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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17396 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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What’s happening here is the wrong decision, just like Roe v. Wade was the wrong decision (for reference, that the Supreme Court had any business deciding the matter - I actually rather like the rule as pragmatic legislation). The law, as written, and procedures, as defined, deserve a great degree of deference. This is precisely because such deference prevents disagreements from devolving into their primal forms.

You’re coming at the whole Rule of Law thing from a bit of a strange angle, as if its proponents must view any legal decision as inherently proper and to form. It’s a little like the ol’ Pope Francis gotcha against Christians, or that post some time back about how Catholicism was obviously bunk because the wrong number of cardinals voted. A system, properly understood, is teleological in nature. That is, it has an essence which drives its character and directs its behavior, and the system is functioning as intended to the degree that it asymptomatically approaches that essence. Plato’s Forms are the obvious analogue here. Just because a chair is broken doesn’t make it not a chair; it is simply a chair that is not serving its purpose - the degree to which it is broken is the degree to which it falls short of the ideal of a comfortable single seat with a back to lean on.

So, very obviously, a legal system as implemented in reality will fall short of the ideal of the Rule of Law, for as you well know we are fallen, mortal things aspiring to immortal essence. But the reason of that ideal is to have a way of solving our differences that is more than just conflicting preferences or arbitrary whims. The Rule of Law, embodied, is a set of fundamental systems for determining what relation man has to his neighbors and the corporate body of the state, with progressively less absolute rules layered on top and a process for rectifying and managing tensions in those rules. In the abstract, it is the principle that there is real justice out there, a fair and proper way of doing things, of preventing the injustice we know all too well, which is the power of a man or a mob to crush the free out of avarice or spite. That’s the whole reason here.

So obviously there are going to be failures in such a system. There were from the beginning, there will be in the future. But calling this a suitable case for abandoning the project altogether - well, what do you think the alternative is? The only thing that has prevented gun bans in the US thus far is the Second Amendment. All our peers have long since banned guns, or put massive restrictions compared to ours. And there has been no end to efforts to eliminate them! The argument that keeps holding absolute gun control back is that the 2ndA is quite clear in its requirements. People choose to ignore it, but unless the amendment is removed, it will be a constant boon to any argument in favor of gun freedoms. But if the fig leaf goes away, the question boils down to power alone, and right now Progressives have all the institutional power and they all hate guns.

Rule of Law is not bald proceduralism to protect the powerful. Power hates rules, because rules limit the exercise of power, and prefers commands which can be totally arbitrary. Rule of Law is here for you, even if you don’t recognize it, even if you don’t support it. Rules are the way the weak organize against the strong. And speaking personally, I’ll be damned before I recognize a system that does not respect my God-given rights as being morally equal to one which does.

What’s happening here is the wrong decision, just like Roe v. Wade was the wrong decision

That is fundamentally not what is happening here. The question is not whether the Supreme court has made a good decision in this case. The question is whether the Supreme Court is capable of delivering a good decision in any case.

And to a fair degree of precision, the answer is, "No".

We have numerous examples of what an actual Supreme Court victory looks like. Desegregation enforced by Paratroopers dispersing peaceful protestors, including children, with fixed bayonets is what a Supreme Court victory looks like. Obergefell, which overnight fundamentally reshaped the law nationwide with strict enforcement and zero mercy for resistance or dissent is what a Supreme Court victory looks like. A Supreme Court victory means you get your way, and those who disagree are shit out of luck.

It turns out that Red Tribe is not allowed to have actual Supreme Court victories. Red tribe supreme court victories apply only where Red Tribe has secured unassailable political power; Blue Tribe strongholds are free to ignore the rulings at will, and it turns out that when they do so, the Court will back down rather than escalate. We have stress-tested the formal mechanisms of the Constitution and its adjudication to their limits and perhaps beyond, and they simply were not able to handle the load. That is unfortunate, but hardly unexpected. The important thing is to realize that the formal account of the system is in fact a lie, and that the necessary power will not be found here and so must be found elsewhere.

The Constitution is a scam. Perhaps it can be a useful scam, to the extent that knowledge of its insubstantiality is not yet fully general; it is likely possible to still get people to trade actual value for its paper promises. I will not be one of those people ever again, though, and you shouldn't be either.

I might agree with you on the whole, but I have to wonder if this whole gun debacle is just how lawyers work.

Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell may both have been written precisely enough to avoid people trying to find holes to poke, whereas all these hyper specific laws around banning inanimate objects with a million different variations come pre-loaded with holes in them. Ban one, another one that's basically the same but with some small change comes into effect because millions of different variations in a field where no one drafting the laws actually knows anything. I don't see anyone wiggling out of Dobbs.

Granted, courts purposely seeing right past obvious constitutionality is pretty obvious at times, especially when they write about the "Aloha Spirit" in their rulings. We're likely doomed either way, but I wonder why it happens more to guns than it does to other red tribe endeavors.

Okay, let’s lay Rule of Law aside for a minute. There’s a much, much more serious problem here.

First off:

It turns out that Red Tribe is not allowed to have actual Supreme Court victories.

What, does the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade not count? The “Blue Tribe” had pinned a huge policy platform of abortion on it, and it was totally undone. Abortion was returned to being a state legislative issue. And this is not merely in words only; there are real and meaningful differences in how states treat abortion. General opinion, and especially Democrat or Democrat-adjacent opinion, is clear that this was a major sea level change. The fact that it does not seem to register to you as a win is really, seriously bad. And I think the rest of the post makes it clear why:

A Supreme Court victory means you get your way, and those who disagree are shit out of luck.

It sounds like what you actually want is not the freedom to do as you wish, but the power to coerce others, and particularly to deny the other what they want. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have to elaborate on why that’s a bad thing, and especially a bad thing for you in particular, but here we are.

First off, there’s nothing wrong with wanting things. Everyone does. There’s also nothing wrong with wanting exclusive things, wanting things that by their nature prevent someone else having something. That’s life; there’s not always enough to go around, especially of the really valuable stuff. But wanting specifically to exert your power over another is something different. Its envy, or at least, is rooted in the same. Envy is seeing what someone else has, hating them for it, and wanting to destroy it. It’s bringing someone low because you can’t stand seeing them up. What people tend to hate about the great and powerful is that they just don’t seem to care; the eggs hating how casually they get tossed in the omelette. The powerful don’t care. Things need to get done, and you can’t please everyone. Envy goes a step further. Omelette be damned; I’m going to break those fucking eggs.

Envy is a deep part of human nature, and by deep I mean base. It is the primitive ape who can’t help but see the world as zero-sum. Kill or deprive the strong man, and I’ll get more, as sure as shit rolls downhill. But as the wise of all ages have told us, we are more than that. I won’t belabor you with the spiritual and philosophical elements on why we can all of us be uplifted into greatness, the last will be first, the tardy day-laborer will get his full drachma, etc etc. I’m sure you’ve heard them all. The same goes for the economic: cooperation and interconnected systems yield greater production and profit, removing the powerful just disrupts the system and impoverishes everyone, something something communism. Nor do I need to detail how the most powerful empires rise on this positive-sum thought and perish on zero-sum dissent, Roman Empire and socii, abiyyah or whatever it’s called, you get the drift. But on the mere psychological level, envy means you will never appreciate what you have. The mere existence of another is enough to make you fly into a rage. The things you have are irrelevant compared to the comparison. And doesn’t that sound miserable?

What’s worse, it makes politics impossible. What you want is not a laundry list of items that you can get and be satisfied with. It’s specifically to remove what the other has. Who can negotiate with that? Yes, obviously the Democrats have behaved very badly. They’re naughty boys and girls and deserve to be punished for what they did. I won’t argue against that for even a second; that is MY opinion. But that has nothing to do with you. Your problem is: right now, in America, there are a lot of people who don’t really like the Democrats, they think they’re overstepping. But if they caught the idea that the Republican Party was thinking like YOU, they’d vote to suspend habeas before they voted Red. You’re scary as shit, man.

Envy is seeing what someone else has, hating them for it, and wanting to destroy it. It’s bringing someone low because you can’t stand seeing them up.

For values of "up" centered around standing on my neck, yes. Blues have insisted that the Constitution allows them to impose their values on me for my entire life. For most of my life, I accepted this because I believed our tribes were both operating within a concrete set of rules, and that honoring appeals to those rules by my opponents would ensure that my own appeals to those rules would likewise be honored. This belief is no longer supportable by the available evidence. All value expended in preserving "Constitutional norms" by my side was wasted for zero benefit. Blues will never accept Constitutional limits on their desires, and the Constitutional machine observably does not have sufficient horsepower to force them to do so.

My prescription remains the same as it has for some years now: a national divorce is the least-worst option available to us. Blues and Reds are not capable of living together, nor of sharing power with each other; attempts to do so will inevitably lead to constant escalation of conflict ending in large-scale fratricide. All attempts to arrest the escalation spiral to-date have failed, often at the cost of the social and political tools used in the attempt. Our institutions, structures and norms were designed to operate in an environment of values-coherence; that environment no longer exists, and it is the height of foolishness to fail to recognize this fact.

For those seeking additional context:

As I understand it, your complaint is that people are increasingly reluctant to accept the outcomes mandated by the rules. I doubt that you consider rule-following to be a terminal goal, so the argument would be that rule-following should produce superior outcomes, right?

Let's say we disagree strongly on how things should be, but we've agreed to follow a set of rules. A conflict arises. You follow the rules to the letter. I apply a novel strategy the rules didn't account for. I win. You have no grounds within the rules to contest my win, because I didn't break any of the rules as written. Changing the rules to account for this novel strategy is itself a conflict, and you're already behind on winning conflicts. Suppose this pattern repeats a number of times, and you now expect that you lose by attempting to play by the rules, and I win by playing outside them.

Let's say you believe this outcome is a problem. What are your options to resolve it? Attempting to improve the rules is not, I think, a workable strategy. The simple fact is that, contrary to Enlightenment ideology, there is no flawless ruleset available. You are never going to close all the loopholes. Rules are simplifications, abstractions, map and not territory. they have to be interpreted, adjudicated, enforced, and each of those steps involves human judgement and an irreducible loss of objectivity. Motivated agents will always find ways around a fixed ruleset, and the longer they stand, the more porous they become.

At the end of the day, it seems to me that respect for a ruleset requires either trust that the rules lack fragility, or trust in the other party not to abuse that fragility for their own advantage. Leaving aside questions of cause and responsibility, it seems obvious to me that neither side of the Culture War actually maintains confidence in either of these propositions. Under such conditions, why would one expect the rules to continue to operate in anything approaching a reliable fashion?

The value of the Constitution came when it acted as a hard limit on the scope and scale of political conflict. People understood it to put many tools of power off the table for most practical purposes, removing them from the normal push and pull of the political contest. When we vote, the Constitution means that we're voting on policy, not on our basic political rights. If we lose, we suffer the other side's policies for a few years, but our rights are inviolate.

Only, they aren't, and anyone who believes otherwise at this point is quite foolish indeed. Progressives and their Living Constitution ideology mean that all bets are off, and indeed we have seen abuses and usurpations committed and upheld that would have been unimaginable as little as ten years ago.

"They wouldn't do that...." Yes, they would, for any value of "that" that one cares to specify. Americans, Blue or Red, are human, and "that" is what humans reliably do. Presidential candidates have campaigned on the idea of taxing religions they don't like, and openly laughed at the idea of constitutional limits on their ambitions. The theoretical grounding is solid, and the underlying logic is simply correct. Where your "norms" are supposed to fit into this picture I really cannot say.

Turn back to your favorite histories, and contemplate the fact that for all our technological sophistication, nothing about our core nature as humans has ever really changed. Humans will inevitably human. We create systems to control and channel our nature, but what our hands make, they can unmake as well. The Constitution arose from a specific culture, and it worked due to a specific set of cultural norms and assumptions. That culture changed, the norms and assumptions no longer apply, and so the Constitution is dead. To the extent that common knowledge of its death has not proliferated, it serves mainly to fool people into making sacrifices that will not be reciprocated by those who caught on a little quicker.

I am not claiming that "both sides are unreasonable partisans, and they just need to be reasonable". I am claiming that our current system makes unreasonable partisanship the only viable policy option, and pointing out that anyone who expects anything other than an escalation spiral is lying to themselves. I am attempting to argue this from the outside view, ignoring any question of which side is right and which wrong, simply looking at the incentives. I obviously have my own opinion of who is right and who is wrong, and I've argued that further down in the thread. I am making this argument because it is common for moderates here to argue that the Culture War isn't that big a deal, that it's blown out of proportion, and that our existing systems are basically fine and simply need routine maintenance for everything to work out fine. I believe that such moderate arguments are dead wrong to the point of being actively dangerous, and I am attempting to communicate the basis for that conclusion across the tribal divide.

I have my own position, based on my own values and my own best interpretation of the facts. What I'm trying to show is that the larger pattern is obvious regardless of particular values or understandings of the facts: regardless of whether you side with Foster, Perry, neither or both, the situation is obviously unsustainable for our existing system. Rule of law requires common trust in the law and its application, and it, together with the rest of our sociopolitical systems, exist to constrain the scope and scale of civil conflict. These limiting systems have evidently failed, and those that remain are observably blowing out as the culture-war blast front washes over them in sequence.

As I see it, our current choice is between a near-total collapse in federal authority and semi-peaceful balkanization on the one hand, and large-scale fratricide on the other, with the latter being significantly more likely given our current social trajectory. I've been arguing this for a long time, this is just the latest data to illustrate the point.

None of this is new, surprising, or unexpected. I and others saw it coming a long way off. Some of us see what's coming next a long way off too. If you are a Blue living among Reds or a Red living among Blues, you should move.

Roe v Wade is repealed and it is left up to the states, Obergefell passes, and federal dictate is declared.

This is an easy distinction to notice, not sure why it is being missed.

What, does the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade not count?

He did specify:

Red tribe supreme court victories apply only where Red Tribe has secured unassailable political power; Blue Tribe strongholds are free to ignore the rulings at will, and it turns out that when they do so, the Court will back down rather than escalate.

This is, in fact, written to exclude Dobbs.

Envy is seeing what someone else has, hating them for it, and wanting to destroy it.

His claim and complaint is that Blue strongholds are violating the rights of those Reds unlucky enough to live in them, and that there is no real redress for this. This... is not about wanting to hurt people. You've got a pretty-good speech there, but it's misaimed.

You’re scary as shit, man.

I feel I should note that there's a key and often-subtle distinction in Craven's posts (though it's not the main thing you're misreading here), which is the distinction between "due to this the Blue Tribe should be shot in the streets" and "enough Reds will notice this logic that the Blue Tribe will be shot in the streets". He's cooled down enough these days that he's doing the latter - warning of civil war, not trying to incite it. He, like me, is a recovering hothead (though to be clear, I'm a Grey hothead, not a Red one).

What, does the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade not count?

No. The Red-equivalent of RvW would be for abortion to be banned in all states for the next 50 years. Putting an end to Blue imposition of their values on everyone is not the same.

So exactly as he said.

It sounds like what you actually want is not the freedom to do as you wish, but the power to coerce others, and particularly to deny the other what they want.

"The ability to coerce others " is exactly how Blues have wielded the Constitution for more than half a century, and arguably much, much longer. There was a time when I and others like me were foolish enough to believe that this was acceptable, because this was a power that both tribes shared equally: we must respect the enforcement of their rights against our desires, because they must accept the enforcement of our rights against their desires.

We now have conclusive proof that they will never accept the enforcement of our rights against their desires. Claims to the contrary were lies.

For further elaboration, see above.

There is no other form political power comes in. Even negative freedoms are specifically rules that deny some people what they want.

Asking for politics that are not coercitive is a ridiculous standard that not even anarchists abide by.

Yes, but the form of the justification is important in maintaining a functional liberty-minded society, in which the social contract is something like "You and I probably have different ideas and values as to how we should live our lives, so let's just agree on a minimal set of coercive laws so that we can be peaceful neighbors."

Now functionally, in practice, there can be severe disagreements as to what should be part of the minimum set of laws; there's non-ridiculous arguments to be made that allowing people to stockpile a military arsenal can make their neighbor fearful and not able to coexist peacefully, or that someone removing "just a clump of cells" is depriving a being of life. But they're couched as arguments over what is the minimum set of laws to allow diverse viewpoints and lifestyles. Even if in practice they can be the same, they are not presented as a naked "Ok, now that I have the backing of a majority you better adopt the lifestyle I want you to have or else..." I guess in a spirited debate it's possible to accuse the other side of doing it. But to resort to unironically, unashamedly doing it is crossing some serious lines.

Because at that point, the polite covenent of let's just be neighbors and leave one another alone is irreparably broken.

But they're couched as arguments over what is the minimum set of laws to allow diverse viewpoints and lifestyles. Even if in practice they can be the same, they are not presented as a naked "Ok, now that I have the backing of a majority you better adopt the lifestyle I want you to have or else..." I guess in a spirited debate it's possible to accuse the other side of doing it. But to resort to unironically, unashamedly doing it is crossing some serious lines.

But to resort to unironically, unashamedly doing it is crossing some serious lines.

You are perhaps more correct than you realize.

"The Country" has not defeated attempts to curtail religious liberties. Specific power blocs have defeated those attempts. To the extent that the Court has been involved, it has recognized political victories, not generated them. Absent those power blocs, neither the Constitution nor the Court will protect religious liberties for any significant length of time.

At every step from absolute liberty to absolute oppression, it is always possible to describe the negative space around current restrictions as "huge deference". Allowing Churches tax-exemption is Huge Deference. When that is removed, allowing them to hold meetings without the approval of an official censor will be Huge Deference. when that is removed, allowing them to meet at all will be huge deference. Not searching former congregants homes for banned materials. Allowing them to have children. Allowing them to live. All possible laws leave negative space, and any amount of negative space can always be framed as Huge Deference. It's not as though deference has a standard unit of measure, much less a volume equation.

[...]

There is no objective measure for "huge deference", "reasonable restrictions", "necessary protections", or any other such phrase. Such phrases are not pointing to a unbiased rule or a principled argument. They are a naked appeal to social consensus, and social consensus observably has had an unacceptably wide range of possible positions within our lifetimes, much less over the course of human history.

"The Constitution protects this" means nothing more than "this is safe so long as the right people approve of it". I observe that "what people approve of" is a fantastically malleable category; if we can go from the 2000s consensus on free expression to the consensus of Current Year, no principle is safe.

No, I do realise all of that. But the forms and niceties are important, even if they are just pretending. If you pretend to tolerate the other for long enough, you start believing you do. And when enough people believe it, something magical happens (or rather, something terrible doesn't happen); your society becomes more stable and its constituents don't jump to civil war anytime they lose an election.

More comments

Desegregation enforced by Paratroopers dispersing peaceful protestors, including children, with fixed bayonets is what a Supreme Court victory looks like.

This level of victory really requires winning two (or really three, in this case) of the branches of government. Roberts has no divisions directly: those paratroopers appear at the behest of the President (nationalizing them from the Governor, representing the counterparty in this case) to enforce the court order.

I suspect Trump could call in the NY National Guard to protect the Columbia library and it's Jewish students, but he hasn't as actually done so.

This level of victory really requires winning two (or really three, in this case) of the branches of government.

Under present conditions, this level of victory is what is known colloquially as a "coup-complete problem". We had ample demonstration of how Blue Tribe reacted to the president attempting to enforce what one might have imagined would be relatively uncontroversial laws like "don't burn down a federal courthouse" via armed federal agents during the BLM riots.

What’s happening here is the wrong decision, just like Roe v. Wade was the wrong decision (for reference, that the Supreme Court had any business deciding the matter - I actually rather like the rule as pragmatic legislation). The law, as written, and procedures, as defined, deserve a great degree of deference.

That might be the case if we were talking about mistakenly making the wrong decision. If the decisions were made maliciously, and in the case of both Roe, and this one, they quite obviously were, the law and procedures deserve active contempt, not deference.

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