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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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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.

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.

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.

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".