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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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The right in the US is a collection of interest groups and not something top down. Hence, no overarching narrative. You’ve got rural people, you’ve got religious people, you’ve got certain business interests- all of which believe they’re being targeted by the government for progressive-ish reasons that mostly are not the same. You’ve got people who are sympathetic to those groups for whatever reason. You’ve got pro-growth libertarians. You’ve got populists. You have a much smaller group of racially conscious and socially conservative but not driven by religion- sort of alt-right adjacent.

These groups might agree on some things in broad strokes. But, they’re going to have different views on root causes and very different narratives.

I don't disagree, but what's interesting is even just last year or perhaps the year before the view was that the left is fundamentally a collection of different interest groups. They've always been perceived as being more fragmented, which is to some extent a necessary function of the fact that they commit so passionately to given causes, which themselves are typically focused on a given group. Especially because those causes usually compete to some extent for primacy within a hierarchy of suffering, the end goal being which group suffers and experiences prejudice the most.

But to some extent your comment is what I'm talking about. I don't think that description is inaccurate, but I'm skeptical that it tells the whole story. I think intellectually there is much more cohesiveness on the right, and it the most relevant split is between the alt right and the conventional right. That also strikes me as somewhat of a progressive's conception of the right, in that it frames the primary binding force of each segment of the right as the perception that they are being targeted by the right. That glosses over the true character of the right in the way I'm suggesting Reuters and Bloomberg do. It's accurate in that those groups do, generally, vehemently oppose progressives, but it's a pejorative articulation of that view, in that it frames it as necessarily conspiratorial, and implies that their view of progressives are of poor enough substance to not warrant further examination.

But, similarly, those groups you describe on the right have always been present and have coexisted in harmony to the point that they were able to operate as a unified front.

I think what’s missing here is that conservatives are, well, conservative and liberals are, well, liberal. Or to put it another way- there’s real personality difference, or at least differences in ideal personalities, which tend to strongly affect how institutions and coalition mates interact with each other to the same or greater extent as personality differences. Thus you see less infighting on the right in a lot of cases where they have less to agree on.

That sounds plausible. Can you elaborate on that?

I'm pretty confident that the left is also a collection of interest groups. We're just in closest proximity to the Extremely Online segment. The Internet makes it easy to claim membership in half a dozen issues at once, but the people who take one seriously are way less likely to get along with the others.

I'm pretty confident that the left is also a collection of interest groups.

To clarify, are you talking about interest groups like non-whites, non-straights, non-cis, etc.? All of these groups don't necessarily disagree in the way that hydroacetylene is arguing. That is to say, I'm not aware of black progressives claiming that homophobia isn't a problem, or that there is even one specific root problem in the country - they seem to argue that there are as many problems as there are bigotries.

In contrast, a modern atheistic alt-righter is not going to agree at all with a religious conservative on the problem facing society, though they may just strategically delay that fight.

I think this is a difference between the modern left and right: right-wingers, at least in America, seem somewhat more likely to be single-issue wonks (hence the disparate coalition that has been the GOP, between business libertarians, evangelicals, and nationalists); left-wingers tend to glom onto multiple causes at once, only favoring one thing over others when the zeitgeist calls for it.

No, I mean anti-racists, feminists, communards, gender abolitionists, tone police, et cetera. It’s way easier to add a bunch of hashtags on a tweet than it is to show up to rallies for competing causes.

The relationship between LGBT advocates and Black advocates might be a good example. Black Americans are not particularly trans-friendly. Intersectionality attempts to paper over this with discussion of how poorly the Black LGBT population is treated, skirting the question of who perpetuates such treatment.

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