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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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I don’t think these attitudes are a response to any single recent event; they have been around on the left for decades. If you read 60's counterculture protest manifestos and ignore the references to "our socialist brothers in Cuba and Vietnam" they would not be out of place on a college campus today. What has changed is the percentage of the population holding such views, but it has been a gradual increase.

I noted the decline in faith in the American civic religion when I observed the different responses to the January 6 riot among my Boomer relatives and Zoomer peers (all more or less liberal). The former treated it as though something sacred had been violated, a church desecrated, the graves of their ancestors dug up and smashed (pick your analogy). The latter, while still angry, viewed it through the lens of harm to individuals: people died, they wanted to hurt our politicians, it was an act of insurrection that could have led to civil war, etc. Trying to explain the way the older generation felt to the younger was like translating between two unrelated languages.

Iraq 2, 2008, Occupy Wall-Street is a big cluster inflection point where some lefty subset of the population realized that the lib subset just didn't give a shit about any of their hobby horses, so fuck 'em.