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 -
Suppose communism is bad (if you think it's good this isn't addressed to you but sure feel free to chime in). How do you teach normies this?
I mean the kind of normie who lives in a world where powers far beyond them do incomprehensible things like set the prices of stuff in the store, so that some of the stuff they really want is too expensive for them, but look, the store is full of that stuff, so somebody has all this stuff but they're not letting them have it except for way too high a price, those greedy assholes.
And then you try to explain to them how markets work and how prices come to be and it all just comes across to them as some weird bootlicking apologism because they're simply not on that level.
Is there a more "down to earth" approach that is needed? Normies who have deeply internalized rules of decency and ideas of "thou shalt not steal" (often normies with religious backgrounds) seem to naturally be anti-communist.
Now I'm sure some of y'all here (you know who you are) will say these people basically just need to be oppressed because if they have their way civilization is destroyed and everything is shitty for everybody, but if you oppress them then they complain but otherwise you have a civilization that hums along. But I hate this, I feel like there has to be a way to make society work that doesn't require telling a huge segment of the population "stfu and get in line or we're putting you in a cage". And I mean obviously violent (as needed) enforcement of civilized norms is necessary, but I notice there are a lot more people who are sympathetic to communist ideas than are actual active criminals. My point is more about these people, not the active criminals (who I support putting in cages)
Is there really no way to get through to people other than to just tell them shut up and take it because we're trying to run a civilization here
You
poisonedderailed the discussion by leading with this. Almost no normies actually think communism is good, nor are they yearning for it to any great degree. At worst they have some uninformed ideas that, if you squint, can sort of seem communist-adjacent. Stuff like supporting price ceilings or floors in competitive industries. But even these aren't really doing much damage. Things like "building more housing leads to higher housing + rent prices" has been much more disruptive to a flourishing society, and it doesn't spring from anything related to communism, but rather from ignorance of basic economics.I put forward that normies think Nazism is bad. If you display a swastika, you are likely to suffer immediate social and possibly even legal consequences due to this belief.
What social and possibly even legal results do you observe from people displaying the hammer and sickle? If you observe a disparity, how large is that disparity? If it is indeed quite large, do you think it is perhaps too large, that the reaction to the hammer and sickle should conform more to that of the swastika? If so, what is the problem with describing this rectification as "teaching normies that communism is bad"?
I don't disagree that normies think Nazism is worse (often far worse) than Communism. That's mostly because of the Holocaust. Communism has some atrocities with higher death counts (e.g. perhaps Mao's Cultural Revolution), but the Holocaust's relatively high death toll + the deliberateness of the whole ordeal is what makes it really pop. If you squint, you can sort of see how many of the deaths in China were accidental. It's hard to do the same for death camps.
It's not that it's a bad to teach them this, it's that there's not really a point since the vast majority already believe it. Yet for some reason much of the motte thinks a huge chunk of the West still harbors Communist sympathies, so most of his answers were specifically addressing that point.
I agree, object to this disparity in perception, and think it is reasonably described as "not believing that communism is bad". It's probably true that, in a sense, most people believe that french fries are bad. I think it's pretty clear that most people think smoking is bad. It seems to me that to the extent that normies consider Communism "bad", they consider it less bad than french fries. I think they should consider it more bad than smoking, and roughly as bad as naziism.
Communism has no shortage of deliberate exterminations, starvations, mass rape, mass torture, the whole shebang. The Cambodian communists killed one in four of their population. The Russian communists committed every atrocity imaginable at considerable scale. If there is no shortage of historical atrocity, why should we accept such an extreme difference in perception between the two ideologies? Isn't this disparity a problem? Isn't education the obvious solution? Why treat the present state as some immutable fact of nature, rather than critiquing it as we do other social phenomena?
Do people squint in this way for Nazi atrocities? Do we, generally speaking, tolerate those inclined to do so? Why should it be different for the many, many deliberate atrocities on the part of the Communists? Or is it your argument that no such atrocities exist, that the public perception is correct?
I would readily concede that they believe "communism is bad" in the sense that "french fries are bad". I see no evidence that they believe it in the sense that "smoking is bad", much less "naziism is bad." It seems obvious to me that the latter is necessary, given the amount of damage that Communism as an ideology has done and might do again.
I can't speak for the community at large, but in my own experience I believe that the West still harbors Communist sympathies because I observe its treatment of previous generations of Communists, and I observe a current generation of violent Communist thugs organizing widespread political violence with the tacit support of their local institutions, as well as local, state and federal governments. Further, I note that Communist ideology appears to be alive and well within the Overton window, while our society chases absurdly diminished returns seeking to further marginalize the already marginalized Nazis. I note that I am routinely lectured on the present threat of nazi ideology by people with the hammer and sickle in their social media bio. I disagree with this state of affairs and believe it should be rectified. Again, "teach normies that Communism is bad" seems like a reasonable shorthand for this aim, which seems obviously unachieved at the present.
Are you sure? How many are actually communist? US Antifa is much more extensively anarchist than it is communist (antifa is non-hierarchal), and outside of that, most of the rioters aren't espousing much in the way of an economic political ideology. Why do you think they are actually communist thugs? Being anti-fascist and/or anti-capitalist is not the same thing as being communist after all.
If communism had even reasonable approval you would have an actually influential communist party, and Trump using communist as an attack against Harris, would not be worth doing (because people would not see it as bad), nor would she have to say she isn't in response. In fact only 14% of Americans even have a favorable opinion of the term communism. (55% have a favorable opinion of the term capitalism just to contrast and socialism at 40%, 10% for Nazism/fascism).
I agree that worldwide communism is roughly as bad as Nazism, in as much as we are balancing huge amounts of horror. But in the US, the reason (in my opinion) why Nazism is seen as worse is that your own history is tangled up with racialized politics. Communism has no real significant negative history inside your nation, nor does it have any real chance of overturning your free(ish) market capitalism. Whereas you had an entire Civil War over an ideology that treated people differently because of race, which pattern matches much closer to Nazism, than Communism. That plus your "golden age" was just after defeating the Nazis and before the Cold War grew monstrously, so seeing the Nazis as the ultimate evil which the US defeated is part of the redemption myth-arc that many conservatives value. In overcoming a racist ideology, you began to overcome your own demons. It's not just left wingers who see Nazis as worse after all. The Silent Generation and Boomers dislike communism more than younger generations, but even they dislike fascism even more (roughly 43% think fascism is the most violent ideology, about 25% think communism or Marxism.)
You (as a nation) dislike Communism, but you HATE Nazis, because your own history is closer to almost becoming Nazis, than it is to becoming Communists. A nation that has emerged from Communism will probably hate Communists more than Nazis (Ukraine and Azov brigade as an example perhaps?) because of their experiences, not because they are making a rationally weighted decision that Communism is worse across the globe and all time than Nazism. So I think wanting America to hate Nazis and Communists just as much is only going to happen after you have a significant Communist government or civil war split across Communism vs Capitalism. Which I do not view as very likely, I admit.
(All stats are taken from polls commissioned by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation which works to try and educate Americans as to the fact that Communism/Marxism is as dangerous/more dangerous than fascism, so should if anything be swaying respondents to communism being bad. To be fair they do say: "Positive attitudes toward communism and socialism are at an all-time high in the United States. We have a solemn obligation to expose the lies of Marxism for the naïve who say they are willing to give collectivism another chance." so they agree with you directionally. Their own figures still show that it is regarded pretty negatively overall. They do accept donations and run museums and sponsor teacher certifications and the like, so if you do feel strongly about their mission, they do seem to be right up your alley so to speak. For transparency, I have donated to them before.)
I suppose that depends on how one defines "communist".
Let's suppose I define it as "generally-left-wing revolutionaries drawing significant ideological influence from Marx and the leaders of the various communist revolutions, rejecting capitalism and the existing rule-of-law and embracing lawless violence against their opponents." It seems to me that this definition covers the vast majority of the black-clad thugs committing lawless violence in numerous American cities, and that these thugs enjoy significant institutional support even from purportedly law-abiding progressive elites and institutions.
In concrete terms, what does this definition cost me in terms of predictive accuracy? Does it harm my ability to predict who they will ally with, who they will fight against, who will provide them with institutional protection and cover for their violence, which communities will allow them to operate and which they will avoid, etc? If it does not harm predictive accuracy in these matters, where does the predictive accuracy start breaking down, and what salient misconceptions result?
And yet, Communist gunmen can publicly take over portions of American cities, threaten people, even shoot people, and the police, local authorities and media look the other way and refuse to enforce the law against them. And because the media is actively covering for them, the public doesn't appear to grasp that this has happened, or why it is a serious problem.
Do you think there's a straightforward way to ensure that the law is enforced against such violent communist gangs, going forward?
If not, how should people like me go about securing similar tacit approval for our own armed, public infliction of violence on the people we deem deserving?
If the latter does not seem practicable, would it be fair to say that violent communist thugs, as I've defined them above, observably enjoy greater leniency than law-abiding Red Tribe types?
I don't think this is actually true. It seems obvious to me that communism was much more popular and for much longer than Naziism ever was, especially with my nation's elites and leadership. To the extent that America was never close to Gulags and mass starvation as a punitive policy, it was likewise never close to extermination camps. To the extent that it approached authoritarianism, it is not obvious to me that this potential authoritarianism was significantly more fascist than it was communist. Then too, it does not seem to me that the communists were actually immune to persecuting and even exterminating large groups of people on the basis of ethnicity.
I also note that countries that came far closer to falling to communism, like much of Western Europe, and even countries that partially DID fall to Communism, like Germany, conspicuously lack the antibodies to Communism that your argument implies they should possess.
I propose an alternative hypothesis: my nation dislikes Communism but HATES Naziism, because large and influential portions of my country's elite have been broadly sympathetic to Communism, and have systematically downplayed its evils in the public consciousness. There is no principled reason why Communist Atrocity should not be its own film category, in the manner of Holocaust films. There is no principled reason why our history education focuses so much on the one and so consistently ignores the other. Having spent some effort to educate myself, I find I am capable of hating them both, and see no reason why my fellow countrymen should not share this capacity. I note that academia and the media seem obsessed with maintaining the hatred one way, and have a long history of hagiography for the other, from Duranty on down to the evergreen academic studies on Marx and Lenin and Mao as serious, useful thinkers.
What's their plan for changing attitudes on this issue? How does it compare to Progressive plans for changing attitudes toward, say, LGBT+ issues?
It hinders your accuracy because it elides the differences inside the group. If they are Marxist communists then you are at risk of a Stalinist totalitarian state. If they are anarchists they might want to tear down the state but do not want it replaced. They'll be happy to burn a police station, but aren't going to reintroduce the Stasi.
Both might be the same now, but one is much more dangerous long term. You are always going to have people who want to tear down whatever the current system is. That is a given. Anarchists are a low threat though overall, they won't harness state power for gulags, or death camps. They're street level problems. Marxist communists onnthe other hand are a different kettle of fish.
Also it will mean you will miss steps (see Hitler vs Rohm) If antifa gained any sort of power, and starts infighting (which given it is a coalition defined by being against something and has multiple factions who disagree on what should be built instead it will) it is absolutely crucial to understand whether Marxist communists or anarchists or whoever started it and who is winning. Because that is going to be crucial as to what happens next. Out-group homogenity bias means you lose information about your opponents. If you are correct and elites are communist friendly. Then it is highly likely they will have to purge or get rid of an anarchist antifa for example. Again see Rohm. Is an elite clamp down on antifa proof of moderation or proof they are cleaning house to take over more thoroughly? Is it a welcome return to law and order or another Night of Long Knives? Without considering that antifa is not all the same, and understanding factionalism inside it, you will have no clue.
Now I am not arguing if you are caught in a dark alley with black bloc, it makes much of a difference, but socio-politically it really does.
As for the foundation, here is the link. So you can evaluate for yourself.
https://victimsofcommunism.org/
Then how do you explain the notable role Anarchists played in both the Bolshevik movement and in the construction of the actual Stalinist totalitarian state? I understand that they, like many of their Marxist Communist brethren, were subsequently murdered by the Stalinist totalitarian state that they had worked so hard together to build, but that doesn't change the fact that they did in fact build it, does it?
Likewise, you appear to be aware that Anarchists and Marxist Communists fight together here and now with the explicit goal of destroying our present society, and you appear to be explicitly claiming that we shouldn't worry about the Anarchists because if they're only active, dedicated allies of the people who want to commit mass murder, not planning mass murder themselves. I have zero confidence that even a pure Anarchist revolution would not generate mass murder, since I do not believe their ideology is even slightly coherent or grounded in reality, and I observe that utopian left-wing revolutionaries have a long track record of papering over the failures of their ideologies by killing the people they find most visibly inconvenient. Marxist Communism likewise had no history of mass murder until it actually won, and then the mass murders began immediately. Why should we suppose it would be different for the Anarchists, even if by some miracle they should manage not to simply empower another Stalin like they did the last several times?
The other part that I don't get is how you recognize that both of these groups are actively working to destroy the present peace, and then expect, should they succeed, for the results to somehow bifurcate based on which of the two is dominant over the other. Again, you seem to recognize that there is no observable separation between the two in their current actions, which are directed at destroying the relative peace and order of our present society. To the extent that they succeed in that goal, the next step is not that we get either an Anarchist or a Marxist Communist revolution, but rather Reds joining the political violence game wholesale, decisively ending peace and order for the foreseeable future. Avoiding that eventuality should be your priority, and in this there is no meaningful distinction between them. To the extent that you are willing either to tolerate either lawless violence from the Anarchists or the tacit support granted that violence by Blue institutions, it seems to me that you are, wittingly or not, endorsing Red violence as well. To the extent that you wish to forestall Red violence, it behooves you to forestall Anarchist violence and the tacit support granted to it in equal measure to Marxist Communist violence.
I disagree, because it does not seem to me that the nature of Antifa allows tight coordination with the authorities such that this sort of factionalism would be a concern. Antifa are thugs, and they are utilized as a deniable, arms-length tool by Blue elites. Their usefulness begins and ends with using violence to shut down and demoralize Reds, and all that the Elites provide for this is turning a blind eye. There is no plausible scenario where Antifa themselves actually end up in power. Their significance begins and ends with their ability to inflict lawless violence without consequence, and that significance is not altered by the ideological peculiarities of the various factions. They attack people Blues don't like, and Blues let them because Blues derive social and political advantage from the resulting chaos and dismay. The ultimate concern is the Blues running this system, and it is difficult to see how the differences between Marxist Communists and Anarchists register compared to the reality of the system as a whole. Likewise if one faction or the other were to be purged; the problem is the people in control of the system, not the pawns. Are they allowing lawless violence, or are they punishing it? If they arrest one faction and tell the other that they have to lay low, then they're not tolerating violence. If they arrest one faction but give the other free reign, they are tolerating violence. Which faction is doing or not doing the violence is irrelevant.
Blue Tribe toleration of their violence can permanently destroy peace and order either way, and their differences don't materially impact that destruction in any meaningful way. So no, I don't think it really does, socio-politically or in any other way.
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