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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21238 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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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.

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