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 -
Discussion starter, but something I'm sincerely interested in and don't have strong opinions about: do modern Western states (e.g., the US, UK, Japan) have more or less state capacity than they did 20, 40, 60 years ago?
The concept of state capacity seemed to enter mainstream geopolitics wonkery about a decade or so ago, and I find it very useful. I'm sure most of you have heard of it, but in short it refers to the ability of the state to accomplish its policy goals through the use of military, industrial, infrastructural, economic, and informational resources. Each of these is important, but I'd flag that informational resources have a special role insofar as they directly feed into the efficiency by which other resources can be deployed for ends. For example, a piece of infrastructure like a new dam or a rail network may advance policy goals or it may be a waste of time and money, and informational resources will help the state predict which will be the case.
Two other key points to note. First, state capacity of course does not only refer to internal state capacity (i.e., resources proper to the state), but also the ability of the state to persuade or coerce domestic non-state actors such as corporations to co-operate with the state's goals. Most of the major players in WW2 - Britain, the United States, but also Germany and Japan - drew most of their state capacity from these more indirect mechanisms. Second, state capacity is hard to directly assess for the simple reason for it is a fact about potentiality rather than actuality: outside of wars or similar crises, there are good reasons both political and pragmatic for the state not to use the full force of its coercive power.
Recent or ongoing test cases for state capacity in the West include the COVID pandemic, ramping up of basic munitions production like 155mm artillery rounds (especially in Europe), and the new vogue for industrial policy in critical industries like ship-building in the US. My gut instinct is that right now, state capacity in the West is historically at a very low ebb, possibly lower than it has been for more than a century, and that this may be helpful for understanding the behaviour of governments. However, I don't have strong confidence in this assessment, and would love to hear what others think.
I don't think discussions of state capacity are very fruitful. It's too ambiguous of a term that it can mean practically anything. It's like a somewhat more intellectual version of talking about "bullshit jobs" or "strong men create good times, etc". You're not getting any actual rigorous analysis, you're just getting people grinding whatever axes they think apply, which will be quite varied due to the provocative ambiguity.
For "state capacity", you get people discussing basically any long-run issues the US has. Climate change, decline of manufacturing, health care cost disease, economic inequality, political polarization, rise of the New Axis (China+Russia+Iran), infrastructure decay, military decay + failed wars, racial tensions, national debt, etc, etc. You can list problems forever, as peoples' negativity bias means the news is more likely to cover them. On the other hand there are quite a few areas where the US is doing well: leader of innovation, solid economy, politically stable despite Trump, massive network of alliances, leading financial system, energy independence, etc. So a lot of the question is just doomer vs bloomer.
Then there's the question of how much the federal government actually engineers beneficial changes, which is ostensibly what the conversation is about in the first place. In practice though it's far too large of a question to really measure in it's entirety, and it's a much better idea to break it up into smaller chunks and evaluate specific policies. Overall, the US has probably lost some amount of state capacity from polarization, as it's effectively become a vetocracy in many areas (e.g. housing), although to some degree the totality of this issue is overblown.
I would agree with the limits of the term as you describe them, and add to this that 'capacity' is a measure of potential, not utilization. You can have capacity, and be inefficient in doing so. You can have capacity, and choose not to utilize it. You could change capacity by reallocating resources from other competing priorities- and this just broadens the question of what capacity specifically refers to in terms of 'capacity for what?' You can reassign personnel between organizations, but a skilled chemist is probably not going to make for a skilled software engineer even though 'capacity to analyze bioterrorism risks' and 'capacity to counter intercontinental missiles' are both functions of state capacity.
There's also a point that a lot of effective utilization of state capacity is, well, invisible by design and citizen preference. A voting (or non-voting) public doesn't particularly want to be accosted on the streets by policemen doing random searches. A state with sufficient state surveillance capacity doesn't need to- they can just monitor surveillance cameras / communications / informants, and tailor interventions to a narrower degree so that law-abiding people have less to notice. This takes a lot more capacity, and produces far fewer observables.
In a sense, it's comparable to people who complain online that no one builds impressive feats of engineering anymore. On cell phones with more computing power than Cold War space programs, over an internet that reaches over half the global population despite being mostly theoretical 50 years ago, and conveyed on ocean-spanning cable networks hidden beneath the waves. Just because you can walk through or over engineering feats without noticing them doesn't mean they aren't there. The same principle can apply to state capacity.
Very good points! Maybe state capacity is like that old adage about bathroom janitors: you only really notice them if they're not around to do the job. That doesn't mean they're not doing their job in the vast majority of other cases.
More options
Context Copy link
I agree with most of this, but I also think that the financialisation of many Western economies probably has exerted a significant toll on industrial state capacity. My suspicion is that the US couldn’t pull off the same feats it managed in WW2 or much of the Cold War because it simply doesn’t have enough welders, factories, machine shop operators, aeronautical engineers, stevedores, and so on.
Likewise, while I think the narrative that “we don’t build things any more” is largely false, we’ve certainly transitioned into building different kinds of thing, with an emphasis on bits over “its”.
I’m less sure about other forms of state capacity. While the US was able to enforce COVID rules fairly effectively, this doesn’t impress me much; largely the rules were about convincing people to refrain from doing certain things and enforcing this. It’s less clear to me that the US could, for example, mobilise an additional 10 million military personnel as it did over the course of WW2.
If I’m focusing on war scenarios here, it’s because the possibility of a war with China looms large here. While the opening days of any such war will draw on stockpiled munitions, in any prolonged conflict the US will be sorely tested in its ability to rapidly regenerate stockpiles and replace losses, especially of surface combatants.
I’m eager to have my pessimism here overruled, but there are times when the tide goes out and you realise which states have been swimming nude, and I worry the US isn’t wearing trunks.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link