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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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I don't think they are especially angry, but older liberal women especially seem to have an unfortunate tendency to speak publicly as though they are talking to children and struggling to make themselves understood, rather than struggling to persuade. Maybe this is a factor of mistake theory vs. conflict theory, but I think it really annoys people, like trying to make yourself understood to a foreigner by speaking English, louder and slower.

I think it’s the narrative liberals tend to tell themselves in which the only reason someone disagrees with the liberal position is that they have a defect, either moral, intellectual, or in cases where they feel charitable, educational. You didn’t, according to this narrative, study the issues and come to a different conclusion. You came to that conclusion because you’re stupid or uneducated unless you just somehow get off on hurting people. So when white wine moms talk to you about why you came to the wrong conclusion, they assume that they’re talking to a lesser being not as evolved or educated as they are.

Conservatives don’t have quite the same narrative. They don’t assume that their liberal counterparts never studied the issue, they assume that they’re perhaps sheltered and get their information from biased sources. But that doesn’t make you stupid or uninformed.

I see no shortage of conservatives assuming their opponents are stupid, insane, satanically evil or all three.

I don’t think it’s quite the mainstream position in the right-leaning spaces. They might nod along with “evil” or “ideologically possessed” (which started with JBP, I think) but I don’t think, aside from mocking college students and wine moms that they call liberals stupid.

but older liberal women especially seem to have an unfortunate tendency to speak publicly as though they are talking to children and struggling to make themselves understood, rather than struggling to persuade

It's called "condescension".

Old liberal women are just like that- I think it's a blue tribe cultural thing that just comes off wrong to non-blue tribers(which, coincidentally, all[literally] swung away from Harris).

It's not lost on me that if you actually listen to the humour and derogatory stereotypes blacks tell about whites, it's, uh, not aimed at conservatives(they call us 'rednecks' and the humour is quite a bit more good-natured).