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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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Let's say that this reckoning mood last more than two weeks and the inevitable Israeli reaction on Gaza; It is possible that we are beginning to see a realignement from the upper middle class on immigration in general and on inclusion and diversity in particular?

I don't really understand how this paragraph connects to the first paragraph. "I am surprised by how some prominent people on the left are willing to excuse atrocities committed by Hamas, therefore immigration and DEI are bad." How does the premise connect to the conclusion? I don't think most left-ish people's support for immigration or DEI are premised on whether or not certain other leftists will excuse atrocities committed by Hamas.

"I am surprised by how some prominent people on the left are willing to excuse atrocities committed by Hamas, therefore immigration and DEI are bad."

I think it's likely more, "I am surprised by how the same set of ideals that led me to support what I support (i.e. immigration and DEI in this particular case, which are also two of the most prominent issues broadly supported by the people of this ideological cluster) also led others to support things I find heinous by my own values (i.e. excusing atrocities committed by Hamas in this particular case). This leads me to question how much and how well I understood these ideals; perhaps I ought to analyze them more carefully, in a way that leaves me genuinely open to changing my mind such that I no longer support things that I support now (i.e. such as immigration or DEI)."

I personally experienced a (likely much more minor) version of this around 10 years ago, in observing the justification of blatant and bald-faced lies done by some of the more extreme (though relative to me at the time, these people were barely extreme) people on my end of the political spectrum. This wasn't some "EUREKA!" moment where I cast off my previous beliefs in one fell swoop, but I was compelled to analyze the empirical, logical, and philosophical bases of my ideology at the time, resulting in me, over time, learning to throw away some (many? Most? That might be too optimistic) of the more absurd policy positions that I used to support before.

So I know it's possible, but I honestly doubt that this will or would cause any sort of meaningful shift at the national level. Not because of the control that the left has over academia and journalism, but mainly because people just don't really tend to think things through like that. There will likely be some people who go through something similar to what I did, but there will also likely be some people who become more sold on the correctness of the ideology because they enjoy and admire the bloodthirstiness openly displayed by the slaughter-apologists, and it's pretty much impossible to tell which number will be higher, or who will be in which category.

Personally I expect the views of a lot of people on the far left to have shifted about specifically, narrowly, Palestinian culture and its current capacity for peaceful statehood. I expect it to become somewhat less fashionable on the left to justify brutality by Palestinian militants against Israel and the general sympathy toward it among the Palestinian populace, even for people who consider Israel an obviously bad settler colonialist apartheid state on the wrong side of history.

Do I expect that shift to translate into a proportional priors update on related issues domestically? Not really. I think it's too easy to rationalize away as, no, that's them, that's unique, it's a regrettable but isolated case, the situation over here isn't like the situation over there, and the people we're talking about over here aren't like the people over there.

I'm an American thinking about the response from the American far left about American immigration policy and culture issues, though. The needle movement elsewhere on domestic issues may be more dramatic.

OP might be speaking from a german perspective. Germany has recently gained a large population of arab/muslim immigrants, whose views on Israel (open celebration of the Hamas attacks) have now opened a new conversation on "do we really want people like that in our country?" The issue has given a clear example of what can be bad about unrestricted immigration, disqualfying unrestricted immigration optimism and validating the points of the right.

It being about antisemitism also means that the normal oppression hierarchy doesn't apply, and that it's harder to dismiss the critics as Nazis, which helps the topic along.

The premise is supposed to be "I've noticed that the people who keep banging on about equality and justice and nonviolence are actually just as bloodthirsty and vile as they paint their enemies to be, maybe that means they're lying about other things as well" but in practice it doesn't really work like that at all as the second half of that never comes into play.

I'm not saying no one has ever changed their minds on account of discovering that some of their co-partisans were extremists, but it's not common. If anything, it's more typical to find people doubling down and insisting the criticism is a vicious smear and further proof of their adversaries' derangement.