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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30003 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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I woke up to Trump pulling a plug on the Department of Education. There's the usual freakout because this makes great headlines, there's the usual handwaving from the WH about how the programs people actually care about will get renamed and shoveled somewhere else, and Trump's enemies become further entrenched.

In principle this is similar to a lot of his other actions: it's motivated by the belief that Americans are getting a raw deal (they are), that they are paying too much and spending the money ineffectively (the money is not resulting in better educational achievement), and the looming giant specter that the government is heavily debt laden and going to go broke if you are not a subscriber to some wonkery like MMT. Trump is using the full power of the executive to chainsaw away the federal bloat and return power and responsibility back to the states.

What Trump likely hasn't foreseen is the likely response to this. I consider the Incentive Problem at the Heart of the American Justice System one of the most important articles written about America in the last decade. It's worth reading in its entirety; but the tldr is something like this: the tension between spending their own money and other people's money has created the disaster that is modern American policing, sentencing, judging and confinement. States don't want to pay for the operation of their own prisons at the same time they want to spend less on policing, so they'd rather give it up to for-profit prisons or shove it off to federal responsibility while enacting a weird kind of anarcho-tyranny.

This attitude is not exclusive to America. Brexit is probably a more notorious example: poor Britons who voted Leave correctly identified that their government considered their job not governance but selling them decisions made in Brussels. In their ignorance and naivete, they expected their own government to pick up the slack after leaving and believed they could do a better job of it by themselves. The reality is this: a government used to outsourcing their decision making process and shirking responsibility cannot be expected to suddenly pick up that responsibility when it is placed upon their shoulders. They will make a complete hash of it: "Brexit means Brexit" - never in a million years did the people expect that this would fail to move the needle on any of the reasons they voted for it (immigration, economics) or the complete lack of a plan for delivering it, as if the organs of government were rebelling against being told to perform their jobs for the first time in years and immediately set about trying to sabotage the mandated accomplishment with malicious compliance (you voted for Brexit because you hate immigrants, let's get even more of them in the country).

I believed, and still do, think Trump is a better president for America than Harris and many of these changes he's trying to push through have been a long time coming. Better yet, the loony side of Team Blue decisively lost in politics, and "demographics are destiny" has been proven false again. Maybe there's a chance they'll learn something before the pendulum swings back again.

However, there stands a very real chance of complete disaster across America as people who have never had to make a real decision in their lives find themselves suddenly having to as the Fed washes its hands and trims budgets. Not to mention the state employees who suddenly have to find room in the budget for all the things the federal government previously took care of. State governments are as subject to the same socialization of losses and the privatization of profits as the Fed is, and just as vulnerable to grifters, lawyers, and all manner of incompetent bureaucrats.

Before team red stans /ourguy/ some more, I would urge you to reconsider - do you have a good opinion of the people working in your state's government, and do you think the people running your state are up to the task of taking on the responsibilities that the Fed is dumping on them?

I couldn’t agree more with @zeke5123a below, 50 experiments is always better than 1. Some state governments will be more competent than others. Some will be more ‘woke’ or ‘anti woke’ than others; they may be correlated or inversely correlated, who knows? But at least they will exist.

For the same reason, I hope some lib state enacts an NHS style healthcare system in the near future (presumably with some caveats to prevent out-of-staters from using it). Not because I want to see it fail, but because I don’t see why it shouldn’t be tried at a state level.

More controversially, I feel the same is true about mandatory ID cards and hate speech laws, by the way. If Vermont wants Euro-style hate speech laws, I really don’t care. Plenty of states will oppose them. The same is true for gun control, for civil rights, for gay marriage, for religion in government.

Let the feds handle foreign policy, defense, intelligence, some interstate policing and - at arms length via the fed - monetary policy. Nothing more.

I never understood the liberal and leftist antagonism to this. It's an obvious compromise, fits right in with their ideas of multiculturalism, Diversity Is Our Strength, etc., and if you're so sure your ideas are better than others', this arrangement will make it plainly obvious soon enough.

I can only interpret as a deep insecurity that letting the experiment run will actually disprove, rather than prove their ideas.

Progressivism is a universalist religion; "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere", "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing". They don't want to experiment with letting states ban gay marriage or allow firearms for the same reason Christians don't want to experiment with letting states allow abortion or reinstate slavery; it is wrong, and it is evil, and it must be cleansed from the face of the Earth by fire and steel.

As @Capital_Room put it:

There is a certain kind of person for whom moral disapproval and the drive to intervene are one and the same thing, inseparable. To them, a lack of a burning need to stop a thing is proof that you don't actually disapprove of it. It's the classic stereotype of the D&D Paladin played badly: "see evil, smite evil." They are constitutionally incapable of shrugging and saying "none of my business." And the Blue Tribe is full of them.

Consider every missionary of an evangelizing, expansionist faith who has set out to convert the heathen — by fire and sword if necessary — because it's their duty, it's the right thing to do, and it's for the heathen's own good. If you have the One True Faith, the true set of Universal Human Rights, the Objectively Correct Morality, then you have a duty to spread and enforce it everywhere you can.

Why fight the Red Tribe? Because if you don't, you are complicit in every wrong they do. If you let the Red Tribe keep being transphobic rather than try to stop them, then the blood of every trans kid in a Red Tribe area who commits suicide is on your hands. Like Kendi says, you are either actively anti-racist, or you are racist. It's one or the other. You are either fighting evil, or you are evil.

Why does the Blue Tribe hate the Red Tribe? Because it's in their nature to hate anyone who fails to share their values. Because this need to be a moral busybody, a crusader, a Social Justice Warrior, is a core characteristic of the Tribe, woven into their culture (and probably also a non-trivial amount of genetic predisposition).

Why does the Blue Tribe continually attack the Red Tribe, trying to force them to convert, or otherwise eliminate the "Red culture"? Because they're fundamentally incapable of not doing so. They can't stop themselves, and thus they will never stop.

I don’t think kids in Alabama deserve bad education that puts them behind their peers because their parents aren’t very smart

  • -10

Poor, minority heavy states do badly at education. It doesn’t have much to do with policy it’s about what they have to work with.

And I don't think kids in California deserve to be chemically castrated because they gravitated to the wrong kind of toy. Would you rather have my views applied locally or globally?

Do you have any evidence that kids in California are being chemically castrated?

  • -10

Anyone who's on puberty blockers is being chemically castrated. It's the same did ug that's used for both.

Okay, well, that’s not true, but you do you.

  • -16

Do you have any evidence that it's not true? Like I said, they use the exact same drug, with the exact same purpose (sex-hormone suppression).

Also, answer my question: do you want my views applied globally or locally?

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In 2024, Alabama had a higher average literacy score than Maine, Vermont, Delaware, Texas, and California, to name a few. And the same or higher percentage of students at basic reading level. Who is getting a bad education because of dumb parents?

Can you link the study that says that?

  • -10

https://www.newsweek.com/math-reading-scores-us-states-2022836

1 second of googling.

The rules of this forum are….? Suggestions?

  • -18

Demanding rigor in a rhetorical cage match is a fatality. OP's statement was clear and google-able at a copy/paste, first-result level. The off-handed claim about Alabama sucking didn't help either, some around here might call it a dog-whistle. Anyway, save your battles.

Claim: it's dangerous for different states to adopt different standards from each other.

  • Would state A risk an invasion by an entire state-B population of underachieving morons--with no economic, political or militaristic boundaries between states as protection?
  • When do states have the right to fight each other?
  • Should we expect that all of our elites will eventually be foreigners because we've dumbed down our back bench?
  • How do you prevent bad localized ideas, un-scientific methods, and fads from chewing through the populace?
  • What are the controls?
  • What happens to national culture?
  • How will we get people to continue to drink milk?
  • What will we do if we suddenly realize we've made a bad national decision? Dept. II: Edu-harder?
  • How will we recognize or measure the impact of losing the department/relying on individual states?
  • Is it all just money--or lack thereof?
  • How will the universities--and by extension small communities supported by such schools--survive without a government college grants program? Is it like moving a highway?
  • Does all of this work to raise the prestige of the Ivy's, Stanford, etc.?
  • Will it be a boom-time for community colleges and State universities?
  • Like...worst of all...what if it works?

Here's a convenient summary of the National Center for Education Statistics data on National Assessment of Educational Progress. To clarify, this does not include adult literacy, just students in grade school. Which I think is a better view of current education standings than adult literacy.

I never understood the liberal and leftist antagonism to this.

It's pretty much entirely historical as a result of Jim Crow. Localism in the UK is weakly left-coded, although in practice it is generally supported by the party out of power in Westminster at the time. In Spain localism is strongly left-coded, but it is right-coded in Italy.

In the cases of the US, Spain, and Italy there are obvious stories about who the noisiest opponents of the centre are and how that determines the partisan valence.

That said, ID cards is a really stupid thing to push to the states (except in so far as they run the offices administering a federally determined policy, which is what happens in Germany) because it is so tied to immigration policy, which is a federal responsibility for good reasons.

Healthcare policy is run at a subnational level almost everywhere - even in the UK Scotland and Wales have their own NHSs.

It's pretty much entirely historical as a result of Jim Crow. Localism in the UK is weakly left-coded, although in practice it is generally supported by the party out of power in Westminster at the time. In Spain localism is strongly left-coded, but it is right-coded in Italy.

I agree that localism (much like free speech) is often used cynically, but that's neither a typical response, nor an actual argument against localism.

"Muh Jim Crow" also doesn't quite explain it either. Are you saying American anti-localists will change their mind if you constitutionally take that issue off the table?

Healthcare policy is run at a subnational level almost everywhere - even in the UK Scotland and Wales have their own NHSs.

The world consists of more than the UK and the US.

” Muh Jim Crow" also doesn't quite explain it either. Are you saying American anti-localists will change their mind if you constitutionally take that issue off the table?

No - what I am suggesting operates at a much more emotional level than that. The Civil Rights movement is the heroic epic of the American left, so in the stories American lefties tell themselves the heroes are centralisers and the villains cry “States’ Rights”. Whereas the heroic epic of the Spanish left is resistance to Franco, so in the stories Spanish lefties tell themselves the good guys are calling for autonomy for Catalunya and the Basque Country while the villains cry “Todos por la patria”.

The world consists of more than the UK and the US

I know. Having checked my research, there are more countries with centralised healthcare policy than I thought, but it is still generally devolved.

  • France is centralised
  • The German system is heavily decentralised, but the Krankenkasse are not organised on State lines, so technically counts as Federalised
  • In Italy healthcare is run by the regions
  • In Spain healthcare is run by the autonomous communities
  • In Denmark and Sweden the ground rules are set nationally but the healthcare system is actually run at County level
  • In Switzerland healthcare is run by the cantons
  • In Poland the national government and the regions share responsibility for healthcare in a way which appears to be incomprehensible to everyone except Polish bureaucrats
  • In Canada healthcare is run by the provinces
  • Australia is centralised
  • In India healthcare is run by the states.

Because people negatively impacted by their opponents’ ideas have primary moral consideration.

I can only interpret as a deep insecurity* that letting the experiment run will actually disprove, rather than prove their ideas.

I don't think so. Rather the opposite really - true believer leftists are very secure in their belief of the correctness of their ideas, to the point where experiments are in fact immoral, since people will end up suffering from the wrong solutions, and unnecessary because the good leftists already know the correct solutions.

Does this sound boo-outgroup? I'm serious, as an ex-leftist who spent decades in a leftist bubble and still lives next door to it. Experimentation may seem like a golden compromise to someone with enough epistemic humility, but epistemic humility is completely absent from the water the left swims in. They know. They know what the problems and the solutions are, and experimentation can only be worse than doing the obviously correct thing.

There's also a practical, political reason not to allow this - they have long-marched through most institutions; why ever give up now?

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