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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15008 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".

Wow, this is a fantastic summary I've been trying to write, but somehow way more concise. Reported as AAQC, thanks.

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