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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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That's a nice quote, but how are my freedoms being suppressed? I think I would have noticed by now.

Oh, depending on your age, there's a very good chance you're not missing out on any freedoms at all. At worst, maybe you've been passed over for university admissions or a job or a promotion as a result of affirmative action or something--and given the abundance of all those things in America, even then you may not have so much as noticed.

Your comment alludes to the process of integration and I think that historically there is much to be said for it. European immigrants faced much the same concern as that directed toward South and Central American, African, Middle Eastern, and Indian immigrants today, but a couple generations later they seem to have integrated entirely. It might be observed that the integration of descendants of African slavery has gone a bit less smoothly, but of course we didn't really start trying to integrate them throughout the nation until about 75 years ago.

Nevertheless, there is in certain corners a tendency of some political groups to assert "whiteness" as a kind of original sin. Job postings listing essentially every demographic except straight white Christian men as "preferred candidates" come up a lot in Canada and even sometimes in the United States. More importantly, just the fact of identifying as "Republican" or "conservative" is enough to get you dog piled and even banned from certain online communities. If you in fact found this space via Twitter, you might not be familiar with some of the more "canonical" writings that created this space, but I heartily recommend them:

I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup

Neutral Versus Conservative: The Eternal Struggle

None of this is to suggest that I really disagree with you. I have high hopes for the long term, and I stubbornly refuse to believe that liberalism is dead (or if it is, that we should stop trying to resurrect it). But that means I strongly oppose identitarianism both from the Right ("alt-right") and from the Left ("Woke"). Identitarianism is illiberal and works against your own expressed preferences for integration by instead demanding ideological conformity. The worry toward which I am pointing is that identitarianism appears to be on the rise since ~2014, first on the Left and then on the Right. Many people only get alarmed about the identitarianism happening in their outgroup (since the other kind is a personal benefit). But I think also sometimes people don't realize that just because you don't think someone is in your outgroup, doesn't mean they actually consider you part of their ingroup.

Y'know, your comment helped me clarify a thought I've had. It seems that there are several different beliefs that often get confused for one another because they are only subtly different.

  • Liberalism: reject tribalism, embrace equality and "color-blindness," let's put aside our differences to get rich and live and in peace (classical /old-school liberals)
  • Identitarianism: embrace tribalism, take from others and give to your own, by hook or by crook (e.g. ethnocentric immigrants, Black nationalists):
  • Anti-White Identitarianism: Same as above, except your tribe prioritizes taking from whites first (mostly because it's easy pickin's, but also something something oppression). There's the Progressive variant that adds the rest of the intersectional totem pole under whites

so far, do familiar. But then

  • Pro-Republic Liberal Identitarianism (there has to be a better name): embrace tribalism, (but reluctantly and only as a means to RETVRN to limited liberalism, not as an end in itself) because liberalism can only function as a fine-tuning knob on a cohesive society, not as a combat arena for rival incompatible cultures duking it out for supremacy.

Did I miss any?

What are some of these freedoms that an older person might be missing out on?

Sorry, I was thinking in the other direction--I think young people are the ones who may have better reason to feel this is all constraining their liberty. The 1990s seem to have been "peak America" in several ways--probably the best "Free Speech" era, certainly an economic dream time, cost disease in education had begun but was years from spiraling out of control, etc.

We do have much better video games now, though.

I feel like jokes about political correctness are somewhat peak 1990s... but I'm happy to cede something along the lines of "If we only knew...".