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 -
Is liberalism dying?
I see frequently brought up on this forum that Mitt Romney was a perfectly respectable Mormon conservative that was unjustly torn apart by the Left. In response to this, the Right elected a political outsider that is frequently brazenly offensive and antagonistic to the Left, as well as many (most?) establishment institutions. I am seeing the idea "this is a good thing, because if the Left are our enemies and won't budge from their positions that are explicitly against us, we need to treat them as such", probably expressed in other words.
This frightens me, as it seems to be a failure of liberalism, in this country and potentially other Western liberal democratic countries. Similar to the fate of this forum, where civil discussion was tried and then found to be mostly useless, leading to the expulsion of the forum to an offsite and the quitting of center left moderates like TracingWoodgrains and Yassine Meskhout, the political discourse has devolved into radicals that bitterly resist the other side. Moderates like Trace seem to be rare among the politically engaged, leaving types like Trump and AOC. They fight over a huge pool of people who don't really care much about politics and vote based on the vibe at the moment, who are fed rhetoric that is created by increasingly frustrated think-tanks and other political thinkers. Compromise seems to not be something talked about anymore, and instead, liberalism has been relegated to simply voting for your side and against the other side. To me, this is pretty clearly unsustainable, since the two sides seem to have a coin flip of winning each election and then upon winning, proceed to dismantle everything the previous side did.
We see this in a number of other Western liberal democratic countries. Germany and France both had a collapse of their governments recently due to an unwillingness between the parties to work together and make compromises. Similar states that seem to be on the brink of exhaustion include South Korea and Canada, though I'm told things are not nearly as divisive in Japan. China, though having its own set of problems, seems to not have issues with political division stemming from liberalism, since it's not liberal at all.
I am seeing these happenings and becoming increasingly convinced that liberalism is on its way out. Progressivism and the dissident right both seem to be totally opposed to the principles. This is a bad thing to me and a cause of some hopelessness, since America produced a great deal of good things during its heyday, and even still is doing awesome things. It is predominantly America's technology companies settling the frontier, and recently they've struck gold with AI, proper chatbots, unlike the Cleverbots of old.
Is liberalism dying? If it is, is that a good thing or a bad thing to you? If it's a bad thing, what do you propose should be done to stop the bleeding?
It does seem to be in dire straights doesn't it? Fortunately it has survived worse before and it will survive this. It survived the beginning of the 20th century for starters, when everyone knew the old political philosophies were dead and being replaced by glorious and vastly superior philosophies like communism and fascism. I think it can survive this ladies reboot (like it's worth watching without the trench warfare or pacific campaign). The thing you have to remember about liberalism is that it is a meta-political system designed to allow a bunch of people with competing political philosophies to unite, so even if it does go away for a bit, it will be back the instant some of the fascists realise they lack the numbers to crush the communists underfoot and vice versa.
I think the biggest problem with our current conception of liberalism is that most people aren't detached enough to be able to adhere to it. They saw liberalism as their team, and because it lacked anything like a defined aesthetic or culture beyond "whatever liberals nearby are doing right now" + "a sense of superiority and being the adult in the room" they decided whatever they did was liberalism as long as they trust the experts and cargo culted their way to (and were sabotaged into) the priestly monstrosity we have been suffering under. That's dying now, and good riddance. But liberalism as it existed outside of the last 20 years is going to be fine I think.
That said, liberalism is one of those institutional facts like democracy or Christmas that grow in strength through the public's acceptance of them, and the cargo cult version has done a lot of damage to the brand, so unless Trump and co aggressively retake it (which they might) it might disappear for a while. It's probably a good idea really, it gets it away from the stigma of the corrupted version.
This next paragraph I wrote first and then I rewrote it in a more motte friendly format, which helped it develop in a different direction, particularly something that I don't remember seeing anyone else in this thread express but when I was finished I reread this bit and realised I'd not hit the point I was originally aiming for, but I currently only have use of one arm and am full of drugs so consider it something like a Tldr that doesn't save any time or accurately represent the original - The shit currently on its way out was never liberalism, which is why people like me have had to call ourselves silly shit like true liberal or lockean liberal. For the past three decades we watched our ideology get turned into a fucking minstrel show complete with hambone and grease paint. Am I worried about liberalism now? No. Quiet or loud, I for one am happy to wait until the techno-reactionaries, gay space communists, block chain minarchists, influencer syndicalists and Keynesian necromancers of the future decide they can behave like adults and compromise a little to beat the other guys into submission.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link