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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33162 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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I'm increasingly fascinated by how counter-productive the current modus operandi of political discourse within the Left and Liberal wings of Western society has become.

When in a political discussion, I try to rarely make sloganeering arguments - very few buzzwords, no contentious examples, generally attempting to keep a big picture in mind, clearly distinguishing between what I believe to be a core principle and what I think could be a likely hypothesis, etc. Of course I sometimes take the bait or let spite and Schadenfreude get the better of me, but generally I think I'm pretty good at discussing politics and have been able to have nice and constructive conversations with people across the political spectrum : I think it's precisely because of the rather tentative way I go about defending or questioning ideas that the discussions almost always conclude on a cordial tone, completely irrespective of how close we are ideologically or if anyone involved was really convinced of the other's perspective.

It has long been remarked that the Left has an issue with both internal and external discourse, pushing for alienating purity tests and distorting supposedly open discussions into show trials the moment an unsavoury subtext or implication can be gleaned from the other's words - no matter how minor or semantic. From a Marxist-Leninist perspective, this makes some sense to me as an internal approach to maintain ideological unity - it has a martial aspect to it that places a very high value on cohesion and loyalty, exactly what you want from an organised Vanguard movement waiting to strike. As an external form of discussion geared towards convincing the public at large or gaining new recruits to your cause, it's obviously abysmal and essentially filters out normal people in record speed.

As a former Marxist-Leninist myself, who was in such a "Vanguard party" in my home of Austria way back during Obama's second term/Trump's first years in office (and who now, over a decade later, feels more sympathy for Mussolini than Lenin), it's been interesting to see how this internal form of discourse (which I guess we now would call wokeism or cancel culture) has also completely taken over any approach to external messaging and discussing. When I was in a Marxist org over a decade ago, we would go to worker's clubs, employee's strikes, union meetings and such in the hope of recruiting or latently indoctrinating the working-class there. The explicit modus operandi that we were taught and regularly coached on was to insist on opinions of theirs that were bauchlinks - "left-wing by gut feeling", essentially. Even though by the mid 2010's most working-class people in Austria outside of some flagship unions were already comfortably captured by the far-right, we spoke to them exclusively through the lens of what we could agree on, not what they were wrong about believing. Of course, this made for a lot of friendly conversations and momentary feelings of having made progress. But in the end, these actions had next to zero effect since most of the Marxist org members were bourgeois students slobs and therefore neither trusted nor taken seriously by the workers, and we really didn't have a good answer on immigration and the refugee crisis (since we were wrong on this issue, as the Left still is today).

Still, this approach to engaging a political conversation seemed to me productive and understanding of how politics functions - you need to get people on your side. That's easier when you make them feel like you and they already believe alot of the same things.

I won't belabour how much cancel culture et all has ruined the Left and tarnished its public image - we all know. What's more interesting to me is that even among less overtly woke or even moderate/conservative liberals, there is a growing attitude of guilt by association and implication - and a pleasure to brand someone as far-right, a nazi, a "populist", especially if said person has any kind of public presence and influence. We see this across the UK, Germany, Austria, especially when it comes to Trump or Ukraine. It's practical effect is essentially them saying "please see yourself as our political opposition and consider yourself excluded from our political project" - the exact opposite of what you want to achieve in a political discussion! Joe Rogan has of course become the archetypal example of this. The list of influential people who became right-wingers because one side of the political spectrum welcomed them with few strings attached and the other told them they were irredeemable and devoid of decency is long and growing.

What's the idea behind this kind of discourse? It seems so alien to any kind of strategic understanding of politics and campaigning to me, especially now when the liberal order is more vulnerable than ever. Are they still this oblivious to the disillusionment and loss of trust in institutions that is well entrenched in Western society today? Is it some kind of some kind of moral self-validation first and foremost? Where does this desire to grow your own political opposition come from?

Dominant ideologies can afford to gatekeep; weaker ideologies can’t. The far left struggles because in some ways it is both strong (it largely agreed with the liberal consensus on social issues, tolerance, immigration, identity, prisons/justice etc) and in other ways it is weak (private property, capitalism, the existence of rich people). As you note, this means it struggles to build an electoral coalition beyond young middle class students who agree with the liberals on social issues but who are personally poor, and therefore sympathetic to leftist arguments around redistribution.

And it’s worth noting that the ‘adults in the room’ in the DNC seem to know what they need to do to be electorally competitive. They just can’t get the party to moderate on trans and immigration.

There's a perception that Democratic politicians are particularly fringe or loony with respect to trans issues or immigration and in general they're not. The problem is that the people who are extreme are uniformly Democrats, and that gets projected on to the rest of the party. It doesn't help that these people tend to, by their nature, be the most motivated, loudest, and most likely to get signal-boosted by their political opponents.

I think the equivalent trend for Republicans is something like racism. Most Republican politicians are not racist, certainly not in the good ol' boy kind of way. But for Americans who personally know racists or look on social media and see examples of politicians who are overtly racist it's uniformly Republicans.

There's a perception that Democratic politicians are particularly fringe or loony with respect to trans issues or immigration and in general they're not.

Maybe on a personal level, but as political figures, there was and largely still is an absolute consensus within the Democratic party on these issues or at least the supposed core beliefs underlying them. The fact that there is a diversity hire Supreme Court Justice who was literally unable to define the word "woman" during her Senate hearings and was voted in unanimously by the Democrats should attest to this. I'm sure quite a few Senators privately think she's a moron, but their political actions are what determines their politics, not what might be whispered behind closed doors.

But for Americans who personally know racists or look on social media and see examples of politicians who are overtly racist it's uniformly Republicans.

If you define racism as "being resentful of black people", sure. But if I consider racism as any undue or malicious injection of race as a marker of superiority or inferiority as pertaining to a political issue, it's most certainly been the left-liberal wing of the spectrum that's by far the most common offender. I actually remember very little hostile discussions of race in Western politics growing up - there was a kind of consensus that fixating on race was low-class skinhead behaviour and that the most one should do is be courteous and non-judgemental. Every now and then you'd get a "George Bush doesn't care about black people" moment, but those seemed more like rebellious provocations and tabloid scandals than any kind of real societal divide. Here in Europe, the big topic around race 15+ years ago was football fans making monkey noises when black players of the opposing team were on the field - again, condemned as low class, provincial behaviour mainly driven by stupidity and a lack of education rather than any kind of malice or "institutional oppression".

The vast majority of Democrat politicians will dutifully vote for secretly transing kids in schools and installing backdoors to enable unlimited third world migration. The official position of the party is the loony, and they do not tolerate dissent.

Even the slimmest Democrat state trifecta in a competitive state will result in them speedrunning the california experience (sorry I don't have links, I remember lib fake news gushing about how good this is) https://prospect.org/politics/2023-05-22-new-minnesota-vikings/

That changed in 2022, when the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) gained three Senate seats to win a one-seat majority. ...

The DFL promptly set to work, passing a sweeping set of reforms that puts deeper-blue states like California, Massachusetts, or New York to shame.

All told, it’s quite the record of accomplishment—all done in less than half a year

Democrats never slow down, and they never defect.

There's a perception that Democratic politicians are particularly fringe or loony with respect to trans issues or immigration and in general they're not. The problem is that the people who are extreme are uniformly Democrats, and that gets projected on to the rest of the party. It doesn't help that these people tend to, by their nature, be the most motivated, loudest, and most likely to get signal-boosted by their political opponents.

Is this actually true? Who was the Democrat governor banning puberty blockers in kids in 2021? Who was the Senate Democrat voting for the wall in 2018? And Biden officials? Come on. They put trans people in multiple positions, had the crossdressing airport thief, and their border policy intentionally massively increased both illegal immigration as well as net of the "asylum claims" that no one actually thinks are legitimate.

Well, there's Gavin Newsom's post-election switch to opposing trans athletes in women's sports.

You can take a kind of functionalist position and say that Democratic politicians are what they do, and so in 2020 they were radical trans ideologues. Sure. But it doesn't give much insight into how they will respond to changing circumstances. Democratic electeds don't have deeply held principles (no more than Republicans do): they react to incentives, around easily understood things like power, money, and status.

The extremists driving the unpopular trans positions, on the other hand, are not going to suddenly abandon their views once they start costing them power, money, and status. (And the broader Democratic base will shift to supporting whatever Democratic leadership and media tells them to.)

You can take a kind of functionalist position and say that Democratic politicians are what they do, and so in 2020 they were radical trans ideologues. Sure. But it doesn't give much insight into how they will respond to changing circumstances.

You have to do the former and be skeptical of the latter, because every Democrat in my lifetime in a major statewide or national race has ran to the center, only to govern far to the left of their campaign positions.

You can take a kind of functionalist position and say that Democratic politicians are what they do, and so in 2020 they were radical trans ideologues. Sure.

Honest question : how else would you qualify someone's politics, other than by their voluntary political actions?

The incentives they experience and respond to. You might have two different people and, at a particular moment of time, they respond the same way to the incentives they face. But if the landscape of incentives change, their actions might diverge.

E.g. if your mental model of Gavin Newsom involves him being deeply ideological on trans issues, then you wouldn't have been able to predict he'd switch to moderating his positions when his party was faced with a broad electoral loss (and wanting to prepare himself for a national run).

And, on the other side, until Trump came most Republican politicians would have condemned broad tariffs and been pro-war. But change the political landscape, and they change their positions.

You can take a kind of functionalist position and say that Democratic politicians are what they do, and so in 2020 they were radical trans ideologues. Sure. But it doesn't give much insight into how they will respond to changing circumstances.

The direct implication of this is that we don't know if they won't come right back to sending trans women to women's sports and prisons the moment they win.

We don't know. But it's not guaranteed they will, and what determines whether Democrats will are how powerful trans activists are when Democrats win, not past actions or politicians' stated values at one moment.

A downside of this framework is that power is opaque, and the clearest way to seeing whether trans groups are powerful is whether they can cause Democratic politicians to send trans people to women's sports and prisons. Beyond that, we have to read tea leaves: how does media treat trans issues? Do tech platforms give them full censorship rights?

There are definitely high-profile Americans who are both Democrats and frequently regarded as racist. Mostly involving antisemitism. To name one example, Hasan Piker.

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are not true believers. But they don’t push back against the true believers running the party.

Like republicans may not be politically correct about race but they’re visibly uncomfortable with racism. Governors and senators do not retweet the 14 words and happily condemn neoNazis(yes, I’m sure you can dig up state legislators, but my point is that among democrats extremism on trans and immigration is not limited to state legislators).

In my state, Gilberto Hinojosa was ousted as state party chair not when he proved incompetent but when he opined that the party should take a chill pill on trans, purely for electoral reasons.

My issue is that on the left, there’s zero pushback. When trans activists host preschool events in drag at the library, the pushback comes from Republicans, but not liberals. When BLM was burning down parts of major cities, not only were democrats not doing anything to stop it, but were giving bail money and public support to the movement. Right now in the great Tesla burnings, I’ve yet to hear one person on the left say “this has gone too far. We don’t support vandalism, and don’t harass people who own a Tesla.”

The right, to a fairly large degree rein in their radical wing. No GOP member would let a Proud Boy cover a mosque in bacon without condemning it. They don’t pay bail money for riots as a matter of course. If people March with Nazi flags, the right will scream at every opportunity from every available microphone, on every podcast and blog that they don’t support this nonsense.

And I think it’s the arrogance of having almost all of the cathedral on their side. They know they aren’t going to face blowback from the media and they know their districts are mostly safe. They don’t have to worry about their wings because they’re the ones in control.

if people March with Nazi flags, the right will scream at every opportunity from every available microphone, on every podcast and blog that they don’t support this nonsense.

Scott Aaronson keeps rightly lambasting Musk for not doing this about the salute thing.

  1. If anyone on the left had said that Tesla vandalism is going too far, do you think your media/info channels would tell you about it? What do you think the motivations are of the news sources covering this? My prior is that any right coded media source would downplay/ignore any such statements.

  2. Your statement about the right reining itself in seems pretty shaky to me. If people march with Nazi flags they'll scream from the rooftops but Elon Musk himself questionably, ambiguously does a Nazi salute on a huge stage, notably doesn't apologize or even acknowledge that this would be offensive to some people, even if it was initially accidental,and the right as a whole lets him off scot free? This doesn't support your argument. And neither does the bit about riots, unless you think everyone in the Capitol building on the 6th was actually no criminal at all. I recall lots of financial and legal support being thrown their way.

If people march with Nazi flags they'll scream from the rooftops but Elon Musk himself questionably, ambiguously does a Nazi salute on a huge stage, notably doesn't apologize or even acknowledge that this would be offensive to some people, even if it was initially accidental,and the right as a whole lets him off scot free?

If Musk's "Nazi salute" was a creation of the left-wing media, this becomes completely explainable.

The thing about Nazi flags is that you don't need to be politically biased to conclude that they are Nazi flags.

Tracing woodgrains has pushed back against the Tesla stuff.

Tracingwoodgrains also has a history of deliberate efforts to undercut the credibility or ability of political opponents to signal-boosting attestations of progressive political excesses, which includes things like the tesla stuff.

Tracing pushes back on a matter of success of tactics towards their preferred outcomes, not kind. Namely, when things are viewed as counter-productive to Tracing's preferences.

Trace also would never survive a DNC primary or a week as a host on CNN. So he is not a good example of the mainstream left.

The problem is that the people who are extreme are uniformly Democrats, and that gets projected on to the rest of the party. It doesn't help that these people tend to, by their nature, be the most motivated, loudest, and most likely to get signal-boosted by their political opponents.

Trace isn't on the left at all. He is a dissident conservative who is trying to build bridges to the centre-left because the centre-right in the US appears to no longer exist.

If the center right no longer exists (not true IMO) the center left hasn't for decades. So, I don't see the point of trying to make that point.

Oh please. Yeah, I heard his origin story of being a Mitt Romney republican, but there's nothing conservative about him. His entire posting history here indicates his goal boils down to 'tard-wrangling the hardcore progressives so they stop scaring away the hoes normies.

I'm also struggling to charitably respond to the assertion that a center-right no longer exists. The neocons don't get to define the center-right, and disagreeing with them doesn't mean you're "far-right".

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The problem is that the people who are extreme are uniformly Democrats, and that gets projected on to the rest of the party. It doesn't help that these people tend to, by their nature, be the most motivated, loudest, and most likely to get signal-boosted by their political opponents.

I'd say the biggest problem is that they get appointed to be the Secretary of the Public Health Service, where they hatch conspiracies to abolish age limits on "gender affirming procedures".

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