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 -
Because no one believes you. Whatever you, personally, believe, it all stinks of embarassed conservatism. People make fun of self-identified "classical liberals" because the label has been spoiled by bigots hiding behind a mask of libertarianism (libertarianism that for some reason only seems to extend as far as their own preferences). I like meritocracy too, but I've met too many people for whom 'meritocracy' means never having to think about how society allocates opportunities.
I could go on, but I'm on my phone and that makes composition awkward, so I'll leave it at this: I find this comment darkly hilarious because the kind of people who populate the Motte are exactly the reason you are treated to a presumption of bad faith.
Why can't conservatives be 'classical liberals'. If you look up a list of historical classical liberals it's people like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Ronald Coase. People like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were considered neoliberals. They were and are considered conservatives as well!
People usually call themselves "classical liberals" because they pointedly want to distinguish themselves from social conservatives. What I am saying is that many/most (though not all) such people are just garden variety conservatives who are embarassed by their own socially conservative views and/or the association with other conservatives, so they come up with stories to tell themselves (and others) how the party left them behind or the SJWs forced their hand or something similar, the point of which is say "I am not really a conservative."
So what would you consider a classical liberal that is neither a conservative, nor a woke progressive?
That would depend on the actual content of their beliefs, since someone calling themselves that could be almost anything from a center left neoliberal to a blue tribe conservative to white supremacist who isn't quite ready to take off the mask.
Statistically, my money is still on conservative in denial.
That's not what I'm asking. You shouldn't have to invoke other people to answer the question of what classical liberalism is according to you.
I apologize; I misinterpreted the question.
I don't think it's a very useful question (or at least not one I have a useful answer for), because I don't use the term except in reference to people who self-describe as such. You can look back to late 18th/early 19th century liberals, but that's a political context that's almost unrecognizable to today. I guess if you want my short answer: classical liberalism properly refers to a historical political tradition which has been succeeded by various offspring.
I think it's not only useful, it's necessary if you want to sneer at people who feel forced out of their own movement. Without an external frame of reference there's no way of determining whether your low-key mockery is deserved or not.
Ok, so even going by that definition I see no grounds to say classical liberals shouldn't be taken seriously on their word. If the political tradition they identify with has been succeeded, the claim that everyone around them moved left is plausible, and if you want to mock then, you need to bring evidence of their self-deception to justify it.
People who feel forced out of their own movement are struggling with the dissonance between their self identification, their beliefs, and the direction of the movement they used to be a part of. This is as true of ex-conservatives who stayed put or moved left while the party moved right as it is for ex-liberals who did the converse.
Me making up my own definition for a particular label has no bearing on that.
I do. The issues of the late 18th century are overwhelmingly different and the label itself was largely dead until it was functionally revived by people who wanted to avoid associating their ideas with conservatism.
But the bigger factor is just that the vast majority of self-ID'd classical liberals I know have garden variety soccon views + weed while exhibiting very little interest in (or outright hostility to) the personal freedoms or civil liberties aspect of their claimed ideology. (There is also the occasional embarassed liberal and even a few sincere libertarians, but they are less common).
It's not that I think they are lying. It's that I think they're full of shit.
It is plausible. It's also another way of saying "I got more conservative". The views that would make you socially liberal in 1954 would make you pretty reactionary in 2024, and having your views crystallize while the world continues to change is pretty much the standard form conversion story.
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
More options
Context Copy link
There was a meme originating during Gamergate about "being thrown into the pit with the rest of us". This is how the throwing is accomplished -- anyone who doesn't sign on with the progressive program in its entirety is branded a closet conservative.
Except that's manifestly untrue. The center left and far left squabble incessantly without the former being forced out. Some gamers have a meltdown because some gaming journalists called them sexist isn't being thrown in a pit, but it is sort of telling.
If you can joke about it, and people get the joke, maybe you should reconsider your priors for 'manifestly untrue'.
Why? As I said, the normie libs continues to exist and, indeed, to dominate. (Though tbh I'd be hard pressed to describe early 2010s gaming communities as socially liberal as opposed to merely disdainful of religious conservatives for being critical of gaming)
So people who haven't changed their ideas since the 2010's aren't liberal now, because the context changed and you can't call them liberal now for the same reason you wouldn't call an 1800's liberal a liberal nowadays. But somehow the contemporary "context" can be cast backwards, and people who definitely were social liberals back then are deemed to be not liberal, because they don't meet your Current Year standards?
More options
Context Copy link
Gaming communities by my experience were solidly anti-War on Drugs, anti-foreign intervention, anti-Bush (and the aspirant neocon world order he represented), anti-censorship, anti-gun, and pro-gay marriage. Of course there were stalwart holdouts who bucked those trends to various degrees, but there was no way to mistake the dogpiles and multi-page sniping they dealt with as a measure of high popularity.
On the question of socialism, it was a mixed bag. Hugo Chavez fans were mocked for their earnestness, but there was a general sentiment of "If only we were a bit more like Sweden". The second invasion of Iraq may have had some initial support, but it was clear people had largely soured on it within a few years. "Slut shaming" and similar things were topics with no clear consensus that percolated for a decade before spectacularly erupting. Trans wasn't really thought about at all. We 'knew' that drug laws were brought about because of racism, and we 'knew' that US black people were getting the Rodney King experience every week. Noam Chomsky was a thoughtful old dude, and Kent Hovind was lol.
I know you may quibble about what constitutes being 'on the Left', but the idea of leftists feeling pushed out of communities because of rightists is something I can't even conceive of over the last 20-30 years unless we're only talking about the those on what we used to call the fringe. Today's modern SJW may have indeed felt unwelcome back in those spaces, and they may have been aggrieved enough to see themselves as attacked from right-wing forces. Wouldn't make it true, any more than a Republican forum turning away Nazis would make said Republicans on the Left.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is entirely a dilemma of the Left's own making when they chucked liberal principles and meritocracy aside and left various flavors of the Right to make those appeals. I get that there are legit criticisms of those concepts, some of which resonate even with me. And yet I really thought "racial quotas in every field" was something that would have been rejected by my estwhile peers; a strawman from right-wing media to be scoffed at, not enthusiastically endorsed. And sure, some would argue that not all leftists would support those endeavors if they were truly aware of the extent of them, but they sure do have a habit of digging their heels in if the subject is brought up.
After prematurely evacuating that hill and leaving it to the savages, you're a little suspicious that 'classical liberalism' is being contamined by a bit of white identiarianism? With all due respect: I hope that's some really tough shit the Left has to chew on for a long time. I'm not a WN by any measure, but there's no way we were going to have this collectivist-tinted racialized 'discourse' without that appearing on the menu. They deserve their shot.
Maybe that meme contamination is what will ultimately kiill 'liberalism'. The ick factor. Or maybe one day people will get sick of the progressive rule of the day when it has nothing to show for its actions, and thing start snapping hard in some other direction.
More options
Context Copy link
I won't say you're wrong that this is how many of my "fellow liberals" think. You are wrong if you are accusing me of actually being an "embarrassed conservative" who actually believes in my heart of hearts that white men rule by divine/genetic right and I'm just pretending to believe in classical liberal values because they flatter me.
As for other Motters, I won't speak for anyone else, but from what I have seen, the people who claim to be liberals really are; the white nationalists or white nationalist-adjacent don't claim liberalism. I can think of a couple of regulars who've claimed they used to be liberals ("before they got mugged by reality" as one person put it) - I am not sure if someone getting blackpilled puts the lie to classical liberalism.
I am not trying to accuse you of anything. I am telling you why this political narrative is not taken seriously.
The people I am describing are not white nationalists (they are frequently racist, but not ideologically so). They are embarassed conservatives. I use that turn of phrase for a reason - they are people who like to think of themselves as liberal even though their political priorities and sensibilities are overwhelmingly right-wing. I know no shortage of people like this in real life by dint of the fact that I used to be one, and the almost universal pattern was that when push came to shove they'd come down on the conservative side of an issue. Sometimes this was just lack of perspective - they couldn't conceive of how a gay man or a black woman might have a different experience with - but often it was just disregard.
I think you're just exhibiting the traits I am protesting. So if I have to wear the "right-wing" label if I continue to believe things that made me a liberal in the 80s and 90s, then sure, I guess I'll have to wear that label before I will accept the progressive redefinition of "liberal."
I don't know what to tell you, man. If your political beliefs really crystallized in the 90s, you're going to find the valence of many of your beliefs sliding right (or being reduced to rhetoric rather than policy, or just losing salience). It doesn't necessarily make you right wing relative to the general population, but it probably makes you more right wing than you used to be. That's not some semantic sleight of hand on the part of the modern progressive movement; that's a normal aspect of how politics change. I'm more left-wing/less conservative than I used to be, partly because my views changed, but in large part because things I still believe became less conservative.
And that is apart from how certain phrases can serve as political euphemisms that convey a meaning quite distinct from their literal one.
I feel like there are a few core concepts to liberalism that are very old and very consistent and the disconnect here is that most modern progressives don't realize that they have almost totally abandoned the ideological framework that they were raised in, so they still hold onto the word liberal despite abandoning the ideology.
It seems sort of amusingly illiberal, to rewrite history so that liberal is just the word that the left uses to describe itself and so liberals who are no longer in-line with the modern left, despite being totally in-line with liberalism, must be conservatives.
The reality is the modern left is not liberal for any coherent understanding of the term, this is not even ship of Theseus territory, it is an almost total abandonment of liberalism as an ideology. The principled liberals who used to be on the left were all collectively shocked(or shocked later when they finally noticed) as the rug got pulled out from under them and their massive wide spread cultural support vanished over night in the face of woke. As I vaguely gestured to above, I think this is mostly a politics as fashion thing, and all the people who would have smashed the like and re-tweet buttons on "I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it," on a hypothetical 1995 twitter, ended up smashing the like and re-tweet buttons on "Freezepeach" on the real 2015 twitter.
A great place to watch this in the wild is, if you have the temperament for it, any Destiny content. Destiny is basically a liberal, and when he talks to progressives he will make liberal arguments, and you can see the sort of confusion and cognitive dissonance, as they try to square a sort of vague background respect for an under-specified liberalism, with their totally illiberal current positions and thinking.
I don't think this right. It is true that progressivism contains illiberal beliefs and values, but that is generally true - virtually every political movement in the US synthesizes liberal and illiberal beliefs. Very few people can be said to have abandoned liberalism, but everyone accepts compromises on liberal values. Sometimes this is directly ideological (something which applies to progressives, populists, religious conservatives, leftists, etc...) and sometimes it is the consequence of disagreements about what liberal values mean in practice or an attempt to reconcile internal ambiguities within liberalism. (Or ideology making contact with reality).
The suggestion that all the principled liberals are on the right is belied by the reality that the modern American right is a coalition of religious conservatives and right-wing populists. These people are not totally illiberal, but their policy preferences center on illiberal goals. The center right, which one would expect to be the standard bearer for conservative liberalism, is functionally dead.
Tellingly, while there is a lot of policy conflict between left and right on culture war issues, the intellectual side of the culture war is almost entirely center left vs far left. The right doesn't have much intellectual firepower to bring to bear, and what it does have tends to be either too spicy for public consumption or too lacking in clout due to misalignment with the broader conservative movement. The latter functionally operate at the right tail of the center left (e.g. people like Lyman Stone or Tanner Greer, who are smart and interesting and also totally untethered from operational conservatism). This is a major reason why conservative illiberalism doesn't get much discussion.
This linguistic shift is decades old (older than me, certainly) and conservatives were enthusiastic participants. The modern progressive movement didn't even exist at the time.
Beyond that, I stand by my initial point: self-described classical liberals are very likely to be people with right-wing views who do not want to describe themselves as conservatives. Not always, certainly (sometimes they are embarassed liberals instead), but someone with conventionally center-left views will probably describe themself as a liberal without adjectives (or maybe a neoliberal if they're terminally online) rather than a classical liberal. The consequence is that professing seemingly anodyne, cross-spectrum beliefs becomes right coded (and 'professing' is the key word here).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't necessarily think this framing is wrong, but this certainly isn't the kind of anodyne charity deployed in the wild.
It's all well and good to say that 90s liberalism would drift into a kind of conservatism as times change. What I see is progressives habitually claiming that this new strain of 'conservatism' is actually the latest genealogical strain of fascism and white supremacy that traces its lineage to Nazism or similar. You see the difference, and so you can surely understand why that tribe may balk at this "No no, you really are technically right-wing" insistence.
I agree that some of this is 'embarrassed conservatism' being expressed by people who probably identified as good liberals up until the 2010s give or take. But some of this is because there are consequences to being frankly conservative. Few are going to honestly embrace the conservative label if that immediately and unfairly typecasts them as villains.
More options
Context Copy link
Am I more right-wing, or are liberals more left-wing? If "free speech" used to be left-coded and now it's right-coded and I am still pro-free speech, who changed?
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
More options
Context Copy link