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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25824 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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Now, I have little idea if this is a left/progressive thing; I've just observed it in that group because I am part of that group and have spent most of my life surrounded by people in that group. I suspect that conservatives, by their nature of preferring tradition - such as the tradition of keeping civilization going for the next generation - have a greater tendency to want to keep humanity and human civilization going than progressives, who tend to be skeptical of tradition. But either way, I'm quite sure this attitude of "why care about humanity's survival when we have my favorite principles to worry about" is extremely common among progressives. Usually, it's not explicitly spoken or even thought, it gets laundered in, as alluded to above, by motivating oneself to believe that the evidence indicates that one's principles don't actually conflict with other goals such as survival of humanity/human civilization (in fact, I see such motivated reasoning often leading people to believe that their principles are actually synergistic to good goal, such as game devs genuinely believing that putting in characters that conform with their ideology would also lead to more sales due to expanding the market).

I tend to perceive progressive strains of liberalism as making the assumption that civilization as they know it is tge default state of humanity and you can’t really destroy it. It’s not “sacrifice survival for thriving” it’s “survival is a given, so let’s thrive.” On tge conservative side it’s understood that civilization is not the default state, decorum, high trust, low crime, safe environments etc. do not just happen, nor will they just continue without some efforts put toward maintaining those things or preventing their destruction. Now I think you can have thriving as well as civilization if you bother to do so correctly. If you make sure that the support structures aren’t destroyed or that public morality, health, and welfare are preserved, then you can do things to allow people to thrive. It’s not a zero sum game.

I tend to perceive progressive strains of liberalism as making the assumption that civilization as they know it is tge default state of humanity and you can’t really destroy it.

This is difficult to square with the constant neuroticism around reactionary enemies who seek to destroy this state or return everyone to a much worse status quo. There's always someone about to put y'all back in chains.

I recognize the quoted section describes a psychological tendency amongst some very sheltered leftists especially, but "you can't destroy what we have" doesn't really fit the hysteria shown by the references to The Handmaid's Tale or - of course - Weimar Germany and the Nazis.

Without opining on the object-level question, I will point out that there is a difference between tyranny on the one hand, and civilisational collapse on the other. One can believe in one without believing in the other, and certainly the latter is pretty far from experience in the West (I mean, when was the last time a Western country had state failure? The Wild West kinda counts - although it wasn't a case of state failure so much as a state not previously existing there - but I can't think of anything more recent).

I don’t see it that way simply because none of the actions they take are consistent with the idea that “reactionary enemies” are about to end civilization as they have known it. The same people refer to ICE as the Gestapo and to Alligator Auswitz and Palentir reading their social media posts also are mostly bitching on the Internet, and occasionally attending a weekend protest that doesn’t interfere with normal life at all. I think most of the “reactionary Nazi” stuff reads more like a psychological need for significance in their own times than the thought that these are actually threats to civilization. Even in Congress, the minority leader is Jewish and he’s not doing anything more than sending angry letters around. If they really believed in Trump’s Nazi party, it seems like you’d be doing a bit more than leaving tge equivalent of 1-star reviews on the internet.

There's a lot of inconsistencies among Democrats'/popular progressivism's stated beliefs. Plenty of courses of action available but untaken that aren't even the least bit risky or illegal.

Suppose it's 2024, and you believe Trump is neo-Hitler and also that America is a fundamentally racist and sexist society. Doesn't that then call for nominating a relatively milquetoast white man who takes no unpopular stances? You might have to put off your more out-of-the-mainstream policies for awhile (or at least implement them surreptitiously), but that is still far superior to having a Fourth Reich.

All you've got to do is vote in a primary as if winning the election is important as opposed to moral posturing. Instead, identity issues dominate.

I mean exactly. It’s not a serious thing, at least not in the sense that they literally believe in theNeo-Hitler theory. If they did, and they wanted to stop it, they’d be doing that. I find it rather fascinating just from the psychological aspect as it almost seems like a rape fetish, but political. They want to be brutally repressed. They want the camps. They want the mass arrests. It’s exciting to them. That’s why they’re always speculating about canceling elections, martial law, and camps. Not because they believe it’s going to happen (in fact Trump would be stupid to cancel elections or declare martial law because it would create a huge backlash from the general public), but because they want to play out their vision of themselves as plucky rebels defying their Hitler. But because it’s a fantasy and they at least unconsciously understand that, they aren’t willing to accept loses of their lifestyle. They aren’t willing to be arrested, risk their job, make their kid miss practice, break the law, etc. they want to appear to have resisted without the messy stuff.

I mean, if they really believed that Trump was going to institute an authoritarian regime and they couldn’t stop it… well none of these people strike me as true believer martyrs(republicans usually don’t either). They’d be loudly cheering on Trump so they don’t get purged.

Isn’t that what we’re doing here? To my mind, this explained better by @kky’s theory of traction.

The average person has no idea how to get from “I am upset about this” to “I am taking effective (paramilitary?) action against it”. If I remember correctly, both the CIA handbook for building an internal insurgency and the famous “Rules for Radicals” both hypothesise that showing supporters intermediate steps along this path is the primary purpose of an effective resistance movement.

I’m not demanding they form a militias or something to be taken seriously. But the complete lack of any action beyond standing outside with signs doesn’t really do much to convince me that these guys are serious. It’s like someone screaming that tge house is on fire from the bedroom while queuing up a Netflix movie. The actions don’t match including the actions including by people who have power and should know what to do and could do things to either slow it down or impeach or launch investigations or hold hearings. Yet… they don’t.

Now if this were 1935 Berlin, and these people believed that the crazy Austrian was about to destroy democracy, the actions don’t remotely fit. They can’t be made to fit unless they don’t actually believe what they’re saying, or they’re actually okay with it, but playing tge part. Psychologically, I think the LARP angle makes a lot of sense. It explains the sort of slacktivist protests, the lack of fear of saying something that the reactionaries don’t like (a good way to get arrested in actual authoritarian regimes), the lack of action by anyone in congress, and on it goes. Now there’s always been a certain romanticism of “plucky resistance movements.” The genre of resisters bringing down or stymies an authoritarian regime is a staple in Hollywood. Star Wars, Red Dawn, Lawrence of Arabia, pretty much every WWII movie ever made, Handmaid’s Tale, Hunger Games. It’s a trope buried pretty deep in American mythology. And so people who are disappointed in losing the culture war might well project that movie trope onto American politics, especially because it allows them to cast themselves as the heroes of the psychodrama. It’s easy to cover up a life you aren’t happy with by pretending to be on some kind of great crusade for Justice. It’s also great for a party that barely has a real agenda because if you are fighting Palpatine, it doesn’t matter that your big idea is shovel-ready projects or something — you’re fighting evil.

A leftist might also argue that shooting first and helping the descent into lawlessness without public buy-in benefits fascists, who already believe in violence and want to discredit the status quo. It's especially bad if Trump already controls the government.

A much less extreme form of trying to play the man (all of the prosecutions, which Democrats do not see as unprovoked) has arguably already backfired.

I tend to perceive progressive strains of liberalism as making the assumption that civilization as they know it is tge default state of humanity and you can’t really destroy it. It’s not “sacrifice survival for thriving” it’s “survival is a given, so let’s thrive.”

I perceive the same, but I disagree with that last sentence. One is the other. If you care so little about survival that you haven't done the research to learn just how unusual and precarious modern society is, then you're deciding that sacrificing survival for the sake of thriving is worth it.

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