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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   29298 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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Recently @RandomRanger accused me of strawmanning the Right:

Turok was being banned for being overtly aggressive and obnoxiously creating imaginary narratives like "The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain."

That's not what the 'woke right' thinks and he surely knows it. He need only check the MAGA rhetoric from Trump about good factory jobs, or the rhetoric from the right about the need to mechanize dull fruitpicking jobs and raise productivity. Why, they say, should millions of people be brought into the country if AI is going to destroy everyone's jobs? Or the need to have American wealth kept in America rather than sent off in remittances. Or them hating H1Bs as cost-cutting that interferes with developing talent. Or them not seeing the country as purely an economic zone but having responsibility to native citizens. It's an insanely uncharitable and aggressive butchering of other people's ideology.

Did I strawman the Right? Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:

FOX: I think American citizens are willing to do the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to do.

LORI CHAVEZ-DeREMER: Americans are willing to do the job. What we have to give them is the opportunity to have those jobs.

DeRemer refers to "Americans," the online racialist Right is talks about whites, but in both cases the vision is the same, uplifting the ingroup means getting them the opportunity to do the jobs currently done by the guy standing in the Home Depot parking lot. Is there any wonder high-income whites are moving away from the Republican Party? Working-class whites, too, don't want their sons working casual labor, which is why in the video DeRemer goes on to talk about how Americans will be given opportunity through being "skilled, upskilled, re-skilled" and how the Trump administration is increasing apprenticeships. Of course, few illegals do those high-skilled jobs, so upskilling Americans won't replace many illegals, but it's not like the Fox News host is going to point out the apparent contradiction.

Given that I've given an example from a cabinet-level Trump administration official, (not "nutpicked" from some rando on Twitter) I expect that @RandomRanger will withdraw his claim that I "obnoxiously created imaginary narratives" in the interests of truth and courtesy.

  • -38

There are reasons to “uplift the in-group” and you need to articulate why this is an innoble goal in and of itself. They are citizens; they have more in common with you if you are a wealthy white person; for evolutionary reasons, it is natural to have an interest in uplifting those that are similar to yourself; for reasons of national security, you do not want so many citizens who believe that the American project is not worth investing in; they may have a higher IQ than Hondurans; they may have different levels of compassion or a different taste in aesthetics which may be informed by genetics.

Is there any wonder high-income whites are moving away from the Republican Party

College-educated White males lean toward Trump. It’s just women who shifted a lot toward Harris.

Working-class whites, too, don't want their sons working casual labor

This may have something to do with the millions of migrants brought in to undercut wages, the exact thing we’re talking about. No, you can’t ever compete with them, because —

  • Remittance payments mean that they can afford a higher quality life while temporarily living a lower quality life in America

  • They are raised with values that are de-socialized by our ridiculous mandatory education culture, and this isn’t the kind of thing you can arbitrarily re-socialize at will

  • They often live in illegal accommodations, requiring less funds, and these require a network that natives aren’t a part of

  • They live within a culture where the women expect to marry laborers

I’m also not sure if you’re agreeing with him that it would increase wages, and just disagree that this is important, or if you think it won’t increase wages.

Historical precedent suggests that the same voters flip flop every four years.

This is a bit of a quibble, but actually it’s more like voters come in and out of participation, but the numbers usually balance out in such a way so as to appear that the same voters switch every time. Longitudinally, the number of individual voters who regularly change their mind is pretty low. But yes, elections are close, so they can still matter, but overall they aren’t the kingmaker. What IS true is that these movements in and out of participation are still downstream from persuasion, and tend to jive with mind-changers. So the general idea still holds.

In 2020 to 2024, for instance, although the chart doesn’t show candidate breakdowns, you can see Figure 43 from this report that about half of voters are consistent but the other half is made up of about 3 even-ish groups: new entrants, dropouts, and midterm-skippers.

When talking about Biden, this summarization basically says that 2024 Democrats had both a turnout and persuasion problem, but turnout alone wouldn’t have reversed the loss (so functionally it is still persuasion, which is exactly how you want the elections to work)

EDIT: will further point out that reading the second link provides compelling evidence that the pro-Trump shift, 2020 to 2024, was driven more by men than women, although both groups shifted that direction. We're talking 10% and 2% changes, going by Pew numbers.

In the 2016 and 2020 elections, white non-evangelicals with college degrees and even white non-evangelicals without college degrees supported Biden by a wide margin

The arbitrary filtering of one of the largest religious groups is silly. The shift to D is mostly among women, not the men. If you’re like me, and think politics should be reserved for the male-brained, women shifting D after a media propaganda blitz that utilized emotional propaganda about victimhood is not at all persuasive in regards to any trend that matters.

less than 50% of Republicans are now in favor of decreasing immigration, down from 88% last year.

This question doesn’t tell us anything, because it is in regards to the “present level of immigration”, under Trump who has been (at least presenting himself as) deporting illegals. The average has no idea that the country plans to import so many Indians. The average voter has no idea about the statistics related to yearly immigration, like, at all. You’re asking them about vibes. Shame on Gallop here.

Off topic, but I kind of wonder how the racial estimate question might change if you gave people a slider that forces all the percentages to sum to 100

the U.S. is more linguistically, religiously, ethnically, and racially diverse than it has ever been.

I don't know about that. In the past there were entire states which mostly didn't speak English(Lousiana and New Mexico have both had governments that did not operate in English).

I think it really just turns on what you consider "diversity". Obviously and famously past Americans considered Germans and Irish and such as contextually diverse in all four of those senses, while today we would probably not say the same of their descendants. I'm sure you could take a stab at some rough numbers about what it might have been over time if you used diversity "in context" for contemporaries, but that would probably be pretty difficult and subjective. Still, I like the instinct here, because it does always annoy me when we hear the similar idea about "division" being the worst it's ever been when the country literally fought a civil war before.

Linguistic and religious diversity might be exceptions, though. This article has a few stats for language that implies it was higher even (or especially) at the Founding, although also worth a side-note that the voting percentages would have been different to some extent. In terms of religious diversity that's also tricky - how do you count "religiously unaffiliated" and its various flavors? I don't really think a fair historical comparison is possible, and I guess you could try, but I won't.

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