This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I've been thinking about why some people are terrified of Trump while others, like me, are more indifferent. I mostly tune out Trump news because I assume much of it involves scare tactics or misleading framing by his detractors. When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it - and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.
This reminded me of a mirror situation during 2020-2021 with the BLM movement, where our positions were reversed. I was deeply concerned about social media mobs pressuring corporations, governments, and individuals to conform under threat of job loss, boycotts, and riots, while my wife thought these social pressures were justified and would naturally self-correct if they went too far. The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints. It seems like we each trust different institutional mechanisms, but I can't help but think that formal governmental processes with built-in restraints are more reliable than grassroots social pressure that operates without those same safeguards. Furthermore, the media seems incentivized to amplify fear about Trump but not about grassroots social movements - Trump generates clicks and outrage regardless of which side you're on, while criticizing social movements risks alienating the platforms' own user base and advertiser-friendly demographics.
I'd submit an underlying root of the fear Trump inspires for many people is the fear of a lack of control.
This isn't a claim about what those people would claim as their cause of fear. This is more of a claim about a distinction between an artifact-level expression of something, which might have its own rational, and the underlying cultural dynamic that underpins such an expression. In the same way that people don't feel the monsters in horror movies as much as they fear the [primal fear of being hunted], where the monster is merely the artifact to express the underlying fear, people fear the sense of a [lack of control] more than actual policies they don't like.
It's not exactly a novel premise that the fear of losing control is associated with a variety of disorders that generally amount to various expressions of stress, anxiety, and (bad) attempts to compensate. Generalized anxiety disorder is characterized by a consistent state of worry, anxiety, and catastrophizing worst-case scenarios. Obsessive compulsive disorder is generally linked to constant intrusive thoughts and the corresponding efforts to mitigate them. Panic disorder goes with the fear of having another panic attack, and 'control' is re-asserted by trying to avoid the triggers that might lead to another panic attack... even though the existing psychological reference of overcoming trauma suggests that avoiding triggers can make issues worse.
Now, there are separate arguments/posts that could be made about whether [current society] dynamics make these sort of things worse. Whether dominant domestic political propaganda narratives by less-than-non-partisan mass media over the last decades might have accidentally encouraged anxieties, catastrophizing, or so on. Whether COVID pandemic policies and lockdown advocacy, which became partisan-coded in the US, might have had unintended consequences for the psychological health of large parts of the population. We've certainly had good effort posts by Motte posters in the past of how social contagion dynamics have shaped or propagated various cultural obsessions, and pathologies, associated with the worst of various culture war elements. Those arguments exist, but they aren't the argument here.
The argument here is that the fear of a loss of control is not just a real fear, but an underlying theme of a lot of fears, and that Trump rides that line in how he breaks people's world views of how the world works, and the sense of control it provides.
This part gets into the overlap of politics and psychology, which can come uncomfortably close to pathologizing your opponents, so please bear with me as I try to make more general points.
One of the individual human psychological needs is a sense of agency / autonomy, which require a degree of control. This is a pretty consistent theme research about how higher employee sense of autonomy correlates with job satisfaction, the esteem stage of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and the commercial applications/implications of player agency in video game design. Control is not the same thing as agency or even security, but they are overlapping dynamics. What it boils down to is simple: people don't like feeling helpless, and one of the aspects of being helpless is not having the power to control your context. It's the difference between having to stay put and take abuse, or being able to choose to walk away.
One of the less obvious aspects of this desire for a sense of control is that it does not have to be directly exercised by the individual, but can be 'outsourced' to other people or even other things. This is a function of what we call trust. A child does not need to be strong enough on their own to face the scary thing, but can cry for their parent, whose presence is reassuring despite the child's own agency not increasing. You can feel safer having a drink in public if you can trust that a friend, or even just a taxi driver, will get you home safer. Note this also can work in the inverse- whether you feel safe or uneasy in a neighborhood can come down to social trust.
Where this starts to interface with politics is the now often-underrecognized dynamic between citizens and chosen leaders who represent. This used to be much more explicit in the Roman patria system, which was a cornerstone of roman society and politics alike. Patria was a patron-client relationship in which reciprocal obligations linked the patron and the client, with client's support/subservience being in return for the patron representing their interests in issues ranging from legal courts to career prospects and so on. A key dynamic of this relationship, however, is that while it could be inherited, it could also be changed- the client who was not served by their patron could, in theory, shift to another patron. The reciprocal obligations of patria are long gone, and the premise is often downplayed or reframed in service of egalitarian cultural biases of western democracies, but you can see it in campaigns where candidate vows to fight for you on X issue. This is an appeal for outsourcing your sense of control to your chosen leader. You may not have the agency, but the politician does, and so a [sense of control] can still be maintained.
What is less obvious about this less-obvious political extension outsourcing the sense of control is that it can also extend to hostile actors.
There is plenty of research associating a conspiratorial mindset with a sense of control, which has a long and diverse history of exaggerating the influence and efforts of hated outgroups to frame them as far more powerful than they actually are. This has expressions in things like the joke about the Jew who reads the Nazi news paper to feel good about how powerful they are, but it also has less comical expressions in exaggerating elements of truth into absurdities. To pick an American-salient example, Russia certainly does spy on the US, and Russian troll farms do try to escalate the culture war, but it is more misleading than informative to claim that the Russians are the cause of American political polarization. Sometimes these are done for purposes of cynical deflection- it's easier for the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party to blame Russian interference for losing the 2016 election than Clinton's long history of doing Clinton-like things- but sometimes these sort of explanations go back to the psychological need for a sense of control even when it's clear you aren't the one with it.
Step back to the field of antisemitic conspiracies. This is a very old genre, and occasionally it gets very absurd. There is, for example, a reoccurring minor news story in the arab middle east of birds being detained (arrested, if you will) in rural areas on suspicion of being Israeli spies. While it is true that the Israelis have considerable espionage capabilities- that grain of truth referenced before- to date there is no reporting I am aware of that has ever validated the conspiracy as opposed to the far more mundane explanation. Israeli universities in Israel tag wild animals as part of research, and then release, and then the birds go where they will across the reason, carrying those tags. There is no reason for the birds to be in that particular country where it is detained.
One one hand, this conspiracy is silly. On the other, if we step back to the [sense of control] framing, it makes a fair deal more sense. The arabs in the broader levant are not exactly known for being high agency societies. Many are in uncontested monarchies or functional military dictatorships that are uncontested because of very established, and often very brutal, security apparatus that stamp on the sort of agency that goes against the state. Nor are they exactly in patria relationships with leaders who do have that sort of agency. There are certainly patronage relationships, but if the Arabs had the sort of regional agency and control they wanted, Israel wouldn't exist. They are people without direct or even delegated agency.
In this context, the [Israeli bird] is a demonstration of a lack of control. Despite their inability to impose upon the state of Israel, here is an artifact from Israel that is able to intrude upon them. They did not know it in advance. They were not able to stop it from occurring. And, well, everyone knows what the Israelis can get up to if they want. The [Israeli bird] could be such a thing. It's presence is a demonstration of helplessness and threat.
Except... by being an Israeli spy bird, a sense of control is being re-imposed via framing paradigm. The bird is not an aimless or chaotic event of chance, but an agent. That agent implies agency on the part of its jewish masters. One may not know the insidious jewish plan, but there can still be a plan. One may hate the control of the perfidious jew, but malign Jewish influence means that someone has some control over things. Even if control is held by a hated outgroup, it still validates the sense that there is control. It's just a contest/conflict of who has control, and how to wrest control back.
This is not a novel or Arab-specific issue. The conflict over the nature of the locus of control of society is a very longstanding paradigm conflict. Our departed Hlynka would occasionally write in his inferential difference series about how it manifested in the western enlightenment as part of the philosophical difference of enlightenment thinkers. The distinction between whether the loci of control of society is fundamentally internal or external, deriving from one's self or subject to imposition from outside context which could be controlled. This has longer arguments about how the [post-enlightenment left] tends towards the external locus of control theory which asserts you can control broader context, and the [post-enlightenment right] leans more towards an internal locus of control because you cannot control outside context, but that's non-central to this.
What I want to go back to is that other political conspiracy, and Trump specifically.
I made a point earlier that the Russian interference narrative could be cynically boosted as a means of blame deflection. Clinton and her wing of the party would rather attack her enemies / blame the Russians / hurt Trump than concede that she was a bad candidate. But cynical deflection isn't the only dynamic in play- it can also go back to the point of 'hostile control is better than no control.'
If Trump is an enemy of the nation, after all, by conspiring with Russia- something that the Democratic party convinced about half of Americans about- then control may have been usurped, but it fundamentally still exists and can be regained. Hence the resistance, the mass organized protests of the mostly peaceful variety, and of course The Secret History Of the Shadow Campaign That Saved The 2020 Election. The later was an actual conspiracy- or prospiracy if you will- of government officials, party officials, media interests, protest organizers, NGOs, activists, and more to coordinate efforts to change laws, manage protests, shape media coverage and all the other efforts done to Fortify Democracy and Save the Election. This very classic 'sense of control' mentality, and neatly aligns with the sort of world view that might sincerely believe that Trump conspired with Russia.
By contrast, if Trump did not conspire with Russia- if he literally came down that escalator and then proceeded to demolish a number of nation-dominating political dynasties who people felt had been in control- or nearly in control- for the better part of a quarter century, winning primarily because of how hated the party and political leaders were... and because no one operating within the rules could stop him... even as the Trump administration was an endless cycle of chaos and turnovers and a lack of organizational discipline...
Well, that's a victory of a lack of control.
But- for a time- the sense of control was restored. The election was Fortified. Covid was Locked Down. The Adults were Back in Charge. Trump was impeached (again), in court (again), and more reliable sense-of-control allies were being propped up in the Republican party. Liz Cheney was being set up to try and re-establish control of the Republican Party, so nothing like Trump could happen again, and the experienced hand of Biden meant the US was back in control.
And then everything stopped being under control, and Trump came back and smashed the 2024 election beyond a shadow of a doubt, and the sense of control was loss even more than it was with Trump 2016.
And if there's something people fear in general, it's a lack of control.
A bit long, but well said.
Personally, I've found the Trump phenomenon encouraging, because it means that the elites who control our government are still too incompetent to resist public input indefinitely. They threw absolutely everything from the intelligence agencies to the courts to the actual assassins at him, and still got waxed by a lone reality TV star and real-estate mogul. Twice!
Come on. Do you really think that
(a) the deep state wanted to murder him
(b) that they would wait till election season to off him
(c) that they would decide that a sniper bullet would serve their goals better than, say, heart failure after an overdose of viagra?
(d) that they would be likely to miss?
Now you can add any amounts of epicycles to make all of that plausible. Perhaps the plan was that JD Vance would get elected Americans would vote for him simply because they dislike assassinations. Only Vance was really a democratic operative whose presidency would discredit the GOP for decades, allowing the reptiloids running the Dems to defeat the last Illuminati bastion in the US. But they did not know that the Illuminati had acquired precognition from alien artifacts from Area-51, so they knew precisely how much to adjust the shooter's scope for maximum dramatic effect.
The deep state shouldn't be considered as a rational actor. No reasonable person would think 'OK we've got Biden as our old and withered presidential nominee, we can just run the country while he's out of it. But let's put in Kamala as a talentless, charisma-deficient vice-president and then when 2024 comes around and Biden is predictably incapable... uhhh... well better think up something clever then!' But they did that anyway and fumbled it.
We already know that they don't use optimal strategies, they're not going to do an assassination properly either. If they try to assassinate someone, it'd look like their military campaigns and spending programs. A giant mess.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Or that they had chosen not to do what it took to resist public input indefinitely even though they technically could have if they were willing to burn enough of the commons. That's the main thing I'm worried about here - relations between the left and right aren't great right now but there's room for things to get much, much worse if both sides just keep escalating the way they have been.
I'm not particularly interested in litigating the question of who started it, because I don't think that's likely to be a useful question to ask here. Instead, I wonder what achievable state of relations (and "complete subjugation of all ideological opponents" is not achievable) would make each side feel secure enough in their position to stop escalating.
Why not? Suharto is my immediate go-to example, but there's also the Reconquista and the Edict of Fontainebleau as what comes to my mind next.
More options
Context Copy link
No, there are paths there. They're just terrible paths that amount to Pyrrhic victory, and which we don't want to take. The obvious one is "nuclear war, half of SJers literally die in a fire, the other half get blamed for weakening the West and thus allowing Beijing/Moscow to challenge us".
I press x to doubt on the SJ debate remaining salient in the event of a full nuclear exchange
"Millions die in nuclear fire, women most affected"
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Scenario A - Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
Trump attempts to assert federal authority. Blue states defy him, and organize around making that defiance as effective as possible. Blue tribe wins an election, and attempts to assert federal authority. Red Tribe states defy them, and organize around making that defiance as effective as possible.
The norm of strong federal control over the states dies. Without a superpowerful federal government to fight over, conflict between the tribes decreases, as each realizes that imposing its will on the other is simply not worth the effort; better to facilitate population transfers of those unsatisfied with their current tribal environment, and let history sort it all out. Legitimate federalism defuses much of the culture war, as people are free to pursue their values in their own regions, and to move if this is impractical.
Scenario B - The Land of Peace and Plenty
One tribe or the other delivers unquestionably effective governance, even by the other tribe's standards; significantly better schooling outcomes even for inner-city black kids, notably effective and just law enforcement, a clear road out of the long-term economic stagnation, an automation revolution leading to an explosion of wealth and dramatically-increased living standards, etc, etc.
Much of the current mess is driven by policy starvation, moderate political approaches chronically unable to deliver the goods, leading to the public turning away to the increasingly radical fringes in search of still-credible policy options. One side or the other actually delivering undeniable policy wins even from the perspective of the opposing tribe could possibly defuse the escalation spiral as people adopt policies that actually work. From the Blues, this might be YIMBYs or the Abundance guys. From the right, it might be things like the Mississippi Miracle or Trump's crime crackdown, which seems to have been drawing support recently even from scattered democrats. Admittedly, this seems like more of a long shot, but there's some evidence that a lot of even our most serious problems might actually be choices, and if that fact could be made stark enough, people might choose differently.
I think your scenario A is off the table for now; even Newsom has not been able to resist Trump's authority.
Scenario B is not happening also. Because even if Trump could deliver that effective governance and to the Democrats it would never be enough. It would be bad because Trump was doing it. And because he can't; e.g. delivering notably better schooling outcomes for inner-city black kids is beyond the President's power. He's doing best on immigration enforcement; despite all the cries, the horror stories are limited. Where's all the brown US citizens black-bagged and dumped in Tijuana? I've heard of one held for 3 days, which is bad but the ordinary sort of bad that happened every day before Trump.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
They didn't kill him with a heart attack post-2020 election for reasons I legitimately do not understand. I am not saying they should or shouldn't have done this, I am just confused why they didn't.
Germany must have started stocking up on heart attack guns this early, and there were none left to use on Trump.
Are you referring to those dead AfD people?
Yup, though mostly having fun. I haven't really looked into it, and I don't know if the German establishment would take things that far.
The establishment probably wouldn't, given how risk-averse most Germans are.
The establishment's far-left Handlangers, though...if they actually had the mythical heart attack gun, I'm perfectly sure they'd find someone willing to pull the trigger. Mid-level AfD candidates being the target doesn't strike me as unlikely either, given that those are both soft targets and highly detested by the left.
But that's assuming such a thing exists and somehow found its way into the hands of very discreet extremists.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The online battlefield has shifted though. Would Trump 2016 have happened without Reddit and 4chan? Those don't exist in as usable a form these days. Twitter was a huge coup, but that's still "two steps back, one-and-a-half steps forward".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link