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The Culture War Singularity is already here
I was once very interested in the culture war, and in many aspects of the culture war. I am a staunch atheist so I cut my teeth in online debates arguing about evolution and the existence of god in the early 2000's. That felt like a side topic to all the important policy debates at the time. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The national debt. Censorship of free speech by the religious right. How to deal with islamic terrorism. George Bush and Dick Cheney. The military industrial complex.
Many of these overlapped, but they also generally felt like separate and distinct things. I ended up stumbling across libertarianism because I ran into someone complaining about government spending, and anti-war. I felt like they kicked my but in a debate simply because they didn't allow for my easy auto win argument at the time "oh you care about government spending, then why don't you care about the massively expensive war in the middle east?"
Nowadays it feels like the culture war is collapsing. Not like a structure collapsing into the ground, but a star collapsing into a black hole. Everything is funneling into fewer and fewer topics. The main two that have come out of it all are Donald Trump and AI. You can collapse most people's views into what they think about Donald Trump. If you know that you basically know all the rest of what they think about political topics. For the few where this is not true, the dividing line is instead AI.
I find myself ambivalent/uncertain on both topics. But my ambivalence is not a path out of the stereotyping. It just leads to a different set of assumptions about me, and most of them are probably pretty accurate.
Both topics feel like they will either come to a conclusion by 2028 or implode in such an epic catastrophe that they will continue mattering for the next century at a minimum.
Or is this all just me becoming jaded and bored with the culture war? Ignoring topics like Transgender, feminism, race relations, metoo, and global conflict to shoehorn my pet theory into the world.
Do you think there just may be something like generational cycles at play here, in the background?
I distinctly remember there being a pretty widespread sense, around 2000, from a lot of people I knew that the neoliberal Democrats, and the compassionate conversative Republicans, were actually pretty similar when you got down to brass tacks. Like the Florida recount was a big deal, and of course people are still activated by partisanship during election cycles, but in the background, the two establishment flavors still seemed to have a lot in common. Regardless of political stance or opinions, the amount of time most people I knew actually devoted to following politics was rather limited in terms of actual minutes per day, compared to everything else they cared about.
The Bush years coincided with 1) the Cheney crew in the background being much more radical than, I suspect, the weak figure of George W Bush actually would have been had Cheney and crew not been so skillful at using the levers of executive powers (and how W behaved after 2006 as that group got sidelined), 2) the rise of the mass popular internet and the blogosphere making a new, non-corporate space for people to rehabilitate the idea of politics as being the site where mass societal change happens (so essentially dismantling the Reagan grill-pill consensus from the 80's on), 3) a generation of younger Millennials coming of age with a background of the collapsed cold war, American's unipolar new world order, mass affluence and college for a huge chunk of them, a Reagan-Clinton mini-baby-boom, and no memory at all of the 70s and the previous round of sour radical politicization ruining everything, and 4) the Iraq War and then especially the trauma of the 2008 financial crisis really discrediting the old 80s Reagan consensus that "public politics is the problem, private ownership and finance are the solution".
So the deck war cleared, so to speak, for another round of the same politics-uber-alles that had swept through from the late 60s through the 70s. And Barack Obama was there to act as a quasi-religious spiritual leader for, especially, those younger Millenials (but also scores of older progressives who had effectively been disenfranchised and marginalized during the Reagan consensus). And the internet really came into full flower as social media and the rise of pervasive smart phones meant people could be politically agitated 24/7, and as political organizations in the background became really adept at pulling those levers. And because all of this is systemic, in a sense, even if you weren't any more persuaded about infinite politics being the solution to all problems, the new media environment, and generational change, meant there was a sense you flatly couldn't opt out even if you wanted to. Everyone around you was going to be raving like a recently converted cultist about whatever their political fixations were, and whatever the outrage du jour was, and there was no way to stay socially connected to humans, and hold a normal job, without keeping an eye on all of this. Once everything becomes public, aggressively, performatively political, you don't really have an option to opt out, which of course was much of the point of those tactics. You need to be seen putting the black square on your profile or whatever to show your stance on these public, unavoidable, binary political issues (non-binary is for gender, not for political stances, apparently).
And so the culture war mattered and ran hot, not because of the issues, but because of the meta-issue that you weren't allowed to not care, and you weren't allowed to opt out, and you weren't allowed to shrug and say "I don't understand those issues, and I don't trust any of the propogandists pushing these agendas". And so you were made to care about the meta-issue of the culture war, even if you had long been exhausted by, or made up your nuanced opinions about, actual culture war issues, including the opinion that you had the right not to have an opinion.
But this whole process of infinite invasive politicization is, in some fundamental sense, exhausting and inhuman. It starts with a bunch of assertions about humans as infinitely political animals that are really at odds with reality. It eats its seed corn rapidly - there are a lot of con games at play, essentially, or emperors-new-clothes games, because it requires certain people to speak in ways that suggest that they have authority and are speaking for a much larger body of people. And that becomes self-defeating after a while, as more and more people finally pull back the curtain and understand that its a con. So it rests on a latent trust for certain kinds of authority by a much bigger mass of people that is drawn down as that authority loses respect. And it's also a machine for producing enemies exponentially - the purity spirals are real. Eventually that mass of enemies is a fatal weakness.
And the emperors new cloth element means that enough public indifference becomes a fatal weakness to the power being wielded. If activists shout JUMP! (RACISM!) and a critical mass of people don't argue or resist or fight but instead very publicly shrug, and then see a critical mass of other people shrugging, then those activists are relegated to where they had been back in 2000 - annoying gnats that everyone sort of ignores.
And then that public knowledge filters out to sympathetic but more politically minded liberals, and to amoral corporations, and they all get and transmit the signal that we're done with this cycle again (just as happened by around 1980), and so the actual muscle behind the "you're either with us or against us" energy is removed.
And then with that muscle gone, people who never cared about the culture war but cared intensely about the meta-culture war of being made to care finally get to take a deep breath, take a step back, shrug, and going back to caring about what they cared about and take the grill pill.
At the very least, this is a long-winded description of my own personal experience, and why I'm entirely checked out from culture war stuff by this point. I read a ton of books along the way, I did a lot of thinking, I learned a lot... but ultimately, I engaged because I felt the tremendous, overwhelming force that I was being made to engage. Younger progressives that I knew, especially, behaved like they had tremendous wind at their back. And now my sense (fingers crossed, god willing, and if I'm wrong the future probably involves a lot more political violence) is that regardless of what happens next, it won't and can't look like the 2010s and the life cycle of woke - all that seed corn has been largely drawn down, and that we're in the burned out phase of this cycle. I simply can't be made to care or be even slightly respectful of something like this again - I'm now convinced the costs of going along with this stuff are way, way, way higher than I thought back in, say, 2012, and I think I'm far from alone in that, too.
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