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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   35048 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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The abortion debate below brought to mind something I've been thinking about for a while. There's been a convergence of sorts between mainstream Republicans/conservatives and the far-right, but there are still many differences, such as on the Single Mother Question. The far-right (which includes most people on this website) views single mothers negatively, while the mainstream conservative view is very different. For instance, here's what Speaker Mike Johnson said about Medicaid:

Medicaid is for single mothers with small children who are just trying to make it. It's not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couch playing video games. We're going to find those guys, and we will SEND them back to work!

Mainstream conservatives and the far-right agree that the welfare state serves to subsidize single motherhood, but only the latter thinks it's a bad thing. Mainstream conservatives' embrace of single motherhood is connected with abortion politics. One mainstream conservative pundit put it succinctly: "you can't be pro-life and anti-single mom." Many on the far-right responded to her tweet with "just watch me" and others scratched their heads, wondering what she meant. But there's a certain logic to it. Much of the motivation for abortion comes from women not wanting to be single mothers. You can respond to this in two ways:

  1. Tell them not to have premarital sex.
  2. Tell them to keep the baby because single motherhood is a heroic thing to do; you're CHOOSING LIFE.

The far-right prefers option 1, I've heard it many times on this website. But do you think it will actually be effective in changing behavior? I personally suspect that given the options of not having sex or having sex at the risk you might have to drive out of state and get an abortion and then get shamed by some online anonymous far-rightists, the latter will be the popular option. Just a vague suspicion I have. So it doesn't surprise me that many conservatives choose option 2. It also harmonizes better with the current conservative political coalition, which is increasingly reliant on the votes of low-class and non-white voters who have higher rates of single-motherhood. We wouldn't want to be elitist, looking down our noses at the salt-of-the-earth working class now would we?

  • -18

Mike Johnson was going after gamers because he's too spineless to admit that elderly dementia patients are what's actually eating up Medicaid's budget. Arguments about single mothers or NEET gamers are a distraction from the fact that the welfare state mostly exists to subsidize the old and that nobody really wants to talk about cutting old people welfare.

As for the social conservatives, I think the goalposts have moved past abortion (which was mostly made obsolete by Plan B being made available OTC) once many of the dare I say Catholics among them realized to their horror that devotion to the awfully Protestant and capitalist sounding "success sequence" doesn't so much lead to abortions as a lack of fertility itself. See also: The Conservative Case for Teen Pregnancy.

The relatively secular far right may differ with the relatively Catholic social conservatives (though Mike Johnson is an Evangelical, which itself makes for a fun divide among both the secular and religious conservatives on the Israel Question) on the Single Mother Question, but nowhere near as bitterly as they differ over the Immigration Question (The secular far right see social conservatives and especially Catholic social conservatives as being unreliable on the Immigration Question, in alliance with the capitalists who are otherwise happy to crush social conservatives' fruitful multiplication with careerism and contraceptives.).

The goalposts moving past abortion would be a surprise to the million women who get abortions each year.

From American Conservative link, it's a good example of what I mean by the Online Right's poverty fetish:

It should go without saying that the success sequence as it is actually practiced in the United States is possible only because of artificial contraception. It is not love of chastity that leads the vast majority of Americans who attain it to “delay parenthood,” as the literature puts it, but the apparently successful attempt of pharmaceutical corporations to reduce the marital act to a sterile parody. Whatever virtues the average middle-class American couple exhibit by “delaying,” they are not natural ones. They are really showing us their disordered understanding of prudence, which has become a synonym for convenience.

{snip}

Which is why I say without hesitation that pregnancy outside wedlock is superior to the success sequence. While fornication is indeed a grave sin against chastity, it is not disordered. It is a natural act, albeit one taking place outside its proper context. Where the success sequence is parsimonious, elevating lust and the pursuit of wealth above other natural goods, pregnancy is liberal in the old-fashioned sense of the word, indeed by the standards of our professional class, even munificent. It involves the failings of youth and, by economy, the goods proper to it: heedlessness, generosity, and a kind of awe before creation, in which it quite literally participates.

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