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 -
I covered that in my post that I linked. The notion that the bill was "open borders up to 5000 migrants per day" was just egregiously false.
Yeah it was actually open borders all the time forever with no limits, because it would have handed 100% of the control of the border to a small cult of DC activist judges.
This wasn't true to any serious extent, other than how laws are always interpreted by the judicial system
How many illegals are here?
How did they get here?
Given that they are in fact illegal, how and why did existing laws and enforcement mechanisms fail to keep them out or remove them once they were in?
Why were these failures not anticipated when the laws were written? Should they have been?
If many previous laws did not work, why should we believe that passing additional laws would change things?
To what extent are these failures the result of willful policy? How would the new laws prevent such policies?
The last major legislation was in 1986, and it was a mess of compromise and had some incoherencies that would later become evident. Add those issues on top of being 40 years old, and yeah, I'd say it's hardly a surprise things aren't exactly in the best shape today.
The reform bill in 2024 would have gone a long way to fixing it. With that dead, Republicans could have (or could still do, I guess) their own party-line bill now that could fix a lot of the issues.
Is there something specific you're looking for? I'm not sure how much of what you wrote were genuine questions, or whether they were just gesturing at political nihilism and implying that since we didn't get it perfect 40 years ago then there'd be no point in doing anything ever.
The last really significant federal gun control legislation was also in the 1980s, IIRC. This does not appear to have impeded enforcement of those laws when the Federal Government considered such enforcement desirable, despite similar "compromises" and "incoherencies". We also see very inconsistent and lackadaisical enforcement of these laws in a large majority of cases, the straw purchase prohibitions being a particularly egregious example, but it really does seem to me in these cases that the problem exists between chair and keyboard, not within the text of the laws. We also have examples, several of which @gattsuru has laid out at some length here, of how legislation Blues find inconvenient is simply ignored; the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act is my preferred example, but it seems to me that there are plenty of others.
It seems to me that political nihilism is spreading because it offers superior predictive value to the process-is-legitimate frame you prefer. If you disagree, I think it behooves you to engage on the details, rather than simply arguing by assertion. We can directly observe that the Feds and the courts routinely decline to enforce laws they don't want to enforce and have been doing so for decades, and often enforce "interpretations" of laws that do exist that converge on simply making shit up. We can directly observe that even repeated Supreme Court "victories" on specific questions of law change nothing, and we can infer that the Supreme Court backs down when faced with sufficient resistance from the states and executive.
How? What is the core of the problem? Is it that laws say "may" rather than "shall"? Where can we see this actually making a difference in this or other issues of public policy? Why did they write the law so poorly, and why should we be confident that a new law would be written better? Because the nihilist argument is that ten years from now, whoopsy-daisy, it turns out this new law also had "compromises" and "inconsistencies" that, gosh darn it, mean we have to let in another twenty million illegals wouldn't you know it shucks howdy.
I'm looking for anything specific. I'm looking for a nuts-and-bolts argument about why the process you're pointing to actually matters, preferably with examples of it mattering in a way that resulted in durable facts-on-the-ground wins for my tribe, because the alternative is that we are being invited to accept paper "wins" that will turn out to not actually be wins when it's too late to do anything about it. I think our interests are better served by taking a blowtorch to the legitimacy of our "shared" political institutions, rather than trying to reform them. I'm open to arguments that I'm wrong, but it seems to me that table-stakes for such an argument is some actual examples of my side winning through the "legitimate" process. Otherwise, if your argument is that every law my side writes just turns out to not be written properly to give us what we want, and every law the other side rights is unquestionably perfect and does even more than they claimed it'd do when they wrote it, that seems odd to me.
You're running out of trust. The institutions run on trust. If one person doesn't trust the system, that person has a problem. If a hundred million people don't trust the system, the system has a problem. It's pretty clear to me that at this point, the system has a problem. You may think that's stupid and unfair, but at some point you have to engage with the realities of the situation.
If you're looking for any specific thing, my old article goes into the asylum fraud loophole that the bill explicitly would have fixed. And yes, "may" vs "shall" is a very important distinction when writing legislation. Most things are written in "may" terms as a rule to give the Executive flexibility to respond in reasonable ways if situations change. Of course that leeway can be abused which happened with immigration, and that's when "shall" is necessary if you think the Executive isn't going to do its job. If you want an example of this in action, look up 8 U.S.C. §1226(c) and court cases Nielsen v Preap as well as Johnson v Guzman Chavez
If you want another example of what legislation could fix, look up US v Texas (2023). Republicans tried to sue the federal government to get them to enforce immigration restrictions, but were thrown out for lack of standing. That's something that could be addressed by legislation.
I'm not really going to touch the rest of your post on the legitimacy of the system more broadly, since we're so far apart that I doubt it would be productive.
I think there is a disagreement here about what you're saying. There are two possible interpretations of this line of argument.
This is what I think you intend to say.
This is what everyone else hears.
I think it's pretty clear that there's more to power than the text of the law. The Republicans seem to have decided to adopt a totally adversarial, zero-sum stance. They seem to have decided that any compromise with the Democrats is a strategic error. They seem to have decided to fight this battle through personnel rather than legislation.
Can you blame them?
Of course Democrats could and perhaps will try to torture the law's interpretation to crack open a ton of immigration again, but there are limits to how far that can get. Trump and MAGA did that in the other direction in his first term and are doing it again now, and you can see how it pans out: many of the EO's get mangled by the courts, and he achieves results no better than Obama's second term, and which can be revoked by the stroke of a pen when the next guy comes in. So yeah, Democrats could do that but their hand will be far more limited than it was under Biden if conservative legislation is passed. Also, the SCOTUS is probably going to be conservative for at least the next generation since it's that way now, and Dems have no plans for how to retake control of the Senate any time soon.
I'm asking MAGA the question "Now that you have power, what's your plan to deal with immigration long-term, especially once Democrats retake the Presidency sometime in the future", and the response I'm hearing is functionally:
With MAGA being the Trump-cult that it is, my priors are that there's a huge distributed search to find a deflection for any accusation that Trump is somehow not the best of all possible worlds for conservatives on every issue. Since Trump isn't prioritizing enduring immigration reform, they work backwards to find excuses, and land on the goofy result that "passing laws is meaningless" with a decent dose of populist pablum "the system is rigged!" and, of course, a recitation of how much they loathe their outgroup, how evil and conniving they are, etc.
MAGA has a golden opportunity to entrench their immigration win, and they're just not doing that since it would require them to hold Trump accountable for failing to optimize for enduring wins rather than temporary fixes that look good on cable news.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link