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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27876 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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My law school is not overwhelmingly progressive because the Powers That Be want it to be progressive. It's overwhelmingly progressive because progressives showed up. You can only stretch the word "elite" so far, and by the time you get down to schoolteachers, you've stretched it past the breaking point.

I agree with the rest of your post, but it's myopic to say that these institutions are overwhelmingly progressive "because progressives showed up." It is absolutely not a stretch of the word "elite" to wonder why all the twenty-somethings going to law school all share these same ideological premises. They all grew up with a similar curriculum, a similar Grand Narrative of history, watching the same movies, receiving the same cultural signals. And you've already explained how the institution is self-reinforcing, so there's just not a lot of room in your own framing for conservatives to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and capture institutions by attending law school.

The situation for Conservatives is dire indeed, but it's just the failure of Conservatism writ large. The Dissident Right movement is most useful at this point in destroying the Conservative movement, destroying its frame of the world that operates within the same moral paradigm as progressivism. The DR's usefulness only really extends to dislodging conservatives (and some leftists) from the Noble Lies that are held dearly but formulate the foundation of a failed intellectual framework. But the DR won't provide the revolutionary moment that would actually shake up institutions. That's going to be AI, and AI will be the moment for a paradigm shift on the right wing of the political spectrum. The entire concept of left/right is likely deprecated altogether.

The DR, at its best, is a call for a non-Conservative Right Wing. While I agree there is no chance of institutional capture by the DR, the probability of the DR influencing a needed paradigm shift on the right wing away from a failed Conservative ideology is... well, already happening.

Beliefs, ideologies, etc have causes. There are physical, mechanical, causal reasons why all the brightest people adopted progressivism over the past millenium. It's not just a tiny coincidence that magnified by building on itself! One can hope the Spirit of the Times is reactionary, that a quadrillion poorly understood contingencies lines up to magnify your political actions rather than retard them. But the march of technology, the advance of AI - these doesn't feel particularly likely to aid conservatism or 'retvrn' to me

I agree with the rest of your post, but it's myopic to say that these institutions are overwhelmingly progressive "because progressives showed up." It is absolutely not a stretch of the word "elite" to wonder why all the twenty-somethings going to law school all share these same ideological premises. They all grew up with a similar curriculum, a similar Grand Narrative of history, watching the same movies, receiving the same cultural signals. And you've already explained how the institution is self-reinforcing, so there's just not a lot of room in your own framing for conservatives to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and capture institutions by attending law school.

That's another layer up from the question of who's showing up. Yes, there's a reason all young, educated professionals share the same ideological premises, and yes, that reason is worth exploring. A lot of my answer basically looks like "progressives showed up" another layer up—that curriculum, those cultural signals, that Grand Narrative is what the people who prioritized making curricula and sending cultural signals and forming a Grand Narrative believe. Culture isn't infinitely malleable, but it doesn't just happen. The project of framework-building falls to those who take it seriously, and there's no law decreeing that good ideas will win out over bad ones. It's a power game many layers deep that every movement in history has played, and conservatives are on the outside of culture looking in at the moment because they lost the cultural power game at least a generation ago, and in some regards much longer, without realizing it.

The project of framework-building falls to those who take it seriously, and there's no law decreeing that good ideas will win out over bad ones. It's a power game many layers deep that every movement in history has played, and conservatives are on the outside of culture looking in at the moment because they lost the cultural power game at least a generation ago, and in some regards much longer, without realizing it.

Yeah, agreed. I'm not opposed to framework-building, I like to think that's what I'm consciously trying to do, I just oppose the existing framework. It is a power game absolutely.

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