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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.
Sorry to dismiss a high-effort argument with a one-liner, but: so "meaningless" that he'll fight to the death for (at least one of) them, and literally ban all discussion of them on his Substack because his audience refuses to agree with him.
My offer to these "the culture war is distraction" people is always the same: you get the economy, or whatever else you find "meaningful", I get total uncontested control over culture - deal?
I think the biggest problem with this proposal is that I don't think there are easy levers to just control culture. That, plus the fact that some cultures might not be able to support some kinds of economic systems. Like can a trad maximalist culture really support a globalist socialist economy, for example?
It's a fantasy scenario for sure, but Arjin's point is sound - hell I'd say he doesn't go far enough. They don't get the economy or something else, they can have everything else - the economy, the administration, the military, healthcare, the media, education - if someone else controls culture you are going to be swimming up a waterfall.
I mean, the the logistics of this fantasy scenario are hard to imagine. Is a genie just snapping their fingers here, or do we actually have to think about the logistics of how a society could sustainably keep Culture A with Economic System B, given some starting point close to contemporary American politics?
I'd be happy enough to use a genie, but it is an interesting thought experiment so I started considering how you'd go about it - and instantly realised we already have an example - The West. The US has controlled the culture of the West for the past century, particularly through television and music, and the rest of the west has been becoming more American as a result. That's why everywhere in the west outside of the US has a national media arm producing local content - without it their national myths and memes get replaced with those of the dominant culture (which is also why those media organs have channels or carve outs for their native populations).
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