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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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The point of saying "it turns out there's no vote you can cast or election you can win that will make your kids respect you" is that conservatives' core issue has very little to do with political power (which they have plenty of) and everything to do with the very rapid loss of cultural hegemony.

"Cultural Hegemony" is political power. Elected offices and Judicial benches and Laws passed are means to an end: the shaping of the society and culture we have to live in. It doesn't matter what the laws you pass say if people just ignore them. It doesn't matter what Rights you have rights on paper if the system won't protect or enforce them. Alternatively, you can skip the paper and simply go straight to the enforcement. Mandatory legalization of abortion nation-wide did not require a Constitutional Amendment; Judges simply asserted it into law. Meanwhile, the Second Amendment is a dead letter, even when the same court delivers decisions upholding it; suddenly the Judges' assertions have no force beyond the doors of their chambers. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that the power in question is not held by the Supreme Court, but is in fact held and wielded through "cultural hegemony".

Cultural hegemony, as you've noted, can't be voted on. It can only be fought over. Therefore, we need to fight over it if we wish to see our values upheld. We need either cultural dominance or cultural independence. Without them, the formal structures are useless.

Sometimes you lose, even when it feels like you ought to have won. That doesn't mean the game is rigged.

By itself, no, it doesn't. To get to the conclusion that the game is rigged, you need to look at how and why you lost. It's possible you did something wrong, chose the wrong strategy, just hit a run of bad luck, whatever. But we have many decades of evidence to look at, and my assessment of that evidence is that the game is, in fact, rigged. Power does not actually work the way the purported rules of the game claim it should. The law says that it's illegal to get a gang together and beat your opponents in the street when they attempt to exercise their first-amendment rights to free speech. Only, local governments can simply order the police to stand down, and the justice system can employ "prosecutorial discretion", and the press can selectively ignore the violence of its partisans, or even lie about who committed it. The law says you can employ self-defense against people attacking or threatening you, but those laws can be ignored and you can be prosecuted regardless.

Law is a coordination mechanism, and not even the most powerful one. The same goes for elections, judicial benches, and so on. No law gave Blues the right to riot and burn their way across the country in 2020, but they did it anyway, they derived significant benefits from the exercise, and they suffered no significant punishment. That's what power looks like, and that power is not shared with or accessible by my tribe under the existing formal system.

One of the core elements of cooperation and compromise based on mutual respect and shared interests between a supermajority of the population in a democratic society is that you don't threaten to flip the table when you lose.

Unfortunately for this argument, we have the actual history of table-flipping. Weather Underground bombers attempted to flip the table, and were rewarded with tenure. Black revolutionaries attempted to flip the table, and were rewarded with tenure. Blacks as a community have repeatedly attempted table-flipping, and are rewarded with their policy preferences being cemented into law. 2020 was the culmination of a widespread, highly coordinated exercise in table-flipping, and it was rewarded with vast cultural and political power.

Your argument is that the respect comes first. This is not the case. Values come first, and if they are compatible, a basis for mutual respect and shared interests exists. Blues engaged in open-ended self-modification of their values, and the result is that their current values are flatly incompatible with those of my tribe. We do not share a common understanding of the good, of what's right, what's legal, what's acceptable. Their current values make them a serious threat to my tribe, and they are evidently unwilling to leave me alone. They will facilitate lawless violence against me. They will attempt to destroy me economically and politically. They will weaponize "shared institutions" against me. They will do these things, because they have done them, and loudly declare that it was good to do them and that they should do more.

I am not under the impression that any of this is persuasive to you. I learned a long time ago that internet arguments don't persuade people, and as you demonstrated with your closing paragraph, selective framing can arbitrarily assign "victim" and "victor" status regardless of the facts. It's entirely possible that this is what I'm doing above, that I'm dead wrong or even lying, and it's not actually possible to prove otherwise. One can present the argument, make predictions, and observe results. That's all.

My prediction, as it has been for some time, is that the above narrative is decisively persuasive to Reds, and will continue to be for the forseeable future. The Supreme Court will never deliver an actual cultural victory to Reds. Cooperation will not bear fruit, and what successes they gain they will gain by fighting for them, by breaking institutional norms and structures, by going outside the existing system. Conflict will continue to escalate, leading to worsening crises. Norms and institutions will go on degrading and collapsing, because there's no foundation to sustain them.

So far, no one has furnished an explanation as to why legally lowering the effort bar so as to improve turnout is cheating.

Because the point is partisan advantage, not shared ideals. Why this rule? Why now? If the answer is "because it helps them win elections", and if that answer generalizes to norm-breaking generally, people lose trust in the norms. It's not what they're doing, it's why they're doing it. Appeals to sacred values don't help, because we've long concluded that the stated sacred values are a sham.