing Trump as "containment" by the establishment, and all of his "victories" as just an empty show for the rubes.
Until the next Democrat administration holds Nuremberg trials for Trump, Vance, Musk, etc., and engages in a thorough "de-Nazification" of the electorate, potentially with re-education camps?
Lol. LMAO even. Top recruiters are shifting away from the ivies, for just one metric.
I've sorta-kinda heard this, but have you got any examples I could look at?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The power of a military leader and a priesthood both exist but they aren't the same.
The power of the intellectual elite comes from the perception that they fulfill some essential, moral role in society. They're a priesthood that cannot even claim to have been invested with their power by a god.
This might be why they've collapsed so readily into endless moralism.
But that is also a weakness. It depends on the deference of the people.
More options
Context Copy link
Apologies if I'm being rude, but what exactly is your power level?
Well, I was referring, at least somewhat, to things ranging from Parvini's "putting the woke away" to this piece at unz.com:
to the general attitude at therightstuff.biz.
But if you must know, I'm a couple of degrees of IRL separation from those TRS podcasters, and the Charlottesville organizers, etc., mostly thanks to a couple of old friends from grade school. (OTOH, I'm also a couple of IRL degrees of separation from the likes of Rod Dreher.) Very much "I know a guy who knows a guy…," along with how pretty much everyone in the Anchorage School District's gifted program around my age ended up either solidly woke leftists or far-right radicals, and the far right can be a pretty small space.
Wait... goddamn, somehow I confused you with @ControlsFreak. I already had a good gauge of your views.
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
I was talking to a friend yesterday about a book I had just read, How the Railways Will Fix the Future. She had recommended it to me because she knew I was a transit advocate, and besides that very much still my 5 year-old self with respect to thinking how cool trains are. It was a fairly quick read; the author (a former? railway engineer) does a good job of breaking down the technical aspects into easy to understand language, and the his engineering background allows him to make some interesting insights into transit that you don't get from your typical urbanism enthusiast.
Where the book utterly failed was in its persuasion. The author is so utterly trapped in his ideological bubble that he is either expecting no one who doesn't already agree with him to read it, or that no one actually disagrees with him (or if they do, are merely pretending to). Here's a tip for all you prospective authors: if you are trying to advocate for something, don't start by furiously denouncing the origins and history of what you want to advocate for. Spending the first 20 pages going over the problematic beginnings of railways as a tool of capitalism and facilitator of imperial conquest and colonization of indigenous peoples, funded by the capital created by the transatlantic slave trade, only to tepidly conclude that despite this legacy the idea can be rescued to create a more equitable future... what? Imagine going about your life like this. Is this man capable of saying he enjoys a good sandwich without first clarifying that he unambiguously denounces the legacy of bread as a staple ration for armies of conquest?
There were various other weak elements; it should go without saying around here that claiming the US needs to build more transit to help LGBTQ+ people of low incomes move states is an argument worthy of only a wanking motion, but beyond that shackling your arguments to such narrow slivers of the population when you're arguing for a universal good is just moronic. And he does the classic leftist tactic of insisting upon "democratizing" progresses by increasing public involvement and decentralizing decision-making, assuming of course that everyone shares his incredible niche politics. (The kicker is he had spent a good chunk of the previous segment going into the exploding costs of High Speed 2, maybe one of the better arguments ever against these notions) Just again and again the arguments came off as so staggeringly lacking self-awareness. But then again I looked up a few reviews for it and those were generally positive; essentially all coming from other left-leaning urbanist progressives who share very similar politics.
But it frustrates me endlessly as someone who actually wants to get these projects built is that ostensibly their biggest supporters are just so fucking bad at making the case for them. So somehow it ends up (at least in Ontario where I live) that it's only the conservatives who end up getting new infrastructure projects done.
Presumably the author wrongly expected that these sorts of counterarguments were the main objections that he had to advocate against? So obviously you start with what you believe the opposition to believe already, and then you refute it.
More options
Context Copy link
In Astralcodexten book review contests there was missing a good savage panning of a book.
What is his argument that this will help rail? I have the stereotype of projects being derailed (ha!) by decentralized and increased public involvement.
His argument in brief is that populations should have control over the services that effect them: so suburban services for a given city should be controlled by the local government, even though his ideal model sees a national, public-owned company owning the rail infrastructure, the rolling stock, hiring the employees, running the trains etc. So ownership should be centralised: planning and operation devolved. He sees this going hand in hand with extensive public consultation: not just at the planning phase but before that, starting at the proposal phase. He thinks (rather axiomatically) that direct education and involvement of the public of the benefits of a given infrastructure project will naturally engender far-reaching support for that project. The only hurdle he thinks that should be removed is any pondering of fiscal sense:
I think there is some merit to the notion of decentralisation; I think a decent chunk of the cost problems associated with modern transit construction, particularly in the Anglosphere, is the imbalance of revenue generation between municipal and higher levels of government that result in transit projects largely being designed by cities but paid for by higher levels of government; it invites buffet-style planning on the one end and political interference on the other. But I think in general his approach is just naïve beyond belief; the combination of the assumption that local interests will only work in everyone's best interests and abandoning any pretense of fiscal restraint obviously invites endless waste and graft.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This post is mostly correct, but feels like it's 6 years old. This was definitely going on during High Woke during Trump 45, but it's become less prevalent now. It's still occurring in a few areas, but D's have largely understood they've shot themselves in the foot and are backpedaling.
Here in Europe, I actually think it’s worse than ever. Maybe it’s the war atmosphere our media and elite are desperate to drum up.
It was never that bad in Europe in the first place - primarily because we have both laws and norms against firing an employee based on a social media campaign by their political opponents.
Yes - we don't have as strong protections against government censorship as the US. But a court appearance and three-figure fine (which is what happened to most of the people "arrested for posting memes") is actually less damaging that losing your income and health insurance.
More options
Context Copy link
Not sure about that. I'd say it has been worse.
I think overall people are just more insecure than they used to be. Trump getting reelected, right-wing parties gaining more support, war making a comeback in Europe, the whole goddamned pandemic episode, Überfremdung (increasing numbers of foreigners) becoming noticeable to normies - all of that shook people, one way or another. The instinctive desire to take the moral high ground and preach remains, but it seems that most of the regular people who would turn into opportunistic preachers are sufficiently unsure of the world right now that they're much subdued compared to a few years ago.
I think I should have been more specific - I'm not really talking about wokeness or cancel culture as it's existed in the past decade per se, I agree that's it's on a downward trend and that many people are now much more comfortable with opting out of progressive discourse or openly critiquing it. Especially today, "cancelling" someone carries much less weight than it did years ago, because there's now a massive contingency of the population that considers being "anti-woke" as it's own social identity and relishes in provoking and triggering the progressive project. You can quite literally make a career off being cancelled today, and the only ones who seem to truly suffer from cancellation anymore are left-liberal people enmeshed in progressive media and activism (which in turn gives the anti-woke crowd even more incentive to keep the siege atmosphere within the Left going and watch them tear each other apart).
What I'm trying to get at feels more like a kind of bitterness or "lashing out" of the liberal project towards its supposed own subjects. The pretence of being a self-justified, End of History blueprint for civilisation that wins based on the superior civic and economic model it offers compared to the dark and tyrannical systems of "the past" seems to be evaporating - all they still offer is the rhetorical comfort of being on "the good side" and how this fulfils some supposed higher historical purpose. They no longer have a believable hegemony in assuring a high standard of living, personal liberties (I think they truly do not understand how much of an anti-system awakening the pandemic was for many people), or embodying the will of the people (Migration being the most obvious case, but also Von der Leyen being weaselled into the leadership of the EU despite not being on the ballot) - so being on "the good side" seems to have next to zero actual advantages aside from validating bourgeois sensibilities and assuring you'll be invited to the next dinner party.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I live in a deep blue area, I can confirm that while there is some renewed understanding of reality, its penetration has been very nonuniform.
More options
Context Copy link
Months, maybe. No backpedaling was happening until Trump won again, and I'm still not convinced it's happening.
Don Lemon was on Maher’s podcast and argued that character’s like AOC hold the future of the Democratic Party in their hands. I’ve seen this sentiment echoed elsewhere from other well connected democrat-operatives within the media.
It galls me that someone would believe that the democrats lost because they ran with candidates that cynically pushed woke talking points and instead the party’s future will be saved by candidates that actually believe those same woke talking points.
Whilst cynicism is always an ugly trait when trying to win hearts and minds, it was actually a point in favour in comparison to genuinely promoting wokism - at least from the perspective of your average voter.
The steelman of their theory of the case is that people like AOC combine both economic leftism with the identity politics.
So it's more the idea that the other wing of the party uses idpol cynically to appear more left-wing because it's not economically populist enough("will breaking up the big banks end racism?") to win. AOC meanwhile will deliver on the bread and butter issues people care about while soothing the idpol wing of the Democrats.
This theory might have made sense for Hillary. But Biden did subscribe to everything bagel liberalism and failed in spite (or because) of his economic populism.
Ultimately I think it's an attempt by Democrats to have their cake and eat it too. They have no real way to untangle themselves from their identity politics. It's the belief system of too many educated, politically engaged liberals. Bernie bent to it because you can't run a campaign if the Voxs of the world are attacking you for being anti-immigrant because you think they lower blue-collar wages and all of the people who volunteer, who donate and call in all have the same politics.
So the theory is to simply bypass the problem: if Democrats provide healthcare, housing and jobs they won't have to choose and can just drag the working class along with them. The culture war is a "distraction", in the sense that their views should not be compromised on but that the opposing views are obviously not as important to their opponents as material conditions.
Obvious problems are that this is assuming that their cultural beliefs don't hurt their ability to deliver (@johnfabian has pointed out the issues in left-wing urbanism which simply needs to resolve its issue with things like endless vetos and crime to go anywhere). And that their very refusal to bend on these issues gives the lie to the idea that it's all just ephemera. If they won't bend despite the incentives to do so, why should their opponents?
It's some cargo cult attempt to recreate an FDR coalition in an age of identity politics with pseudo-Marxist handwaves that no one actually consistently holds to.
More options
Context Copy link
She’s enough of a snake that when it comes time to embrace a different message she will not skip a beat.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Purity spirals are driven by individuals taking an opportunity to improve their own position.
Say there's somebody in your volunteer radical labour union who is an excellent organizer: he's likeable, outgoing, genuinely committed to the cause, and works a blue collar job where he actually puts into practice the organization's techniques and principles. (This is in direct contrast with most of the membership, who are grad students LARPing as workers.)
This guy is accused of mild sexual misconduct. Is the organization best served by a. immediately expelling him, b. investigating the incident then deciding what to do, or c. trying to find a compromise that ensures he can continue to do his good work?
Answer: what's best for the organization is totally irrelevant. Somebody is going to take position A. They're going to win, because the organization has no defenses against it - this is a question of good and evil, not of tradeoffs. Anybody on side A wins and gains a crumb of status and maybe power; anybody on side B or C loses.
Part of the reason that the radical left is so susceptible to this is that everybody has the authority to start this process, but there is often nobody with the authority to say "we're not doing that".
In an actual blue collar environment, this kind of accusation would merit a 'so what?' and the opportunist advocating for A would wind up with egg on his face. But grad students upset they don't make as much as a panda express manager are different.
More options
Context Copy link
The people who actively push for position A may be doing so for cynical status jockeying reasons, but I think the organizational response that enables their success is an understandable, if unfortunate, reaction to decades of people using position C to argue for no consequences for immoral behavior ever. When people hear that Comrade Bob was accused of sexual misconduct, they immediately think of Harvey Weinstein and Father Jim, panic, and do whatever they can to avoid accusations of conducting their own cover-up. In that context, arguing for nuance is typically going to fail. Now, as those scandals fade into the background, there may be a chance to successfully push for position B. It seems to me that this is starting to happen, though that is admittedly just a gut impression.
That reminds me of something I was reading last week. There was a student athlete at Stanford who committed suicide, which is sad and terrible. The reason? She was due for a disciplinary hearing: bad Stanford, I guess. News articles then went into what happened, and they usually framed it as she was facing the hearing because she spilled a cup of coffee on someone.
Hmm. Digging deeper, she had thrown a hot cup of coffee onto another student's face. Okay, this is getting juicy. Maybe he deserved it? What did he do? Well, the news articles breathlessly reported he had been accused of sexually assaulting someone.
Finally, I find out the root cause: he had kissed one of her team members without consent.
These are all obvious questions to ask, and the actual story is pretty straightforward, a series of banal student hijinks that ended in tragedy. But the sheer unwillingness for any news articles to simply tell the story is a result of the dynamics you mention. No one wants to be the bad guy and say "well actually, Stanford didn't brutally murder an innocent girl to help cover up a rapist's crimes," because if you do, you're all of a sudden part of the rape cult, opening you to attack and hurting your career advancement.
More options
Context Copy link
Often the offense is something less consequential, like "is not fully up-to-date with pronoun etiquette" or "works with fossil fuels".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You expel from the organization everyone that takes position A with the "Everyone that doesn't believe in due process is not someone we want here"
That might work if the organization was sovereign. It almost certainly isn't.
The government has a huge say in how things like sexual harassment is dealt with because it determines if the organization has taken all reasonable steps to avoid a hostile environment. If Obama says that sexual harassment is a violation of rights of female students and creates a hostile environment you have a strong incentive to take all claims seriously.
It will not look good come the lawsuit if you've been firing the very sorts of people who will be zealous about preventing said harassment and assault, even at the cost of a few good people.
More options
Context Copy link
Who is "you"?
SJ is very trigger-happy and has weak leadership; there is for the most part no "you" that actually has the security in power to take the locally-disincentivised action and actually make the mob follow along (rather than simply being replaced).
More options
Context Copy link
Sufficiently decayed institutions will have kangaroo courts as part of their statutes. Given enough time, A becomes "due process".
The whole fights in the FOSS community about CoC enabled entryism were about just this.
More options
Context Copy link
In this specific sort of example, the cheat code that people discovered was claiming that due process that includes things like trying to figure out the facts of the matter based on evidence was misogynistic when applied to women accusing men of bad sexual behavior. This, I think, was an instantiation of the larger principle that "lived experiences" described by people who were categorized as "oppressed" were incontrovertible. It seems to me that more and more people are growing wise to this vulnerability, which makes me wonder what the next cheat code will be, to circumvent inconvenient things like the sort of due process you're talking about.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's because they are more vulnerable than ever that they have to tighten the screws. All that tolerance, discourse, and "the marketplace of ideas" were just a flex, like a boxer sticking his neck out knowing the other fighter doesn't have the skills to land a punch. It also seems like a straight-forwardly correct move in the short term to alienate a few powerless people and keep an iron grip on the institutions, than risk losing them for the sake of being reasonable.
More options
Context Copy link
I think it's simple; you mostly apply mistake theory and are trying to understand a particularly pathological strain of conflict theory. One that sees any deviation from what is considered the obvious good viewpoint and belief as being driven by malice and thus proof that the deviant is an enemy.
It's hardly unique to the left, but I'd agree in recent times, it's been mostly observable in them, as it has a hard time growing without a certain level of social and cultural dominance. It's hard to blind yourself to not everyone who disagree with you being Hitler if you constantly have people who disagree with you who obviously aren't Hitler shoved in your face; it was much easier for the left to insulate their filter bubbles. As their cultural and social peaked has likely peaked and is in decline, we're likely (hopefully) going to see this strain recede as well. I think that can be seen in Gavin Newsome trying to front run it and having mostly agreable discussions with people quite far outside of the left's overton window.
More options
Context Copy link
It's easier to understand when you take into consideration that our current political environment is following closely on the heels of a full blown moral panic. Given the scale and scope of the moral panic, a lot of previous cultural assumptions can no longer be taken for granted.
I don't think the left has fully grasped this yet. So a lot of things that they previously assumed to be true, ideas like "They're just kids protesting, society will give them leeway", or "Making people feel uncomfortable for the sake of X disadvantaged group is likely to be met with nuanced consideration." are suddenly no longer valid. I think once this paradigm shift has been internalized, the bulk of the left leaning groups will chart a new course. Either that or fade into irrelevancy.
It feels like we've been hopping from one moral panic to another since at least 2001.
Would you mind narrowing that down?
The social justice explosion from roughly 2012-2023.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is a major part of it. There has been plenty written about how the purity-spiraling progressive left, i.e. the woke/idpol/crt/dei/sjw crowd, are following a religion that fills a vacuum left by the rejection of traditional religions, so I won't reiterate it here. The thing about religions is that you don't need to win in any way that makes sense in the real world to win according to the tenets of your religion. In the case of this religion, being more pure than thou is one way of winning.
And likely there's a major self-validation component to it as well, in that this group of people tend to be far more individualistic than most people, valuing freedom and self-expression far greater than most people. This is evident in many things, including their hair/tattoo/piercing/fashion choices and their support for transing children. Thus it would make sense that they put greater value in the individual feeling of righteousness they get from putting down someone less pure than them than in their movement winning more supporters and becoming more capable of affecting change in this world.
More options
Context Copy link
Dominant ideologies can afford to gatekeep; weaker ideologies can’t. The far left struggles because in some ways it is both strong (it largely agreed with the liberal consensus on social issues, tolerance, immigration, identity, prisons/justice etc) and in other ways it is weak (private property, capitalism, the existence of rich people). As you note, this means it struggles to build an electoral coalition beyond young middle class students who agree with the liberals on social issues but who are personally poor, and therefore sympathetic to leftist arguments around redistribution.
And it’s worth noting that the ‘adults in the room’ in the DNC seem to know what they need to do to be electorally competitive. They just can’t get the party to moderate on trans and immigration.
I don't think that that's their biggest issue so much as the part where they're utterly unwilling to pursue any policies benefiting the common people if such would slightly inconvenience their Wall-Street donors....
This doesn’t seem to hold republicans back too much, so it’s probably not that.
More options
Context Copy link
Biden pursued a lot of what the left sees as "policies benefitting the common people" (expanded child tax credit, student loan forgiveness, left-friendly reindustialisation like the CHIPS act, big infrastructure bill, a more pro-union NLRB and a more anti-big-business FTC). And this worked - the Biden administration saw the fastest low-end real wage growth, lowest unemployment, and highest employment since the Clinton boom.
Neither the left nor the common people gave him any credit for it. In the case of the left, this was because the American left (apart from AOC) are retarded. In the case of the common people it was because the typical voter (who is increasingly likely to be retired) is more bothered by modest-by-1970's standards inflation than they are by poor labour market performance for people less fortunate than themselves. This 2012 blog post by Steve Randy Waldman was prophetic - when offered a full employment economy, the voters hated it.
Any suggestions of similar, still running blogs or communities?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There's a perception that Democratic politicians are particularly fringe or loony with respect to trans issues or immigration and in general they're not. The problem is that the people who are extreme are uniformly Democrats, and that gets projected on to the rest of the party. It doesn't help that these people tend to, by their nature, be the most motivated, loudest, and most likely to get signal-boosted by their political opponents.
I think the equivalent trend for Republicans is something like racism. Most Republican politicians are not racist, certainly not in the good ol' boy kind of way. But for Americans who personally know racists or look on social media and see examples of politicians who are overtly racist it's uniformly Republicans.
Maybe on a personal level, but as political figures, there was and largely still is an absolute consensus within the Democratic party on these issues or at least the supposed core beliefs underlying them. The fact that there is a diversity hire Supreme Court Justice who was literally unable to define the word "woman" during her Senate hearings and was voted in unanimously by the Democrats should attest to this. I'm sure quite a few Senators privately think she's a moron, but their political actions are what determines their politics, not what might be whispered behind closed doors.
If you define racism as "being resentful of black people", sure. But if I consider racism as any undue or malicious injection of race as a marker of superiority or inferiority as pertaining to a political issue, it's most certainly been the left-liberal wing of the spectrum that's by far the most common offender. I actually remember very little hostile discussions of race in Western politics growing up - there was a kind of consensus that fixating on race was low-class skinhead behaviour and that the most one should do is be courteous and non-judgemental. Every now and then you'd get a "George Bush doesn't care about black people" moment, but those seemed more like rebellious provocations and tabloid scandals than any kind of real societal divide. Here in Europe, the big topic around race 15+ years ago was football fans making monkey noises when black players of the opposing team were on the field - again, condemned as low class, provincial behaviour mainly driven by stupidity and a lack of education rather than any kind of malice or "institutional oppression".
More options
Context Copy link
The vast majority of Democrat politicians will dutifully vote for secretly transing kids in schools and installing backdoors to enable unlimited third world migration. The official position of the party is the loony, and they do not tolerate dissent.
Even the slimmest Democrat state trifecta in a competitive state will result in them speedrunning the california experience
(sorry I don't have links, I remember lib fake news gushing about how good this is)https://prospect.org/politics/2023-05-22-new-minnesota-vikings/Democrats never slow down, and they never defect.
More options
Context Copy link
Is this actually true? Who was the Democrat governor banning puberty blockers in kids in 2021? Who was the Senate Democrat voting for the wall in 2018? And Biden officials? Come on. They put trans people in multiple positions, had the crossdressing airport thief, and their border policy intentionally massively increased both illegal immigration as well as net of the "asylum claims" that no one actually thinks are legitimate.
Well, there's Gavin Newsom's post-election switch to opposing trans athletes in women's sports.
You can take a kind of functionalist position and say that Democratic politicians are what they do, and so in 2020 they were radical trans ideologues. Sure. But it doesn't give much insight into how they will respond to changing circumstances. Democratic electeds don't have deeply held principles (no more than Republicans do): they react to incentives, around easily understood things like power, money, and status.
The extremists driving the unpopular trans positions, on the other hand, are not going to suddenly abandon their views once they start costing them power, money, and status. (And the broader Democratic base will shift to supporting whatever Democratic leadership and media tells them to.)
You have to do the former and be skeptical of the latter, because every Democrat in my lifetime in a major statewide or national race has ran to the center, only to govern far to the left of their campaign positions.
More options
Context Copy link
Honest question : how else would you qualify someone's politics, other than by their voluntary political actions?
The incentives they experience and respond to. You might have two different people and, at a particular moment of time, they respond the same way to the incentives they face. But if the landscape of incentives change, their actions might diverge.
E.g. if your mental model of Gavin Newsom involves him being deeply ideological on trans issues, then you wouldn't have been able to predict he'd switch to moderating his positions when his party was faced with a broad electoral loss (and wanting to prepare himself for a national run).
And, on the other side, until Trump came most Republican politicians would have condemned broad tariffs and been pro-war. But change the political landscape, and they change their positions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The direct implication of this is that we don't know if they won't come right back to sending trans women to women's sports and prisons the moment they win.
We don't know. But it's not guaranteed they will, and what determines whether Democrats will are how powerful trans activists are when Democrats win, not past actions or politicians' stated values at one moment.
A downside of this framework is that power is opaque, and the clearest way to seeing whether trans groups are powerful is whether they can cause Democratic politicians to send trans people to women's sports and prisons. Beyond that, we have to read tea leaves: how does media treat trans issues? Do tech platforms give them full censorship rights?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are definitely high-profile Americans who are both Democrats and frequently regarded as racist. Mostly involving antisemitism. To name one example, Hasan Piker.
More options
Context Copy link
Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are not true believers. But they don’t push back against the true believers running the party.
Like republicans may not be politically correct about race but they’re visibly uncomfortable with racism. Governors and senators do not retweet the 14 words and happily condemn neoNazis(yes, I’m sure you can dig up state legislators, but my point is that among democrats extremism on trans and immigration is not limited to state legislators).
In my state, Gilberto Hinojosa was ousted as state party chair not when he proved incompetent but when he opined that the party should take a chill pill on trans, purely for electoral reasons.
More options
Context Copy link
My issue is that on the left, there’s zero pushback. When trans activists host preschool events in drag at the library, the pushback comes from Republicans, but not liberals. When BLM was burning down parts of major cities, not only were democrats not doing anything to stop it, but were giving bail money and public support to the movement. Right now in the great Tesla burnings, I’ve yet to hear one person on the left say “this has gone too far. We don’t support vandalism, and don’t harass people who own a Tesla.”
The right, to a fairly large degree rein in their radical wing. No GOP member would let a Proud Boy cover a mosque in bacon without condemning it. They don’t pay bail money for riots as a matter of course. If people March with Nazi flags, the right will scream at every opportunity from every available microphone, on every podcast and blog that they don’t support this nonsense.
And I think it’s the arrogance of having almost all of the cathedral on their side. They know they aren’t going to face blowback from the media and they know their districts are mostly safe. They don’t have to worry about their wings because they’re the ones in control.
Scott Aaronson keeps rightly lambasting Musk for not doing this about the salute thing.
More options
Context Copy link
If anyone on the left had said that Tesla vandalism is going too far, do you think your media/info channels would tell you about it? What do you think the motivations are of the news sources covering this? My prior is that any right coded media source would downplay/ignore any such statements.
Your statement about the right reining itself in seems pretty shaky to me. If people march with Nazi flags they'll scream from the rooftops but Elon Musk himself questionably, ambiguously does a Nazi salute on a huge stage, notably doesn't apologize or even acknowledge that this would be offensive to some people, even if it was initially accidental,and the right as a whole lets him off scot free? This doesn't support your argument. And neither does the bit about riots, unless you think everyone in the Capitol building on the 6th was actually no criminal at all. I recall lots of financial and legal support being thrown their way.
If Musk's "Nazi salute" was a creation of the left-wing media, this becomes completely explainable.
The thing about Nazi flags is that you don't need to be politically biased to conclude that they are Nazi flags.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Tracing woodgrains has pushed back against the Tesla stuff.
Tracingwoodgrains also has a history of deliberate efforts to undercut the credibility or ability of political opponents to signal-boosting attestations of progressive political excesses, which includes things like the tesla stuff.
Tracing pushes back on a matter of success of tactics towards their preferred outcomes, not kind. Namely, when things are viewed as counter-productive to Tracing's preferences.
More options
Context Copy link
Trace also would never survive a DNC primary or a week as a host on CNN. So he is not a good example of the mainstream left.
Trace isn't on the left at all. He is a dissident conservative who is trying to build bridges to the centre-left because the centre-right in the US appears to no longer exist.
If the center right no longer exists (not true IMO) the center left hasn't for decades. So, I don't see the point of trying to make that point.
More options
Context Copy link
Oh please. Yeah, I heard his origin story of being a Mitt Romney republican, but there's nothing conservative about him. His entire posting history here indicates his goal boils down to 'tard-wrangling the hardcore progressives so they stop scaring away the
hoesnormies.I'm also struggling to charitably respond to the assertion that a center-right no longer exists. The neocons don't get to define the center-right, and disagreeing with them doesn't mean you're "far-right".
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
I'd say the biggest problem is that they get appointed to be the Secretary of the Public Health Service, where they hatch conspiracies to abolish age limits on "gender affirming procedures".
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