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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This has been far from obvious. Actually going ahead with the prosecution and sending Trump to prison, i.e. letting his entire voting base know that they aren't allowed to pick their representative and their votes are worthless, is not going to be a decision without serious consequences. Most people believed that they wouldn't go through with it not due to some opinion on the matter of the law, but the political and societal consequences that would ensue. My personal belief was that the whole point of these prosecutions was to hamper his campaigning efforts - and the dates they chose for the trial were as close to confirmation as I thought possible barring another wikileaks incident. I didn't think they would actually send him to prison simply because that would be so good for his re-election chances, but if they actually go ahead with it I'll be extremely surprised. To quote a joke made by another poster, maybe he could use the time in jail to write another memoir about his political struggles.
Have you read the news anytime in the past two decades? Are you high? I unironically cannot model the mind of someone who believes that a motivated prosecutor and judge couldn't round up twelve people willing to convict Donald Trump, a man who most members of the blob consider to be worse than Satan, on charges that don't quite hold muster. They were already willing to bend the law much further than allowing a lying democrat into a jury pool with the crossfire hurricane investigation and the bogus Carter Page warrant - they've already gone well beyond what you seem to believe is plausible, and that was in 2015! You have a comical level of faith in an institution that has already been demonstrated as helplessly corrupt - how can you possibly look at the prosecutions of SpaceX for failing to hire enough illegal immigrants for a job they're forbidden to work under law, or the soft-walking of Hunter Biden's countless, impeccably documented felonies, and think that the legal system in the US is actually functioning on legal principles?
Yes, and there isn't actually a contradiction here - they don't believe that Trump was actually conspiring to deprive people of their democratic rights (rather that he was attempting to thwart a conspiracy to do so by others).
I'm not going to deny that's one way of phrasing the message being sent. But a more accurate one would be that they believe the government and the democrats are defecting from the political and democratic order - that they're corruptly using their current authority in order to prevent the opposition from gaining power. Functioning democracies generally don't lock up and arrest the leaders of the opposition party! When the social contract that stipulates democracy and a peaceful transfer of power is torn up, why should they continue to bind themselves by rules that their opponents are clearly not respecting? They're saying "If you don't play by the rules, we won't play by the rules either." - which is not exactly the kind of terroristic threat that your interpretation implies.
I don't think you've seen much recent conservative social media activity. Do you really think the Trump base needs Tucker Carlson to put the thought of violence in their heads? If the Biden administration announces that the Republican party doesn't get to contest the next presidential election, I don't think the republican base would just sit there and go "Aww shucks, guess that's what the law says! Nothing we can do." if it wasn't for Tucker Carlson whispering in their ears.
I think that he is absolutely a true believer when he makes that claim, no matter his feelings towards Trump the man. I think Trump is flawed, albeit not as flawed as he's often painted to be, but even if I passionately hated the man I would still have no trouble believing that his incredibly passionate base would get extremely violent if they were told that they weren't allowed political representation anymore.
That is not what Carlson is saying!
"The heinous crimes that they are accusing Trump of are in fact the heinous crimes that they themselves committed" is an argument that you can make, and I've seen variations of it elsewhere. But Carlson isn't making that argument. He's saying they're "not real crimes". Tried to steal an election? Pfft, that's nothing, next you'll arrest him for littering.
It's the difference between "I didn't kill the guy" and "Nobody liked him anyway."
I disagree - he's claiming that Trump's actions aren't actually real crimes and never rose to that level. I'm extremely certain that if you offered the deal to Trump, he'd be perfectly fine with a scenario where Biden, losing the election, makes a series of phone calls saying roughly the exact same things he did, and Carlson would be too. Even the actual charges against him are reliant on the idea that he knew he was lying, and I fail to see why the idea that Trump made a mistake is so outside the realms of possibility.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why not? What "serious consequences" do you have in mind, and what reason do our elites have to fear them (as opposed to, say, welcoming them as casus belli to crush the hated enemy tribe even harder).
Again, what consequences, other than his supporters giving up and quitting the political scene?
So what if people stop thinking our legal system is principled (assuming they haven't already)? The Chinese, for example, rejected the entire concept of "rule of law" and "equality before the law" (the core positions of the "Legalist" school) a bit over 2200 years ago, and soldiered on as a civilization just fine.
Greece? Ukraine?
Because the alternative is being subjected to severe punishment for no possible gain?
Except I think, based on my experience with my "republican base" family and friends, that is what most will do. After all, quite a few already think that 2020 was outright stolen, expect some manner of repeat in 2024, and have given up on voting in favor of one (or more) of three things:
Preparing for the imminent Second Coming/End of Days that is now guaranteed to happen in our lifetimes.
The "Benedict Option" (even if they don't use the term): preparing and strengthening their family and church in hopes their descendants a century or two from now will be better prepared to survive and rebuild in the inevitable Dark Age to come. (I think it was Dave "The Distributist" Greene who argued that the entire right needs to accept that we cannot and will not ever win politically any time this century, and the only possible politics for the right is either forming families or becoming a (Catholic) priest, then preparing said families and Church for the eventual collapse.)
Wait for "someone else" to "fix everything" for them.
This last — the immense "free-rider" problem — cannot be overstated. My Dad, for example, holds that, should this sort of situation come to pass, that "local church groups" will provide all the organization the American right-wing will need to "fight back" and win… while he's (AFAIK) never attended a church service in his life. (He's certainly never attended one in my lifetime. For that matter, he has no friends or social life at all outside our family.) Others confidently that our military will certainly step in and set things right… in between breathlessly repeating the latest thing they watched on Fox News about the Woke-ification of our armed forces.
This was one of the more common right-wing criticisms I used to see of all the Q-Anon nonsense — that, besides being an exercise in unbounded apophenia, it serves as a call to passivity, asserting that right-wing citizens need do nothing at all, because the "patriots" secretly at work behind-the-scenes will fix everything for them.
Others (like the people at Sarah Hoyt's blog comments) will go on at length about how doing anything but hunkering down is "playing into the Marxists' hands," and that we just need to wait until "Zhou Bai-Den's Marxist thugs" come busting down our individual front doors, at which point we need only shoot back in self-defense, and then we automatically win.
I think that, for all their passion, very few of them will get violent. Sure, some will, but those that do will do so entirely in the form of "lone-wolf" terrorism, blind lashing-out so poorly targeted and sloppily executed as to make Breivik's assault on Utøya look good in comparison. They will accomplish nothing but giving our government even more excuses to crack down on the right and limit political expression further still.
This reaches the point of civil war and potential serious domestic terrorism events. I don't believe you're thinking seriously about the consequences of this if you think that the elites could simply crush them - US domestic infrastructure is utterly impossible to secure in this kind of threat environment and the red tribe at the very least has the ability to reduce the US to a blasted wasteland with no functioning economy at all. Even assuming the elites are as perfidious, powerful, competent and undivided as you claim, their choices are going to be between giving the hated enemy tribe a say in society, or just not having a society at all.
That section was essentially an attack on AshLael's position - you don't believe that and neither do I, so there's no point discussing it given that I believe we actually agree here.
Your idea of a functioning democracy is Ukraine? You are not exactly making a good argument against the claim that functioning democracies don't do this, especially seeing as how Ukraine has actually suspended elections and isn't democratic in the slightest.
This is going to happen to them anyway if they do nothing, and in fact has been happening for a while. They have a choice between severe punishment, or severe punishment with a chance at victory. Sure, it sucks, but it beats the alternative.
I can't actually argue against your own impression of your friends and family, but I think that the base in general will absolutely get more serious and violent if what is being described comes to pass. Maybe we just see different portions of the republican base?
I agreed with those criticisms, though the bigger issue to me was that Q-Anon was obviously faked.
Who?
While it isn't particularly pleasant to talk about, Breivik's assault actually achieved all the aims he was going for. He confessed later on that his manifesto was actually a fake - the reason it was full of plagiarised writing was because he specifically wanted to give the impression that he was inspired by a particular group of writers in order to get the media to attack them. He succeeded, and at the same time wiped out the most promising left wing politicians of the next generation. Breivik unironically achieved the goals he had for the attacks, so you'd probably want to pick a different example.
More options
Context Copy link
You've got to remember, post-2020-election the Republican machine did not declare "stolen election, government illegitimate". McConnell outright condemned Trump right after squelching his impeachment trial. You're right that a few lone wolves aren't much of an issue, but if the Republican machine as a whole flips into "rebellion" mode that's quite a different story, and having elections be stolen for real is the sort of thing that might push them over (remember, if the fix goes in that means all their hopes of accomplishing anything via the system - the whole reason they are politicians - just caught on fire). In particular, once one state declares secession or the equivalent, all the other red states are faced with the choice of "join the rebels" or "be made to fight the rebels and then be crushed politically in the ensuing witch-hunt". Texas is the obvious spark, but not the only possibility.
Complicating matters is the fact that the PRC is probably looking to have a Taiwan invasion ready and waiting next year, precisely in order to take advantage of possible chaos in the USA.
Most of my hope is on "the SCOTUS nixes attempts to remove Trump from the ballot". Outside of that scenario... well, I'm sure glad I don't live in the 'States.
Of course not; that would not be keeping in their role as the Outer Party; the Washington Generals to the Democrats' Globetrotters. It would threaten their cushy jobs and ongoing access to the proverbial gravy train.
As the Spartan ephors said to Philip II, "if." I don't think they will, because enough of the long time party establishment are, to use wrestling terminology, jobbers. They're paid to make a show of opposition, to maintain "kayfabe," and then lose. And they likely know it. It doesn't matter how blatant any future "steal" is, they know their continued access wealthy donors, personal influence, and those famous "DC cocktail parties" depends on insisting that the elections were still free and fair.
No, that's far from the whole reason. Again, there's the many benefits of the job itself — the pay, the perks, the status, the influence. I think it was one of Chris Rufo's essays that pointed out how the Democratic party has shown a willingness to accept short-term electoral losses in pushing through long-term legal and social changes, highlighting the particular example of LBJ. In contrast, the GOP, most especially the party establishment, trend very much in the opposite direction — they consistently prioritize protecting their phony-baloney jobs (to borrow from the great Mel Brooks) over "making a difference." There are benefits to being in the Outer Party. There are reasons that generally-competent basketball players play for the Washington Generals.
(Then there's the ones like Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich (can you tell I'm Alaskan?), for whom politics is literally the family business. The latter was being "groomed" for his eventual Senate seat all the way back when he was in high school. They were raised to be politicians. There are reasons I say that an openly aristocratic system is just being more honest about the ruling class.)
Plus, even if the GOP establishment does want to accomplish things in office, those aren't necessarily the same things that their voters — especially the Trump base — want. As someone once put it on a lengthy youtube video I once watched (analyzing county-level maps and breakdowns of biennial Congressional elections from the end of WWII to the end of the 20th century), the Republican Party began as the party of New England bankers… and that's what it always will be. They only "picked up" white working voters because the post-Nixon Democrats "dropped" them, as Matt Stoller describes at length in his 2016 Atlantic piece "How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul." The job of GOP elites is to falsely pander to the voter base when campaigning, then deliver for the elite donor class in office — and I remember sometime last year or so a quote floating around the web from an interview with a Republican campaign strategist where he pretty much said that.
Assuming they aren't able to delay it from reaching them until after the election.
We seem to have very-different models of these people. I guess if there's an obvious steal and the GOP just rolls over and plays dead, I'll have to give this more credence than I currently do.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link