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 -
As I said, a substantial minority of Trump supporters are straightforwardly malignant. "I don't care any more, I just want to watch the world burn so other people suffer as much as I did" is a perfectly comprehensible response to imagined (or even real) oppression, although not a creditable one, or a platform anyone could win an election on if they were clear about what they were doing.
I do not think "the Western proletariat" is a unitary actor, or that they support right-populist parties by supermajority. To the extent that the views of working-class Trump supporters are visible, they voted for Trump in 2024 to get cheaper eggs, not $20/hr non-union assembly line jobs.
In any case, tariffs are a tool and not a policy. The signals about what policy Trump is trying to achieve with tariffs are, to be polite, confused, but looking at the administration's policies in the round, I do not see any evidence at all for "bring back the type of union manufacturing jobs the 1950's economy was built on". I do not see much evidence for "bring back manufacturing" - we know what a manufacturing-focussed industrial policy looks like and how it uses tariffs because most countries have been pursuing one most of the time from the Age of Exploration through to the Bretton Woods Era. Critically, the tariffs vary by product type (with the highest tariffs on manufactured consumer goods) much more than by country of origin.
Nobody voted for Trump because of eggs, everybody voted for Trump because of 20 million foreigners (probably more), including 10 million let in with close to zero vetting in just the last administration.
Migration is the single most important issue in the US and Europe, and you can tell by watching the French and German election results, where the supposedly different parties reliably line up into anti-migration and everybody else.
Trump is anti-migration, which is what allowed him to bulldoze his way through establishment republicans in 2016, and I have no explanation but providence to explain that the chart that saved his life is the one charting the insane increase of entries during the Biden administration.
Very much agreed - the culture war is about culture, not economics. And immigration is the most important social issue in basically every rich country. But neither the narrative nor the teams has changed on immigration since it first became an issue, which was well before Trump came down the escalator to take advantage of it.
Conventional wisdom is that the reason why Trump got 49.8% of the vote in 2024 instead of the 46.7% he got in 2020 is something to do with economics, and if you ask the minority of voters who care about economics more than culture, they talked about prices and not jobs - unsurprisingly, given that the Biden economy was doing just fine on jobs and low-end wages.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Then you're simply haven't paid attention to any significant political event in the West for the last two decades and I don't know what to tell you. Who do you think is voting for all those far right parties in Europe? Why do you think Brexit happened?
If your answer to those is thought terminating clichés about either racism, some nebulous social media influence or people being too dumb to figure out what's in their interest, you're actively choosing not to understand what's going on.
See this is exactly what I'm talking about. You are in a bubble so your only experience of those people's discourse is the memes you and they exchange against each other about eggs and the price of gas. But you see, proles don't actually make political decisions solely on the back "I did that" Biden stickers.
What they see is that they live in a country that largely sees them as superfluous non competitive relics and look for any politician that isn't an active enemy of theirs.
Donald Trump may be totally unable to implement his economic views correctly, but he's a friend, not an enemy. And that class of people can count their elite friends on one hand, so naturally they'll fall in behind him.
You're welcome to call that spite if you want, but the fact is you can't buy friendship with slightly cheaper eggs.
My friend, you are huffing WAY too much internet. Trump won because a bunch of normies were tired of everything being too expensive and the incumbent administration looked like a bunch of boobs. If he fucks the economy into the toilet in ways that affect a regular person the GOP will 100% get utterly brutalized in the midterms, and Trump will spend the rest of his presidency dodging impeachment attempts and accomplishing nothing.
You are drastically, drastically, DRASTICALLY overestimating the electoral relevance of based right-wing resentment-mongers. They exist, but they've never been anything but part of the GOP base and they ain't shit without the normies who just vote for the opposition whenever they feel bad about the economy.
What about the onshoring that is absolutly not going to happen because building new factories requires more time than these tariffs could ever be expected to last? (IE 4 years tops and more likely two years if the Republicans do badily enough in the midterms)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
20-25% of the population in most countries - which is not enough votes to include a supermajority of the proletariat for any standard meaning of the term "proletariat".
The right-populist parties that are doing significantly better than that - most obviously PiS in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary - aren't focussed on bringing back manufacturing jobs. PiS is talking about bringing back farm jobs in a country that was 20% agrarian within living memory. Fidesz is conventionally right-wing on economics (as is Reform in the UK and the AfD in Germany). And of course both parties, like other right-populist parties, focus on cultural issues over economic ones in their campaigning.
Because retired people voted 2:1 in favour of it. Age was a stronger predictor of how people voted in the referendum than social class. If we define "proletariat" in the orthodox Marxist sense of people who have to work for other people in order to eat, the proletariat voted 55-45 for remain.
Given your response to @sohois, we don't disagree that the culture war is primarily about culture, not economics. And we don't disagree that you can carve out a demographic that does show supermajority support for right-populist parties that is in some sense more "proletariat"-like than the demographic of Motteposters. But if you are using the word "proletariat" to exclude working-age women, which you need to do if you want to make "The proletariat supports right-populist parties" a useful generalisation, you are using the word in a non-standard way. But that is an argument about the meaning of words. Where we have a substantive disagreement is about the economic views of right-populist voters.
If you look at:
then the conclusion you come to is "bring back assembly line jobs" is only a major right-populist cause in the US, and probably only because Trump made it one. The best economic right-populist message in essentially every European country is "we will protect the welfare-state-for-the-old by cutting white-collar government employees and welfare for immigrants" - i.e. it isn't about jobs or the private sector economy at all. The second-best message is "enviro-loonies are destroying your lifestyle", which could be about manufacturing jobs, but in practice turns out to be about domestic energy consumption (including private car use). The main time "enviro-loonies are destroying jobs" was a winning election message was around the Dutch nitrogen crisis, and the jobs were farm jobs.
There are right-populists with libertarianish economic policies. There are right-populists with agrarian economic policies. There are right-populists with what used to be mainstream centre-left economic policies. The common thread is that they promise to preserve the welfare-state-for-the-old and that they blame immigration for the inability of the centre-right to do so - not that they want to bring back manufacturing jobs.
I have actually done the work of politics - if you are running for office, or doing field work for someone who is, you can't avoid speaking to the sort of older socially conservative voters who are the traditional core vote of right populist parties. (I am aware that some countries have an new right-populist constituency among male Zoomers, but the UK isn't one of them and I got out of active politics before the Zoomers were old enough to vote). These people also exist in my extended family. And guess what - if you let them talk about policy, they mostly talk about crime and immigration. And when you do hear something about economics, 2/3 of the time it is a variant of "how can we afford X when we can't afford Y" where X is something that is perceived as benefitting foreigners, and most of the other 1/3 is about how much more expensive things are than they used to be. You don't have to take my anecdotes on authority - the point I am making is that I have lived experience of doing politics, and it is consistent with the data.
"Friend" is what you call someone who is on your side based on shared values - i.e. it's about culture, not economics.
This has been a message in right-populism since Bush, at the very latest.
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe I'm the one in a bubble, but my experience of talking to this sort of people involves quite a lot more specific complaints about outsourcing and the disintegration of the industrial base. Then again I am French and most of the paupers I know are as well, so that colors my view quite a bit. But I did connect with people from other countries in the West and insofar as they fit this sociological mold, they seemed to have similar complaints, if expressed in less Marxist terms than what you'd find in France.
In any case, I appreciate you jumping to the interesting question here which is indeed what economic policy right-wing populist people actually support, given that your description of their messaging is broadly accurate.
I think that unlike what you're saying "we will protect the welfare-state-for-the-old by cutting white-collar government employees and welfare for immigrants" and "enviro-loonies are destroying jobs" are absolutely something that can be reduced into a coherent ideological economic policy.
And that's pretty self evidently that of economic nationalism.
The general narrative goes like this: the globalist elites passed free trade agreements and setup international trade unions to allow themselves to profit from arbitrage between every country and get the cheapest ressource and cheapest labour for their enterprises, in doing so they detached themselves from the bonds of national loyalty that previously locked them to the lower class of a given country and instead started to rule together on the entire world. Nationalists obviously view this as a betrayal, and moreover the generalization of migration as another way to further globalist interests through arbitrage again, with the added benefit of dissolving any remaining bonds of loyalty among populations by creating a multicultural free for all where the institutions that held nations together (Family, Religion, etc) are systematically destroyed in favor of ever more atomized alienation. Even things like environmentalism fit into this narrative as yet another assertion of domination where the interests and moral fads of those global elites come at the expense of the local native.
Moreover, the divide also maps onto that general opposition between cities and the countryside, given that the global elites almost exclusively live in large international metropolises whilst the local natives are most concentrated in suburban and countryside areas.
I'm not sure whether you'd call this political ideology cultural or economic, but in some sense that doesn't really matter. That constituency is real, and it's growing.
And the somewhat diverse economic policies you list can all be explained within that context, as pragmatic adaptations to the needs of the local constituency colored by the local nationalist tradition.
No, it's what you call someone who is on your side.
I suspect this is very much a country-to-country issue. When you live in a small country with a high income that is basically forced to be dependent on trade (not having all that much in the way of natural resource apart from lots of timber and some minerals), anything but basic-level protectionism is a dead issue, perhaps unless it's the whole of EU doing it. France is bigger and has former colonies it can still tap into and a general do-it-yourself culture insofar as political economy goes, it can afford to be protectionist in a way that Finland can't.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
People that don't like immigration.
Immigration.
Insofar as we're doing a class analysis, that's about exactly what I'm saying.
Not saying the cultural aspects don't matter at least as much, but we're talking about economic policy here, after all.
I'm not sure this really maps to right-wing growth in Europe. Le Pen's economics are close to Trump in her economic nationalism, but Farage is an old school libertarian who wanted to make the Brexit campaign all about opening up free trade outside of the EU. Meloni has retreated pretty quickly into bog standard neoliberalism. Can't comment on Wilders or the AfD, but there's nothing to suggest that wider right wing movements are an economic protest
I think that Farage's libertarianism is bogging down Reform, if anything. The Right has a problem where, because it's social death to be further right than David Cameron, it's drawing from a very small pool of potential politicians. In a lot of countries, you get maybe one serious, charismatic far-right politician and you just have to live with their quirks.
This is incidentally why the left tries so hard to get rid of them via lawfare. Not only does it narrow the pipeline, but if you can nobble this decade's Great Man then you've got a good long time before another one comes along. Look at how (on the other side) socialism just collapsed after Corbyn got pushed out. Albeit in that case he lost an election pretty badly.
I'd say it's not so much his libertarianism as the fact he is solely a libertarian, he's not really right-wing culturally at all. His aims have always aligned with right-wing voters so he's always courted them but it's pretty clear he doesn't care much about things like immigration
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