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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9157 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Why political revenge narratives don't make sense to me.

It essentially implies the difference between the right wing and left wing argument about things are about morals and not about the effectiveness of policy or economic ideas for the good of our country and our citizens.  If "your rules fairly" includes doing things that you think are stupid, inefficient, counter-productive and extra prone to corruption then doing it back would be strange.

Presumably if you hold an idea like "smaller governments are generally better for a country's growth" or "the state taking ownership in companies leads to bad incentives" or "free speech benefits the country's citizens and the country as a whole"  then it would make little sense to abandon them once you've taken power if you want the best for the nation.

After all if you care about the country, I would assume you want good and effective policy. If you see the left's policy ideas as bad and harmful to our future, it's not a great idea to join in on the self-harm. Unless you're a traitor and hate the country, you would be pushing for what you think is the best policy. Now people might disagree on what is best for growth, what is best for the people, and what is best for the country but we should expect them to pursue their ideas in the same way if they care about America, towards ideas they think are good.

This is part of why principled groups can stay principled so easily. An organization like FIRE truly believes that free speech is beneficial. Suppression and censorship when their side is in power would be traitorous to the good of the country in their mind, even if done out of a desire for revenge. A person like Scott Lincicome of CATO truly believes that government taking equity of private enterprise is bad policy, and thus it's easy for him to critique it.

They aren't  "turning the other cheek", they just actually believe in the words they say and the ideas they promote. They want good policy (or at least policy they think is good) for the benefit of the country. Sometimes you can see this in politicians, like how Bernie Sanders supports the plan to take equity in Intel. He believes government ownership of corporations is good for the country so he supports it even when the "enemy" does it. I think he's a stupid socialist but it's consistent with what I expect from a true believer. And you see with libertarian Republicans like Ron Paul, Justin Amash and Thomas Massie criticizing the Intel buy.

Counter to this, the "revenge" narrative comes off like the advocates never believed the words they were saying. It suggests their stated beliefs don't reflect what they think is good for the future of the US, but rather personal feelings and signaling to their in-group community. If they changed their minds it would be understandable, but if that's the case then the revenge narrative is unnecessary to begin with, they can now argue on the merits.

It essentially implies the difference between the right wing and left wing argument about things are about morals and not about the effectiveness of policy or economic ideas for the good of our country and our citizens.

I have seen this argument before, where literally in the same sentence somebody can say that other people argue about morals, while he just wants what is good for people. You do realize, that moral philosophy on basic level talks about distinction between what is good and what is bad? As soon as you use the word good or bad, you are making a moral argument.

There seems to be certain myopia for many people, where they hold some moral positions without acknowledging them as such. They pretend that their morality is objective and rational, not even warranting defending it - as if they read it from facts of the universe, they gleaned it from the proton number of atom of carbon, or from trajectory of Jupiter or something like that. It is similar trick adjacent to Russel's conjugation in much of leftist thinking - our moral philosophy is true and fair and outside of critique, while your moral philosophy is just a hideous ideology.

There's two different meanings of "good" being conflated here. "Is legal abortion good for the country?" is a political and a moral question; people will disagree about it largely because they have different opinions on "good" itself. But "are tariffs good for the country?" is largely an object-level question. Proponents and opponents have identical definitions of what it being "good" would look like (i.e. increased prosperity in the long term); they simply have a factual disagreement on whether tariffs will achieve that end. Granted, things aren't black and white, many questions straddle the line. But it's still a meaningful distinction to talk about.

Yes, this is one of the arguments I have seen. You can posit yourself outside of any moral structure and define good something akin to "how to achieve one's goal most effectively". So for instance if a school shooter wants to kill as many students as possible, it is "good" for him to use guns as opposed to knives. You are not going to question the morality of the action, you just talk in terms of which actions are more effective in reaching any given goal that you are morally impartial to. I think this level of thinking is useless outside of highly specific and individual action, you even need to distance yourself from any other potential impact these actions have for that person and take their stated goals at their face value, otherwise you enter into moral argument territory rather quickly.

Plus I think it is also misleading to even use the words like good or bad for this concept, I wish there was a different vocabulary there. As soon as you are talking about concepts like what is "good" for country or people, you are losing the argument as country or people are not moral agents to whom you can give any advice.

Not quite, this is still scientism. Economics can help answer the actual object-level question, "Are tariffs an effective way of obtaining a desired outcome?" It can tell you what the trade-offs are.

But the questions of what outcomes are desirable, and what trade-offs are acceptable, are values questions.

Yes, but I think there is truth to the claim that many political disagreements are genuinely downstream of disagreements about the object-level questions, not value differences in the weighing of whatever associated trade-offs exist.

The distinction starts to get blurry very quickly.

We can reasonably assume that there is a fact of the matter regarding which HBD claims are true. But the reason people take such strong stances on HBD, even in the face of inconclusive or insufficient empirical evidence, is because of their values. It’s hard to cleanly separate questions of value and questions of fact because our values influence what we think about the facts.

It’s hard to cleanly separate questions of value and questions of fact because our values influence what we think about the facts.

1000x this. Which to my mind is the true and valuable insight hidden at the heart of post-modernism.

I take the opposite view that most disagreements are value disagreements that ultimately map to aesthetic disagreements about the nature of a good life.

What led you to think this? Can you take some central disagreements and drill them down to the object level?

But "are tariffs good for the country?" is largely an object-level question. Proponents and opponents have identical definitions of what it being "good" would look like (i.e. increased prosperity in the long term); they simply have a factual disagreement on whether tariffs will achieve that end.

But for example if free trade increased the overall prosperity of the country 10% and the financial district 200% whilst the prosperity of blue collar workers and those in the rust belt heavily decreases, ‘good for the country’ again becomes a little tricky. Especially if you start to consider the second-order effects of this policy on the finances, social structure and industry of the country.

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