site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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.

13
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I am in partial agreement with you, and have advanced similar arguments in the past; I had an extended back-and-forth with one user on /r/CultureWarRoundup a while back about this exact topic. In addition to your very trenchant points, I would add that not only is plantation-style slavery terrible for the slave, it’s also terrible for the master! It inculcates sloth and unbearable haughtiness, as the slaveowner lords lazily over a totally dependent class of workers who free him from the need to engage in even the most trivial personal labor. As a right-winger I’m positively-inclined toward some form of aristocracy and hierarchy, but I was also raised with enough Protestant Work Ethic such that I’m constitutionally unable not to feel some level of contempt for the slave-owning lifestyle, to say nothing of the morality of the practice.

That being said, I think it’s important to remember that a great number of slave-owners in the early 19th century were already beginning to feel trapped by, and ashamed of, the institution, and were desperate to find a way to end it. Some of the most important organizers and funders of the American Colonization Society - including several Founding Fathers and eminent statesmen - were slaveowners who were looking for a way out. Remember that many states had laws dictating that any slave-owner who manumitted a slave was then responsible for essentially providing a life-long pension for that slave - something which would have been utterly financially impossible and ruinous for owners of large plantations that employed dozens or even hundreds of slaves.

Thomas Jefferson repeatedly predicted that slavery would need to end, and quickly, and that subsequently it would be necessary to deport the entire black population of the country; he had no idea how to financially sustain himself and his own lifestyle in any other way, though. The same is true of many other slave-owning Founding Fathers. The ultimate failure of the American Colonization Society is probably the single greatest what-if in American history, and I want to at least give some credit to the slave-owners who realized, after it was too late, what they had wrought on the country and on their own descendants.

As for why so many modern white identitarians are pro-Confederacy, I think a large part of that is simply a founder effect: major figures in the racial right in the 90’s and 00’s such as Jared Taylor, Sam Dickson, and Sam Francis, were all Southerners with ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, and for them the issue was acutely personal. Given that some of the important intellectual voices on the white nationalist right, such as Gregory Hood (AKA James Kirkpatrick AKA Kevin DeAnna), were directly employed and mentored by those figures, they’ve sort of picked up the Confederate sympathies by osmosis. There is also certainly an element of Owning The Libs, associating the Yankee occupying government, which brought (partial) racial integration to the South with the barrel of a gun during Reconstruction, with the later forcible imposition of the Civil Rights Regime a century later, a process which is frankly still ongoing and has expanded to the entire country and even arguably the entire American Empire.

As for why so many modern white identitarians are pro-Confederacy, I think a large part of that is simply a founder effect: major figures in the racial right in the 90’s and 00’s such as Jared Taylor, Sam Dickson, and Sam Francis, were all Southerners with ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, and for them the issue was acutely personal.

This is a great point which I haven't thought about.

There is also certainly an element of Owning The Libs, associating the Yankee occupying government, which brought (partial) racial integration to the South with the barrel of a gun during Reconstruction, with the later forcible imposition of the Civil Rights Regime a century later, a process which is frankly still ongoing and has expanded to the entire country and even arguably the entire American Empire.

This is actually an area where I feel some sympathy towards Dixie, but they never understand that they created the problem in the first place. So it is hard to sustain it. Besides, they often make the North more liberal than it really was. Lincoln himself wanted to deport all the blacks for much of his life. The hardest fight against desegregation of public schools didn't happen in the South: it was in Boston.