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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14972 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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So, this was an interesting read...

Left-wing violence is being normalized

I doubt many people here will find the core assertion even a tiny bit surprising; we were just talking about it, kinda, last month. What I found interesting was the, uh... I'm not sure what to call it. The rhetoric of realization, maybe? The opening line:

Something has changed in America’s psyche. Violence has become more acceptable.

I immediately found myself doing the DiCaprio squint and mouthing the words "fiery but mostly peaceful", but I read on. The meat:

Well, after working through a heap of survey data and social media language trends, we’ve come to a series of startling conclusions about a change that’s happening in US society. The NCRI has uncovered more than just an online ecosystem of unsettling ideas. What we’re seeing is the rise and proliferation of assassination culture on the internet. It’s more than just a collection of jokes, symbols and memes. It’s an entirely new subculture for incubating radical and subversive ideas that are anathema to the things America has historically stood for.

Over the past several decades we have assumed that calls for political violence come from the far right, and they often have. What we never expected to see was the enormous growth in similar calls emerging from the mainstream left. We undertook a nationwide survey to understand it better and discovered that a breathtaking half of those who identified as politically left-wing agreed that the murder of public figures could be at least somewhat justified. What’s more, 56 percent of them agreed that there could be some justification for killing Trump. Just under half agreed that the same could be said about the fate of Musk. Tesla dealerships, too, merit at least some destruction, according to 59 percent of those surveyed.

You don't say!

If you want to understand America today, the most compelling explanations revolve around a cluster of personality characteristics called authoritarianism. There are two kinds: a right-wing kind and a left-wing kind. Many mainstream academics say that all our present political instability revolves around a critical mass of people amenable to behaviors linked with the right-wing type. . . .

Yet it runs against common sense to imagine only right-wing people can act pathologically when most of the postwar world lived, for a while, under the intensely authoritarian – and quasi-genocidal – domination of communist regimes. And very few of us can shake the intuition that the intense “woke” energy which has so permeated American culture over the past decade shares these hallmarks of authoritarian tyranny.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that there has been a kind of intellectual embargo on saying so lately, because most explanations coming from mainstream US academia about cultural politics have fixated on the conservative version. The godfather of right-wing authoritarianism theory, the Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer, labeled the left-wing variety as nothing more than a “Loch Ness Monster”: it doesn’t actually exist.

And people believed that! Somehow. Bob was the expert, after all. He's an expert, Bob! An expert! (Well, he was; Altemeyer died last year, too early to witness Trump's second inauguration.) Also, how does Horder know I'm not surprised to "learn" that there has been an "intellectual embargo on saying so lately?" He seems to be suggesting that it will not surprise the reader to learn that his surprising new discovery is in no way surprising to anyone who isn't a shameless partisan. How is that supposed to work, exactly?

Newer thinkers, however, have started to change their minds. Academics have begun work on a new framework that describes an emergent left-wing authoritarianism.

The article details the framework, which is basically a mirror of the extant right-wing framework (conventionalism -> anticonventionalism, aggression -> antihierarchical aggression, submission -> censorship). On one hand, I think the author is correct. On the other, I guess I'm wondering if I can get a senior fellowship at Princeton for being several decades ahead of their best researchers on the idea that authoritarian leftism is actually a real thing. The whole tone of the piece is amazing to me. Max Horder comes off as an affable buffoon; "we discovered the Loch Ness monster, guys! What a shock!"

It's a move in the direction. I don't have any serious complaints about the proposed framework. But really. Really. This is the new game? Is it because Trump is in the White House again, so academia has to go back to pretending to be "politically neutral?" "We're all good classical liberals, boss, honest! No radicals here, no sir." Or am I too cynical? Maybe it's more like--there really was an intellectual embargo, the Trump administration has directly or indirectly lifted that embargo, so all the good scholarship is creeping out into the sun. In which case, will academics admit that? Maybe send Trump a thank-you card?

I won't hold my breath.

There's an idea I've been toying with for a while that connects with this. I saw some comment a while ago (I can't recall where) that Obama had said he expected some macho, manly, John Wayne type to be who Republicans settled on in 2016. And so Trump blindsided him.

And lurking in the background there, you can see, I think, something like Obama's (ultimately disastrously flawed) theory of how progress happens in society. Namely, you get a bunch of hardcore radical leftist activists to get agitated up like an agitated bee's nest. And then kind-hearted liberals publicly portray themselves as simply responding to the people's will as they enact progressive change. And then, after enough of that, eventually stern dad John Wayne gets back in office and spanks the radical activists who have overreached - and he gets considerable public support in doing so. And so those activists are forced to have their more extreme edges get sanded down. A certain amount of liberal capitulation happens - but meanwhile, quite a lot of the previous change sticks, too. And liberals get to console their radical activist fringe and say, "I know, I know - what a dick that guy is! We fought for you, and we'll fight for you next time, too! Show up at the polls and organize! But I mean, what can you do? Reactionaries and fascists, am I right?" And notably, in that story, liberals never, ever, ever have to be the bad cop and police their own crazies. They really want to be the cool uncle who still listens to Nas on their ipods (but wear mom jeans).

But Trump threw a massive wrench in this theory of social change. Because of course actual Trump is intermittently pretty radical himself, or at least is quite comfortable with radical rhetoric. And because the actual populist forces that Trump taps into are frequently fairly radical too (but a radical strain that is utterly terrifying to American liberals who really don't want to accept the reality of their own social position). And because American liberals secretly want stern dad John Wayne to reassert reality and normality after their radicals go too far and temper those radicals a bit while leaving the hands of liberals clean and letting them chafe against the repressions of normality... and Trump really didn't do any of that. Trump loves chaos. He doesn't have any of that energy that George W. Bush or Mitt Romney have, trying to be a beleaguered dad from a 50s sitcom holding the line and reinforcing norms in a prissy, stuffy, uncool way.

In 2017, the old, comfortable script got thrown out. And that meant that nobody was there to police liberals' radicals for them - and indeed, liberals were busy being utterly frantic themselves because of Trump, so policing their radicals was the last thing on their mind. They were coming to feel pretty radical themselves. So there ended up being no breaks on the train, and the radicalism of the left ended up growing way more pronounced and unchecked. And so that's grown and grown...

But by 2025, 1) it's turned out that some of those radical edges are absolutely electoral poison (and increasingly make even normie liberals uncomfortable), 2) some of those radical edges are tearing the Democratic coalition apart, 3) intersectionality has proven a lot more adept at making fervent enemies (like nearly all young white men in America) than friends, and crucially 4) a lot of those radicals REALLY, violently hate the Jews, and given how the current Democratic coalition is structured, that simply can't be allowed to continue. And because of the way Trump rolls, they simply can't wait for the stern 1950s dad to show up and reinforce norms and boundaries for them. So (or at least in this theory) some American liberals (or their powerful institutions in the background) are finally reaching the point where its dawning on them that they're going to have to do the policing themselves, as deeply painful and unpleasant as that may be. And that's going to require theorizing their erstwhile allies in Latinate language and casting them in pretty unpleasant lights via rhetoric rewritten as social "science".

I think a contributing factor is also that a new generation has grown up steeped in progressive rhetoric but that isn’t “in on the joke”. Millennial and Baby Boomer progressives knew on some level that this was all just a rhetorical device for advancing the Democratic Party’s electoral interest. Trans women weren’t actually women. We aren’t actually planning to have a real no-joke, violent communist Revolution and put the CEOs up against the wall. We shouldn’t actually try to drive Israel into the sea because the State Department wouldn’t like that, even if there is no logical way to justify its existence under the ideological creed we loudly profess. But now you have zoomer progressives who genuinely believe all this without even a hint of irony.

grown up steeped in [whatever] rhetoric but that isn’t “in on the joke”

I've been thinking this more and more. What if someone took common hyperbolic political rhetoric literally and then acted on it?

Like Bush and early Obama era American evangelicals in Africa recite their anti-gay talking points to Africans. The Africans listen and take the only sensible response to people corroding society and ruining important institutions in such an insidious manner: Kill them all and mandate reporting such people with stiff penalties for failing to report a secret homosexual. Then the Americans break kayfabe and go "Oh no, we meant they are ruining society but don't take any action against them other than vague campaign rhetoric."

Or some reddit-style "healthcare CEOs are killing us". Or literally "globalizing the intifada". If many people literally believed this sort of rhetoric, some portion would be happily digging the mass graves to put our wicked enemies into. Or pouring burning fuel on old people and children in the streets.

Or "Western countries are about to be overrun by invading immigrants, it's already a civil war, unless we act we are going to be enslaved by Muslims in a short time" and then breaking kayfabe when someone takes up guns and starts fighting the said civil war form the nationalist side.

Or "Western countries are about to be overrun by invading immigrants, it's already a civil war, unless we act we are going to be enslaved by Muslims in a short time" and then breaking kayfabe when someone takes up guns and starts fighting the said civil war form the nationalist side.

Counterpoint: I wish a mothafucka would. Unfortunately right-wing nationalist violence often seems to manifest as mass shootings carried out by clearly mentally unstable people that target the entirely wrong targets. I.e. random people in a school or grocery store instead of assassinations targeting politicians, the leadership of NGOs that help illegal migrants illegally migrate, etc

If a nationalist took up arms and actually targeted relevant targets I think you'd see a lot more sympathy instead of what you call breaking kayfabe. See, for example, the lionization that Timothy McVeigh gets from certain corners of the gun rights crowd. If he hadn't blown up a daycare in the process I think support for him would have been even more widespread. McVeigh claimed he was unaware of the daycare in the building, meanwhile one of his co-conspirator claims they did know and didn't care, no easy way to know who is telling the truth.

I think a lot of political-extremists-by-night-milquetoast-law-abiding-citizen-by-day people, i.e. most people who comment on politics online, do actually sincerely believe that open war should be waged against their political extremist enemies, but at the same time it should obviously not be waged at the expense of the milquetoast law abiding citizen life they enjoy. It's easy to say that yeah, you support breaking out the long knives, but at lot less easy to go the extra mile to actually accept that you might lose everything you value and enjoy in the process.

So in my view it's not - not consciously - all just empty rhetorics and jokes to be in on.

Rather, the calls for violence come with the unspoken assumption that you and the people on your side can crush the despicable enemy without much resistance, because that's how people talk themelves up. Obviously my side will win, we're on the right side of history, our values are better, our enemies are idiots. But when someone nominally aligned with you goes through with acts of political violence, you suddenly realize that you aren't the well-regimented, organized and coordinated forces of good about to exterminate your weak and irredeemable enemy - you personally are sitting in comfort and luxury at home while your cause's champion is a deranged mass murderer who just killed a bunch of random people, picked a fight with the very establishment that guarantees your comfort and luxury, and got absolutely crushed by it. Your actual political enemies didn't even get to factor into it.

And there you are, left holding the bag full of needing to square that okay, that guy's intentions technically aligned with what you demanded, but obviously he's not supposed to

  1. be a lunatic who attacks random people instead of the enemy's champions
  2. be ineffective
  3. endanger your comfort and luxury (firstly by putting you in the establishment's sights for wrongthink, secondly by highlighting how suicidal your violence would be were you to commit it), which you aren't willing to risk no matter how infinitely evil your enemies are

Everyone who isn't Uncle-Tedding it by going off the grid entirely is a first-world citizen first, and a political extremist second.

Counterpoint: I wish a mothafucka would. Unfortunately right-wing nationalist violence often seems to manifest as mass shootings carried out by clearly mentally unstable people that target the entirely wrong targets. I.e. random people in a school or grocery store instead of assassinations targeting politicians, the leadership of NGOs that help illegal migrants illegally migrate, etc

First, this reads as a touch fedpost-y (I say as someone who's eaten some bans for the same). Secondly, I don't recall where I've read it, but I know I've encountered at least a couple of people on the right arguing that the Labour Party of Norway was noticeably weakened by their loss of up-and-coming young talent at Utøya, and thus, contra Yarvin, Breivik did make a difference for his side. (I'd argue that this is actually why Yarvin spent so long pooh-poohing ABB, because — particularly after listening to him on podcasts — so much of Yarvin's political program seems to be aimed first and foremost at preventing this sort of thing — for entirely understandable historical reasons.)

Whatever the attack, I'm fairly sure that a larger amount of people engaging casually in rhetoric described above are suddenly going to indicate that they didn't mean it that way than say that yes, that's exactly what they meant. Or do what other gun rights people do regarding McVeigh: indicate that the perp was a fed or that it was a fed false flag attack some other way.

There's been a lot of cases where the shooter has deliberately targeted immigrants (in a mosque, a place frequented by immigrants otherwise etc.) and the logic, if cruel, is obvious: create an atmosphere of fear encouraging other immigrants to return back to where they came from and discourage new immigrants from coming in. Some shooters have indicated as much. The same logic as when Hamas continues to shoot rockets seemingly at random or encourage civilian attacks: create fear to discourage aliyah and encourage yerida.

But now you have zoomer progressive who genuinely believe all this without even a hint of irony.

As I mentioned down thread, I live near a university. I frequently encounter protests for or against the ${CURRENT_THING} whenever I have to go into town.

One of the most fascinating protest signs that I ever saw simply said LIBERALS GET THE BULLET TOO in all-caps sharpie. To this day, I'm not even sure they were protesting.

Actual leftists are not liberals. I've seen LIBERALS GET THE BULLET TOO plenty on edgy online leftist spaces. By which I mean self-identified socialists and communists.

They historically went even further and denounced social democrats as "social fascists". SocDems, socialists, anarcho-communists and Soviet-backed revolutionaries battling each other by rhetoric or sometimes literally with bullets while actual for-real fascists took over Europe.

I'm pretty sure that's a tankie slogan from those that see things like the concept of private property as too far right. Maybe also an element of out group/far group dynamics, or referencing Stalinist and Maoist purges of the inteligencia and such. I don't have any friends that attend such things (that I know of).

One of the most fascinating protest signs that I ever saw simply said LIBERALS GET THE BULLET TOO in all-caps sharpie. To this day, I'm not even sure they were protesting.

I'm reminded of the BLM flag that was the snake with "YES WE WILL TREAD" or something similar. Like, they were protesting oppressive police by... wanting to oppress libertarians? Constitutionalists? The US Navy post-9/11? I mean, I assume they simply interpreted the entire flag as "Outgroup Flag" and didn't think about it, but still.

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