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Notes -
Cthulhu always swims right.
A common argument that pops up from time to time is that history generally moves in one direction. One prominent example of this historically has been Whig history, which has a narrative of human society generally moving from a barbaric past to an enlightened present. People like MLK Jr. have implicitly endorsed this view with the quote "the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice". It's a nice idea... but it's clearly wrong when you bother to think about it. People believe their current values are where true justice lies, and their current values are highly predicated on their environment whenever they grew up. Nobody can look into the future, so we look to the past instead, and it's a story of people gradually becoming closer and closer to our present selves. But if we had the capability to look into the future, there's a good chance that we'd be shocked or horrified about where we eventually end up. People in 2000 BCE would probably think our present world in 2024 CE is terrible in a number of ways. Neither side is correct or incorrect, it's just a difference in the baseline.
Given the negativity bias of the internet, more recent takes on "history generally moves in one direction" can mostly be summarized as "[thing] generally gets [worse]". One example is conservatives telling you how progressives always eventually win on basically everything. One popularization of this idea is "Cthulhu always swims left", which people have claimed on this site many times, example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, etc. If you’ve been on this site for long, then you’ve almost certainly encountered this idea at least once. This rebuttal is a better critique than I could ever give. The gist is that things only look like this if you gerrymander history in a pessimistically partisan way. Yes, progressives always win if you only include their wins and exclude all of their losses… duh? But that’s a goofy way to cut history. Conservatives might then try to come up with reasons to handwave away any progressive losses, either as trivial (“they lose the small things but win where it counts”) or as simply delayed (“they haven’t won… yet!”). But these are never particularly convincing to an unbiased observer. History really doesn’t move consistently in any direction but the most vague and basic ones, and trying to force it into this box or that serves as little more than a glimpse into that person’s pessimism.
Freddie deBoer posted an article today that espoused that idea that “Cthulhu always swims left”, but flipped so that, effectively, “Cthulhu always swims right”. He doesn’t say those exact words, but that’s his general conclusion. In the aftermath of Harris’ defeat, many in the Democratic party are claiming that the party needs to move to the center after being too far left for many years. Americans mostly agree with this idea, but the remaining leftists like FdB are horrified at that conclusion. To people like them, Harris basically ran as a Republican, and so saying that the party needs to go even further right is anathema. If this all sounds utterly ridiculous… I wouldn’t disagree with you. Saying the country always moves right shares all the flaws as those saying it always moves left. I explicitly disagree with this piece, but I still think it serves as a useful example of what it’s like when the sides are reversed.
I think Freddy's argument here, and the cthulu swims left meme are both examples of extending the left/right political model way beyond its usefulness (to the extent that it is ever useful in the first place). Reducing all of politics to a single axis in modern times is already suspect, but the model only gets worse in the past. If we're only talking about social issues, maybe you can define "right" as adherence to traditional values and "left" as rebellion against those values, but when the values completely change multiple times over, that doesn't really mean anything. Today, traditionalist christians might be considered right wing, but in the Roman empire they were the weird commie leftists who wanted womens' rights and equality under god. But is that inherently more right wing or left wing than paganism? Is banning abortion right wing because it upholds the sanctity of life, or is it left wing because it's dysgenic? The "left" and "right" have flip-flopped on this even in the last 50 years, let alone centuries.
Right wingers in the seventies were not generally pro-abortion, and eugenics being associated with the right is itself Cthulhu swimming left. In point of fact views on eugenics in 1930 are more predictive of current-day views on abortion than views on abortion in 1930.
because cthulu swam past eugenics and now it's toward the right? Or are you saying that doing more eugenics is directionally leftward?
Maybe it's because swimming only left means you swim in a circle.
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