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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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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.