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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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If I'm understanding you correctly, you think the culture war will resolve itself as people organically change their opinions and values?

Well people (in general) do change their values under social pressure, that is one of our most stable social technologies. But I am more talking about representation, consider the Conservatives in the UK. They won a bunch of non traditional seats in Labour strongholds due to Brexit. The influx of MPs representing those people (very similar to the working class inversion in the US) means that there is now a faction of MPs who don't want to lose their seats representing them. That faction is part of the reasons for the Conservatives budget climbdown recently. Voters in Stoke may have voted Conservative but that doesn't mean they suddenly became fiscal conservatives.

The Democrats have to change what they can accomplish based on what they can persuade Joe Manchin to vote for. The Republicans similarly for Sinema. And that is because of the people they represent.

When the UK government backtracked on its initial fairly lukewarm response to Covid to introduce lockdowns it was because MPs were under pressure from constituents to Do Something. The people in my experience are much more the drivers for "elite" decisions than I think even they realize.

Wokeness started as a backlash against cultural hegemony that had a number of groups considered as outcasts. When those groups got large and numerous enough they were able to form a coalition. The opposite will happen when people consider wokeness to be too oppressive. It's a see-saw that never stops moving. I think we can see some early signs of that. There will be a lag as things coalesce and as groups on the "outside" have to find and develop new alliances and get large enough to tip the scales once more. When that happens politicians will go with the current.

Which is not to say each tip doesn't leave some lasting changes. It usually does. Nothing can ever go back to the exact way it was before.

Edit: To clarify a bit, we will never be free of the culture war itself I don't think. It's an intrinsic part of human desire to form groups and then impose our values on those groups. But which side is winning, or what side represents what, is malleable and will change over time. It is an infinite war that cannot be won, but luckily it isn't an actual war.