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Natalie is digging her own grave by making this argument.
She is effectively saying that : "All historic change is was a result of coordinated bullying, and that the coordinated bullying of JK Rowling is justifiable as the next step towards social change desired by a subsection of the population." Natalie does not spend any time talking about the merits of her stance or the social social change she desires. (other than circular logic).
Power trumps all. Convincing someone or productive debate are for plebs like Megan Phelps-Roper.
This is what a ringing endorsement of Ron DeSantis sounds like. The new right has taken exactly this approach to politics. Who needs intellectuals who spend all their time convincing, when we can simply employ the most effective collective bullying technique in a democracy : elections. Just as once side can force you to use pronouns, the other now forces you not to.
In a desperate fight between soft-power (twitter cancellations, university tenure, hiring decisions) vs hard-power (supreme court, local govts), hard power always wins. Soft-power fares much better in an era that favors convincing over bullying, because hard power always feels like bullying. But in a world where bullying is ok, hard power can run rampant. Republicans are clueless about soft-power in 2023 (with the decline of the Church), but they sure know how to get themselves some hard-power.
“Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”
I personally still have some hope for good-faith negotiators.
The use of hard-power or hardened-soft-power to achieve goals feels unfaithful to the spirit of the US. However, in practice, Natalie is indeed right. Social change is often forced down our throats before we're willing to digest it. But with equal odds, Natalie might just find herself with a bitter pill being forced down her own proverbial throat.
She's accurately identifying the state of play. The right isn't gonna accept trans people no matter what at this point, when you start calling people pedophiles the conversation is kind of over.
I don't think the tactics of trans activists matter that much electorally. Us political obsessives can fight all we want about trans people but electorally it's all gonna get swamped by abortion/inflation among normies.
When you openly and blatantly state your intent to convert people's children to an ideologically driven belief system backed by the power of the state, then no conversation is possible. Arguably it never started.
"We don't have to convince YOU of anything, we'll just teach your kids to hate your beliefs and we may convince a few of them to undergo invasive surgery to alter their very personal identity, against YOUR wishes."
Explain to me how there's any room for negotiation when such a position has been moved to the forefront of one side's platform?
Thats the default though. 60 years ago kids were being indoctrinated into an ideological system with the backing of the state, whether their parents liked it or not. And 40 years ago, and 20 years ago.
Arguably the issue with America right now is not that kids are being indoctrinated but that they are not all being indoctrinated the same way. Thats how you get a cohesive polity. Too many states, too many systems. Call it a civic religion, a shared mythos or whatever. The point is what you are complaining about is not new, every kid is getting indoctrinated into something.
The fight is over what. But the sholip on not having kids indoctrinated at all sailed a long time ago. But
60 years ago it wasn't at all surprising that a Nixon or a Reagan could win 49 out of 50 states running on a platform of US civic religion.
A religion that academics, imagining themselves to be somehow more worthy than everyone, have always deeply resented and accordingly have spent the last 60 years trying to undermine and destroy.
Academics didn't undermine it. Its own inconsistencies and the number of people excluded from it did I think. In practice if not in theory.
I think a version of it can still stand, the shining city on the hill, but it has to be less exclusionary, probably less wrapped in actual religion.
It's nowhere near as exclusionary now after successive waves of accepting other groups - so why doesn't it reconstitute itself?
The answer is that academics and progressives continue to problematize it as fundamentally racist and sexist* and to push more atomizing forms of identity and a replacement civic cult (Pride, the "LGBT" nation).
* To give one of many examples: the 1619 project was made recently to attack the founding story of America. It wasn't published in NYT in the 1950s or in the Jim Crow era.
Do they problematize it? Or are they seeing actual problems? Are they pushing more atomizing forms of identity or were their forms of identity not accepted so they rebelled? Have they succeeded in convincing everyone their forms of identity should be accepted on the shining city or is that still ongoing with significant numbers of hold outs? Chicken or egg?
They problematize it.
I just edited my post to add an example: The 1619 Project is a deliberate and historically dubious attempt to problematize the founding myth of the US. The problems of 1776 I think are pretty obvious, there was no need to go looking for trouble. But apparently it's not enough to simply point out those undisputed issues.
They're pushing it. In a variety of ways. Even if we put aside that their refusal to countenance ROGD and their pushing of pronouns may lead to kids adopting it.
Just their general denigration of straight,white males and their pushing of AA gives people a reason to adopt other identities in progressive spaces. The funniest and most out there examples of this are of course people who claim to be a totally different race (usually Native American or First Nations) so they can get some sinecure.
They've made serious gains with gays, blacks, Latinos and so on. Many smaller and more recent minorities (e.g. Indians) honestly have no need of a movement as intense as the Civil Rights movement
There are obviously issues but those issues do not prevent appealing to the promise of the civic faith of the US -MLK did it in far worse times . They don't want to. They have a general cultural bias against patriotism and see it coded as right-wing and they believe in the idpol view of focusing on ever more specific minorities and consider stuff like "I don't see race" that fits with the civic faith problematic.
Also, they have serious problems they apparently can't solve (the most important of which being the black achievement gap) and their solution is to destroy standards and the basic ideal/goal of the country as meritocratic as a result.
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60 years ago, our society was much more homogeneous than it is now. The social systems in contention now weren't set up to create that homogeneity, they were set up because the homogeneity allowed the public at large to see value in systems and structures that achieved common, (that is to say homogeneous) goals.
Now we are heterogenous, and the systems and structures become a weapon to fight over, in the endlessly spiraling series of escalations. You're describing it as though that fight was the norm previously, only it really, really wasn't. There would be no public school system if the population that established it had suffered the level of values-conflict we currently endure. Likely there would have been no nation either.
I think you're wrong. This homogeneity is a historical illusion. 60 years ago you had the civil rights era. Was that because everyone thought and was treated the same?
60 years before that it was womens suffrage you were divided over. With differing feelings and laws in different states.
60 years before that you're fighting over whether men who can't own land can vote. Plus you know the whole civil war.
The difference i would argue in each of these cases is that one side won convincingly each time. And that then trickled down to all states. You had some forced homogeneity for a time before the next division erupted. But only because there was victory. There were always weapons to fight over. You just don't see them because the battles were so convincingly won. And that changed landscape is the water you swim in.
Women not being able to vote being a niche idea in the US is because a cultural battle was fought and won over it. Thats why 98% of people don't question it.
If the right wins the trans "war" in 60 years people will look back and say how the right side won and how quickly everyone fell into line. They get broad strokes. And someone then will say thats because 2023 is more homogeneous in views than 2083. Not realising that battleground is why homogeneity emerged.
That's not going to happen. If the trans side loses the whole thing is getting memory holed. Best case scenario we'll be talking about it like we do about lobotomies as "bad thing crazy doctors were doing", not as something intimately connected to the progressive movement. Worst case scenario the whole thing is getting pinned on the right ("in Iran the government was forcing gay people to transition, and even in the west we had a movement trying to promote transition for gender non-conforming people") the same way eugenics is nowadays, and the only people knowing this is ass backwards will be a bunch of internet contrarians.
Might be naive, but I don't think things like that can get memory-holed.
The fucking President met with Dylan Mulvaney, on HD video, visible from the little clairvoyant in everyone's pocket. It's over.
There used to be leftist groups in the UK and elsewhere in Western Europe advocating the decriminalization and normalization of pedophilia / man-boy-love. After they failed to replicate the success of the Civil Rights Movement as they wanted, they faded away and their entire existence was memory-holed. The same happened to the wing of radical feminists advocating for lesbian separationism. The fact that gay rights groups didn't promote the legalization of gay marriage as their main goal until the early 2000s is also memory-holed. So yes, it can actually be done.
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To use an example that makes my side look bad, as somebody pro-trans.
How many people do you think knew about Donald Rumsfeld happily shaking hands with Saddam only about 15-20 years before treating him like the most dangerous man in the world? Probably not a lot. Or I'll put it more accurately if you put that picture in front of somebody who was pro-Iraq War, would their opinion have changed? Probably not.
90% of people don't put much thought into politics, 9% put only a little, another 0.9% put a lot, and the last 0.1% are weirdos like us.
If it turns out the gender-critical/anti-trans side is completely right, nobody is going to get punished, there will be no massive shift in societal or political views. We'll just move on to the next fight, and you'll move on to the next fight, trying to block us.
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Sure, and in 2083 this will get the same treatment as the "Democrats" in the KKK
(Byrd), and the ones who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the ones who voted to expand slavery into every new state at the 1860 Democratic Convention. To wit, "Those were actually Republicans."
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In a year or two most people are going to barely remember what all that was even about. The ones that will vaguely remember something will struggle to find said video because Google / GPT5000 will suck at historical searchers relating to culture war. As years go by the few internet contrarians that will remember it fully, and have the video on hand, might elicit a reaction similar to the one you get when someone posts a from the 90's relating to the current culture war.
One of my first top level comments I made after we moved here was about this very question because I already felt the vibes shifting, and if at all possible, I would like to preserve the historical memory of this particular culture war exchange, and one of the most compelling responses was that I don't have a chance. A culture war issue has to be constantly reinforced to maintain it's position in our awareness. As an illustration, you may have heard about lobotomies, but have you heard their sequel: psychosurgery? From what I gather it was a massive culture fight spanning a decade, with choirs of Expert Trusters shouting down dissent. It even got it's own Hollywood movie. How much have you heard about it?
This might be counting my chickens before they hatch, but still, if you have any ideas for how to preserve the memory of what is happening now around this subject, please share them. This is the second most important thing after winning the issue itself.
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Which another way of saying the past will look homogenous right? It was only some crazy doctors and so on. That's my point, the past will look more homogeneous than it actually was.
In this case it will, but your other examples are wrong. All the other movements are talked about as an epic battle between good and evil, that does not leave one with an impression of homogeneity.
Also, aren't you conflating broader society with what is taught in schools?
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Do you think that parents now have more or less control of the specific curriculum and lessons being presented to their children now than they did 40 or even 20 years ago?
Sure, and it is arguable how much that of that brainwashing actually 'takes' because it sure seems like most kids end up rebelling against whatever paradigm they were taught.
Do they? It seems like most kids turn out to be conformist and mediocre members of their parents’ social stratum.
Obviously there’s a teenaged/youth rebellious phase, but I’m not convinced that’s a cultural universal even in America.
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It seems less relevant whether parents have more or less control. 60 years ago there was probably more shared beliefs between the curriculum maker and parents compared to today. Thus the question of control was of less importance.
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Temporarily sure, but as this SNL Skit illustrates:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lK0Lp43a8z0
How long do they actually rebel for before they settle down?
And parents probably have more control of curriculums than they ever did. Which is probably part of the problem.
I see little evidence for that in a world where Teachers Unions can shut down school systems on a seeming whim, but maybe you have a different perspective.
Almost my point. The boomers were the generation that produced hippies, and a full on counter-culture. And then they became, well, the Boomers, the ones who elected Trump.
It's not clear that schooling will produce lasting ideological commitment 10, 15, or more years down the line, without some external force acting (i.e. the CCCP in China).
Sorry missed this. Compared to the power unions had back in the 70's, where they could shut down close to the entire economy, yes it is significantly weaker. The reaction to that power and its use is quite a bit of what led to Reagan and Thatcher (not unreasonably, honestly). Teachers unions only look powerful compared to unions in other sectors which are nigh toothless tigers nowadays.
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Back in my day you had basically no access to the curriculum is my point. No internet, etc. You got to see homework and that was about it. No smartphones recording and so on.
Parents have much more access and thus control than they ever did when I was in school. 40 plus years ago.
More access means more control? The Taliban also have access to those curricula thanks to the internet, does the Taliban have more control of Western schools than ever before?
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Elections aren’t bullying.
Elected officials weaponizing the government monopoly on force—that’s the last word in bullying. To the extent which officials campaign on doing just this, voters may be complicit, but I think it’s worth making the distinction. The vote itself is not violence.
Other than that, I agree. Retreating from liberalism, from agreeing not to make those votes for bullies, is a bad look. Perhaps even inviting disaster.
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