site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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.

16
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Previous incarnations of US conservatism (think late 1800s, early 1900s) were deeply critical, if not outright hostile, to capitalism.

"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. "

I can't think of a time where a recognizably conservative movement in the US was anti-capitalist. The WJB style populists might, in some sense, be called conservatives (them being as much a religious revival movement as a political movement) but, I think, instead they just demonstrate the difficulty of applying modern categories too closely to the past. After all, one would hardly call Grover Cleveland, whose faction WJB drove out of power in the Democratic Party, the left of the contemporary Democrats!

It was only with Reaganism (about the time when Cowen was a young lad) that the shift towards equating rampant capitalism somehow became associated with being "right-wing". Perhaps there is a generational divide here.

This is really just absolute nonsense. The association of capitalism with the American right-wing is about as old as the country itself, depending on exactly what you mean by capitalism and 'right-wing'. It's telling that the modern left thinks of the Jeffersonians as the 'conservatives' in the First Party System but really both parties in that era were pro-capitalism. The Federalists were an alliance of commercial and incipient industrial capitalists in the Atlantic port cities and the Republicans were agrarian capitalists more interested in trade and export. As you trace the lines forward, probably the only really thorough-goingly anti-capitalist sentiments you'll get are from the pro-slavery apologists like Fitzhugh but, even then, in practice the pro-slavery faction of the Democrats just wanted the same kind of export oriented commercial capitalism that the Old Republicans had. The post-Civil War Republicans were very pro-capitalism, so was the Conservative wing of the Democratic party. As the left-leaning labor wing of the Democrats developed and the various flavors of the original Progressive movement came into being you got anti-capitalism showing up again in American politics, but always invariably from the Left. Some of the more elitist strains of Progressivism are arguably more right-leaning than left but they just show useless the scale can become in the margins.

Honestly, the anti-capitalism of the New Right comes more from a deep-seated leftism at its heart. It's mostly young people who come from a youth cultural milieu that is extremely left wing (both socially and economically) and it just kind of swaps in a cultural conservatism (although one that honestly feels weirdly different from the Christian conservatism of decades ago) while maintaining the anti-market prejudices of their roots. In that way they're kind of like the original Populists, but they're not usually particularly closely related to the actual cultural roots of 19th century populism: few people who consciously identify as 'New Right' have an agrarian, Christian background and are instead usually suburban or urbanites from more-or-less de facto secular backgrounds.