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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   35213 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Trump just tweeted "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."

I know that Belisarius thinks I'm a far-leftist (lol), but I think that a fair reading my post history will show that I am what I present myself as, more or less a classical liberal who hates both the left and the right.

I've spent a lot of time and energy both online and offline defending Trump and Trumpism from the often hysterically-phrased accusation that it is fascist, a huge threat, etc. I feel a bit like an idiot now, to be frank. I still hate the woke and am somewhat glad that Trumpism rose up to halt the woke's authoritarian tendencies... but lord, more and more I wish that it had been almost anything other than Trumpism doing it. The argument that Trumpism is fundamentally a classical liberal force is becoming more and more absurd almost by the hour, in my opinion.

Accelerationists (the three or four actual ones for whom it's not just a funny pretense) must be rubbing their hands raw with glee right now. Things are moving very fast.

As much as I appreciate some of what Trumpism is doing to upend stale norms and wokism, at this point I, and probably many other centrists are starting to think "shit, maybe the hysterical libs had a point about these people". And if politics is making me start to side even slightly with literal Redditors, you know that things are bad and crazy.

My biggest mistake, I think, was to extremely overestimate libs and the left. I really thought they would manage to blunt Trumpism's worst impulses and there would be a sort of stalemate like there was during Trump's first term. But libs and the left seem to be missing. Turns out that there is no deep state waiting with sharp fangs and CIA assassins to stop the orange man as soon as he tries to actually do anything that hurts the Blob. Instead, there are only old tired bureaucrats and the occasional protester wearing a pussy hat.

Whoops. Well, so much for that. I was wrong. And this shit is starting to be a bit genuinely alarming. I think I am, actually, getting tired of "winning". I wanted the woke to be defeated by classical liberals, not by a rage-filled vengeful gaggle of right-wing revolutionaries.

I wanted the woke to be defeated by classical liberals.

We could debate all the fundamental philosophical problems of liberalism (classical or otherwise), but what I think is the more pressing problem with this attitude of simply wanting to return to "90s liberalism" which seems to be espoused by many figures is that they make no effort to explain that even if somehow liberalism defeats woke and we all become good liberals again, how will liberalism not immediately give rise to woke again. Woke, if not liberal itself, arose in the conditions of liberalism. Why wouldn't it do it again? Even if you're a 'classical liberal' rather than a '90s liberal' (social liberal) it's just delaying the problem slightly longer.

Ironically, despite the contemporary right-wing movements often being accused of being reactionary, it's really the anti-woke liberals who are reactionary in the quite literal and plain meaning of the word. They think we can just turn back the clock on political and philosophical development of the last thirty, fourty, fifty years and (re)establish a liberal utopia and the last fifteen years of woke will disappear forever like a bad dream, like it never happened. Remember, this 'SJW' 'woke' thing is just a fad that college kids will grow out of once they enter the real world.

Contemporary right-wing thought doesn't do this. It's decidedly post-liberal, not liberal or pre-liberal. It has, with maybe a few exceptions, fully embraced that liberalism has had its political moment, it has failed and the question is how to address those failures. The dialectic has progessed, one might say. Even the ironically named 'neo-reactionaries' aren't really reactionary in any meaningful sense, other than just borrowing basic, well-worn concepts from eons past. Their politics are still clearly post-liberal. I would even argue 'MAGA' (insofar it is a coherent political movement) is post-liberal, again despite the ironic name.

So my question to all those who just want to 'retvrn' to the liberalism of decades past - how to you plan to address or reform liberalism so it will won't cause woke again? What do you acknowledge are its problems? How would your changes keep the essence of liberalism so despite the changes it could still meaningfully be called liberalism? How would it not just be simply nostalgia for a past that can never be returned to, if it existed at all?

My suspicion as to why Liberalism was weak to wokeness was twofold.

  1. The average person believes that society was wrong about homosexuality. As such, when a new movement that professes to be like the gay movement arises, they're very eager to show they wouldn't have made the same mistakes as their predecessors. (There's a major difference between someone who is gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and someone who is queer/LGBTQ+ - I'm referring to the former group on terms of what the average person would accept).
  2. The right wing still carries a lot of baggage from some specific forms of christians. A very common life path is someone who is raised in a religious environment, then goes to university. People who are less intelligent who follow rules tend to enforce them without understanding the purpose behind them (for example, at work you could have a procedure to set the printer page delay to 15 seconds because the color ink doesn't dry quickly - someone intelligent would know a black and white print could have no delay, while someone less intelligent would do it every time). As a result, the kids who go to university feel that there are no redeeming factors to christianity, and feel it represents the right.

I think that if wokeness suffers a hearts and minds defeat, as opposed to what Trump is doing, it actually would be possible to go back to liberalism. We'd have in our cultural milieu a reference to leftism going insane, which would produce antibodies against the empathy spirals that the current left uses.

That being said, I don't think that we are currently on that trajectory - I think that Trump (like Biden and Obama) is projecting a culture change top down, and that we have too much of a bifurcation in beliefs to return to it yet. I honestly think that a very major country (like, G7) has to fall specifically from wokeness (similar to the fall of the Soviet Union) before we can see the potential for it to return.

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