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 -
Since tomorrow is the last (so far) scheduled day for releasing opinions by the Supreme Court of the United States I wanted to take some time to contrast the court's treatment of a pair of cases this term. These cases are Trump v. Anderson and Trump v. United States. The former case is the case out of Colorado about Trump's ballot eligibility. The latter case is the case out of the DC Circuit concerning Trump's claim to presidential immunity for his actions on Jan 6th 2021. I can't compare the reasoning in the opinions of the two cases (we still don't have a decision in the immunity one) but one thing I, and other court watchers, think is suggestive is the timeline of each of these cases. I link to SCOTUSBlog above because they provide a convenient timeline that I'll reproduce here.
In the case of Anderson the petition for cert was filed on January 3rd and granted on January 5th. Oral argument was scheduled for February 8th and the decision was issued March 4th. That's 61 days from petition for cert to decision, which is incredibly quick by SCOTUS standards. The nature of the case makes this understandable. After all, it's a question about whether a major party's chosen candidate can be on the ballot in one (and perhaps many) states. The decision was also unanimous which likely goes some way to explaining the short turn around from oral argument to a decision.
In the case of United States the petition for cert was filed on February 12th and granted on February 28th. Oral argument was scheduled for April 25th and we still do not have a decision yet. Note that just the time from granting cert to oral argument is almost as long (57 days) as the entirety of Anderson, from cert to decision. This also ignores the fact that the special counsel filed a motion for cert before judgment all the way back on December 11th 2023, which SCOTUS declined. This decision is also strange. Is there any decision the District of Columbia Court of Appeals could have issued that SCOTUS would not have granted cert on? This effectively added three months to the case (the appeals court issued its decision on February 6th) for what seems like little reason. There is some expectation that this case should take longer because there is likely much more dissent among the justices as to the correct outcome compared to Anderson, but this fact does not explain actions like the long wait until oral argument or declining the petition for cert before judgement. One would think the criminal trial of an ex-president who is also a candidate would be a pressing matter but the justices don't seem to think so.
I am not the first court watcher to note that that SCOTUS seems to move quickly or slowly depending on which one seems to operate more to Trump's benefit. Nearing the end of the term and with no decision yet in the immunity case makes me take a bit more conspiratorial perspective on the whole thing though. As I mentioned above tomorrow is the last scheduled day for releasing opinions and they still have opinions outstanding in 18 cases argued this term. They have been issuing opinions at a rate of 3-4 per scheduled opinion day this term so dropping 18 of them tomorrow seems unlikely. The most likely outcome is they schedule more opinion days next week and possibly the week after but it's possible they don't issue a decision in the Trump immunity case this term. There is a rather famous case where SCOTUS did not issue an opinion in the term it was argued. Instead releasing the opinion the next term, almost a full year after it was first argued.
The conspiracy angle on this is that SCOTUS doesn't issue a decision in United States v. Trump this term, instead waiting until after the November election. This ensures no action in Trump's criminal trial before the election. It also means some control over the most direct beneficiary of their decision. Perhaps if Trump wins in November we get a sweeping ruling immunizing large swatches of conduct. Perhaps if Biden wins we get a much narrower ruling immunizing a very small sphere of conduct.
I think the Justices are smart enough to understand that their authority is a product of social consensus, not anything innately derivative of their position. They understand that since Conservatives approached a solid majority on the Court Blue Tribe has pivoted to attacking the court's foundational social consensus directly with calls for court packing, smearing of justices and calls for their impeachment, and so on. They appear to be attempting to balance exercise of their power with maintenance of that power. I'm skeptical that such a balance is possible, but they've certainly pushed harder toward exercise than I expected, so I imagine we'll see.
I still do not expect the Court's foundations to survive long-term; there is no reason for Reds to continue investing faith in them if they cannot deliver, and there is no way for them to deliver without Blues killing the court. This realization undermines the social consensus foundation from the Red side, and we converge on both sides admitting more or less openly that the Court is only legitimate when it delivers their specific preferred outcomes, which is isomorphic to the court having no legitimacy at all.
The entire point of a Supreme Court is to settle tribal conflict. The court can't reliably perform that purpose now, and its ability will only further diminish over time.
Except that the blue tribe controls what legitimacy means. Once they have the court making 100% Blue decisions again, it'll be "legitimate" except for a few malcontents in the dying remains of the more radical part of Red. The bulk of Red will accept the court no matter what, because they accept the legitimacy of institutions axiomatically.
Eh, I dunno about that. There's a long history of back and forth about which party is the "defender of the Constitution" and such. They both have held that mantle at different times pretty strongly in the last even 20 years only. Sure, Democrats are playing their hand pretty strong, probably too strong, recently (junk like "democracy dies in darkness" and all that, great on paper, even true on paper, horribly mangled job in practice). Democrats cry wolf about a lot of things. But not Trump. This dude actually jokes around about suspending the Constitution which is not cool and not-so-jokingly asks about deploying troops domestically which we've only seen in living memory a few times in the 60s and once in '92 for the LA race riots. The dude doesn't even pay lip service to checks and balances and admires dictators.
Why do you care about this, and why should anyone else care about this? The Constitution is dead, and there will be no resurrection. I do not believe that it protects me or my tribe in any meaningful way, and I do not see why I should respect claims of its protection put forward by other tribes. Constitutional claims are useful when they convince other people to drop opposition to one's values or goals. There is no reason to allow them to obstruct one's own values or goals. The constitution means whatever five justices say it means, without limit; benefits are entirely derived from controlling the mechanisms of interpretation, not the document being interpreted. If you have political and social control, you don't need the Constitution, and if you lack it, the Constitution will not help you. This is how the document observably works, and knowledge that this is how it observably works is now reasonably common across the population, and will only grow increasingly common over time as the contradictions inherent to the system continue to express themselves.
Deploying troops domestically was the correct response to the Floyd riots, and the failure to do so seriously damaged what remains of our country. The riots were the culmination of Blue Tribe's long-established strategy of employing organized, lawless political violence to secure political and social power, and they succeeded to an unbelievable degree specifically because no one was willing or able to deploy the appropriate response of overwhelming lawful force on the part of the authorities. That failure made the culture war much, much worse in a way that probably cannot be fixed.
Trump is not a unique threat. He exists because a critical mass of Red Tribe has lost faith in the existing system and wishes to coordinate meanness outside it. If he is finally destroyed that critical mass will find some other avatar or method to coordinate meanness through. They will continue to do so until either they find an effective method to obtain real address of grievances, or until society suffers a fatal rupture. The later seems, admittedly, a more likely outcome, but the former should not be underestimated. The current systems which prevent redress seem to me much more fragile than they generally appear.
I don't think this is true. If the supreme court did things obviously false, and the executive disagreed, on something that mattered, and had popular opinion on his side, I don't think there'd really be too much trouble with him doing what he wanted.
This is just false. Supreme court justices are not infrequently honest, and trying to do interpretation, not fabrication. At the very least, they always are pretending to be interpreting the text, which does provide constraints on their behavior.
Treating the constitution with respect is a valuable norm because it does, in fact, constrain behavior. Less than it used to, as people kept stretching things, but it does constrain behavior, and usually in ways that make things better.
I'm not claiming the Court can't be defied. Obviously it can be, and in fact several of its recent pro-2A findings are being defied at this very moment in various states, most notably New York and California, and have been for years now. I'm claiming that to the extent that any outcome can be attributed to "The Constitution", it is actually happening because the Justices want it to happen, not because of the ink on the paper. There is no ground reality, there is no platonic form, and anyone who believes otherwise is fooling themselves. Abortion has both been protected and not protected by the Constitution, and the answer to the question of which state was "correct" is mu.
It is of course the case that things happen because they (in some sense) want them to happen; actions happen by agents. But pretty often, the reason why they want it to happen is because that's what they think the Constitution says, and they're trying to be faithful interpreters.
Why not? I think language has meaning.
This particular piece of language has managed to hold enough people in its sway that something vaguely approximating its meaning has been the basis by which we govern the United States of America.
If you try to strip out the Constitution from your understanding of the United States, you will understand it worse, not better.
No, it's not moot. The norm of following the Constitution is important and a valuable check against limitless power-seeking. That norm means that it's useful that we should try to care what the Constitution says. Further, interpretation socially recognized as correct helps to confer legitimacy. Social recognition of correctness of interpretation tends to correlate with correct interpretation loosely, at least, because many people can read.
Language has meaning to the extent that people are willing to cooperate in building and maintaining that meaning together. If they are not, then it cannot. For any deeper "meaning" than that, I think you need something approximately like an appeal to God. I'm willing to accept such appeals, but others are very clearly not, and neither you nor I have any means by which to compel such acceptance.
And it just so happens that "faithful interpretation" consistently results in judgements that match their own perceptions of what is just and good, and sometimes no more than what is expedient. Any contradictions between these judgements and the text itself are easily resolved by words words words. I'm given to understand that "emanations" and "penumbras" are sometimes involved.
In the past, certainly. In the present, not really, no. In the future, not at all, I should think. Common knowledge and path dependency trump all other factors. It is certainly true that understanding the Constitution is necessary to understand how we got to where we are now, and the short version is that when it was written people really believed in it. But to understand where we are going, one needs to understand that this belief has largely died, and within a generation at most will be entirely extinct.
Supreme Court decisions favoring Blue Tribe observably have vastly greater impact than decisions favoring Red Tribe. Decisions favoring Red Tribe have been quite explicitly defied by lower courts, and the Supreme Court has then quite explicitly allowed such defiance to stand. I have no problem explaining such behavior: the Court realizes that its power derives from social consensus, not formal law, and recognizes that the consensus is against it and that further attempts to enforce the law will cost it more than it can afford. But if you believe the Constitution is really where their power springs forth, I'd be interested in your alternate explanation of such behavior. The Supreme Court sided with Dick Heller, yet he still can't have his gun. Why is that?
And given that I observe that decisions favoring my tribe are routinely nullified by Blues wherever they are stronger, why should I support upholding decisions favoring blues where we Reds are stronger? What value is secured by doing so?
I don't think I can offer a response better than that of Lysander Spooner:
The value of the Constitution came when it acted as a hard limit on the scope and scale of political conflict. People understood it to put many tools of power off the table for most practical purposes, removing them from the normal push and pull of the political contest. When we vote, the Constitution means that we're voting on policy, not on our basic political rights. If we lose, we suffer the other side's policies for a few years, but our rights are inviolate.
Only, they aren't, and anyone who believes otherwise at this point is quite foolish indeed. Progressives and their Living Constitution ideology mean that all bets are off, and indeed we have seen abuses and usurpations committed and upheld that would have been unimaginable as little as ten years ago.
"They wouldn't do that...." Yes, they would, for any value of "that" that one cares to specify. Americans, Blue or Red, are human, and "that" is what humans reliably do. Presidential candidates have campaigned on the idea of taxing religions they don't like, and openly laughed at the idea of constitutional limits on their ambitions. The theoretical grounding is solid, and the underlying logic is simply correct. Where your "norms" are supposed to fit into this picture I really cannot say.
Turn back to your favorite histories, and contemplate the fact that for all our technological sophistication, nothing about our core nature as humans has ever really changed. Humans will inevitably human. We create systems to control and channel our nature, but what our hands make, they can unmake as well. The Constitution arose from a specific culture, and it worked due to a specific set of cultural norms and assumptions. That culture changed, the norms and assumptions no longer apply, and so the Constitution is dead. To the extent that common knowledge of its death has not proliferated, it serves mainly to fool people into making sacrifices that will not be reciprocated by those who caught on a little quicker.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link