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Notes -
TL;DR: see the bullet points at the end
Today, let's talk an old article and see if it still has relevance. Way downthread when talking about language, I was reminded of one of the language influencers of the left, George Lakoff. A linguistics professor by trade, he wrote a number of books, two which I'll mention briefly: "Moral Politics" in 1996, where he argued conservatives and liberals differed in their emotional and subconscious attitude towards government, and "Don't Think of an Elephant!" in 2004 as a rough guidebook accompanying his progressive think-tank, where he argued that the linguistic framing of the debate often would often determine who would win. Conservatives think of government like a strong and strict parent who needs to strictly raise their citizen-kids into more-responsible adults, then be hands-off from there, he argued. Liberals, however, think the government is and should be a nurturing parent, promoting good virtues and protecting against corruption and badness that encompass various common ills of society. Lakoff thought that liberals were often losing because they were using conservative linguistic frameworks. He was especially active in trying to push a certain brand of linguistics during the Bush years, but upon the 2008 crash his think tank collapsed and he more or less retired at 67.
However, for today, the year is 2011 and he comes out to pen one more article with some advice. Enter The “New Centrism” and Its Discontents. The event he's worked up about? Obama's 2011 State of the Union, with whom he disagrees about political tactics. Please note that any emphasis is purely my own.
He goes on to argue that while many Obama-style Democrats were using the playbook of using friendly-sounding packaging to sell good liberal policies, that this was bound to backfire dramatically as the packaging would become the product - or perhaps more accurately, the framing determined the (often hostile) battlefield. Well, wait, actually it's worse - he thinks that to some extent, fighting wars of words on hostile territory actually pushes moderate voters to the right in a sort of self-reinforcing cycle! He thinks not just that politics is a value conflict, but that the fight itself shifts the power of the players. This was a little bit new to me.
I found this especially interesting. He thinks that conservatives are really good at using the right language, partly through what elsewhere in the article he describes as a far better and more organized (or at least, disciplined) media ecosystem. Is he right? Do liberals regularly lose the language framing wars among moderates and swing voters, and thus the battle, even before they begin?
Whoa. Brain-changing language is quite a claim. This caught my eye a little bit because of how it makes at least a theoretically-grounded factual case for language as a thing that influences people on a physical level. Is he to be believed? I have my doubts about the scientific application, but it was interesting to see this discussion happen in 2011. However, that's not an accident! Obama was, in the referenced Tuscon speech, speaking soon after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that is now seen as one of the earliest examples of political assassinations now frequently discussed. If language usage choices rewire the brain, are we actually to blame, at least in part, for these kinds of shootings? (I hope I'm not misrepresenting his point here)
In a way, this seems pretty prescient. According to progressives, at least (and certainly others) radical conservatives did take over the Republican party, and they did espouse authority and overwhelming force to punish the unworthy and the enemies, and they did use the deficit as a ruse, and they did have a uniquely selective approach to which science to believe. It's all over the news these last few months. As a pretty classic centrist myself, that feels like a pretty damning indictment, if true. Is it true? And even if he's wrong, does he have some useful advice?
The "progressive" solution
He ends by giving essentially a nice bullet-point list of things that progressives need to do. (I should note that there is some question as to whether 2011-era progressives are the same group as 2025 ones, so maybe it's best to consider it more broadly). If you read nothing else, this is his thesis, distilled.
Again, strong language. Conservatism drives empathy from the world? Uncharitable, but I can kind of see it. My parents originally flipped from Republican to Democrat, even as religious social conservatives, because in the words of my dad, "they at least pretend to care about poor people, but the Republicans don't even try". There's some pragmatism here, even among the moralization, for finding good allies. His vision of morality as the wellspring of progressive vision is an interesting one that I think partially got lost in the political noise, though I'm unsure how well it would work in practice. Most of all, though, the sixth bullet point has almost objectively been flagrantly violated in the last decade. Support Trump? You must be stupid, or mean, or shortsighted. Different values? No, clearly you just didn't see all the facts. If nothing else, I think for Democrats to get their mojo back, that probably has to change. You can't persuade someone you don't even understand.
What do you think? Is he right about language choices molding the political conversation and even changing values themselves via mere reinforcement? Should Democrats focus on long-term value-change strategies? Even if he's wrong, would you appreciate a Democratic party following his six proposals? Are "progressives" still losing the language battle? Food for thought.
To me, the most interesting point is how Lakoff's programme interacted the change in what the left-wing project was about between then and now.
In 2011, centre-left politicians thought they were in politics to deliver rising material standards of living for the bottom 99%. The activist base had started to shift to social issues (the tipping point was the failure of Occupy in late 2011) but the establishment wouldn't for a few more years. The frame that Lakoff was telling the Democrats to adopt was to fully lean into their role as the Mummy Party. (It isn't in the excerpt above, but Lakoff explicitly said was that the correct frame was that the nation was a family and the State was a "nurturant parent"). Of the six points, 2 is "accept support from successful businessmen who offer it", 4, and 5 are "git gud" and 1, 3, and 6 are "always talk like Mummy, talking like Daddy only benefits the Daddy party".
What actually happened is that the broader left-wing ecosystem of which the Democratic Party is part did embrace the spirit of points 1 and 3. They did organise around a single morality, optimise their communication to reinforce the frame of that morality, try to change the world through brain-changing morality etc. But the morality they adopted wasn't egalitarian therapy culture with the State as mother, it was woke culture with the State as HR lady. By 2020, centre-left politicians thought they were in politics to raise the relative social status of historically oppressed groups at the expense of white males.
If its occasional, yes. But making a kid his brother's keeper, and particularly making big brother responsible for little brother's fuckups, is considered abusive parenting ("parentification" is the technical term), not nurturing parenting. The ideal Mummy State makes the badly-behaved retarded kid its problem, not the healthy siblings' problem.
But that's the rub and where the analogy falls short.
The State's problem IS my problem because of how taxes work. In the mommy/sibling/bad sibling framing, the mommy who takes on the burden of the bad kid is paying out of her own pocket. She isn't demanding the good kid get a job and then bring home 25% of his or her wages to immediately be wasted on indulging the bad kid's emotional needs.
People who decry the Nanny State concept, in my mind, aren't going far enough. There is no such thing as a Nanny State. There is only confiscation of the abundance that the responsible and capable have produce on their own to be redistributed for .... reasons?
Direct, socially network charity is what I want. If I see that there's a guy in my town struggling because of some legitimate bad luck, I'd want some sort of mechanism to directly help him out over and above just me giving him cash. Local level, socially networked welfare.
Some of the counterarguments I see are:
Some communities, as a whole, don't have the resources to do this. Response: Then that's a broken community. They should all move. Yes, I am serious.
Smaller communities don't have the "resources" to "administer" such benefits. Response: This is just a thinly veiled argument for bureaucracy and PMC jobs. GoFundMes can be setup in a matter of minutes with all the necessary reporting and compliance. There's no reason Anytown, USA couldn't have their municipal government set these up - and then instantly fund them - just as easily. The not-conspiracy conspiracy is that government technology implementation is so awful party because of naked job preservation instincts by bureaucrats.
"What, so you want people to BEG their neighbors for money!? How despicable!" Response: "Beg" is hyperbole. Asking for an receiving charity is a pro-social act (Christians even call it Saintly). I'd rather have this be open and explicit than what we have now - covert signaling, counter-signaling, and assumptions of who is on what kind of government assistance. Furthermore, because government assistance is secured through faceless paperwork, people do not feel the same sense of humility and become, eventually, entitled.
Again, a Nanny State doesn't exist. The reality is far worse. We could solve these problems by admitting that PMC'ism is rampant and that individual emotional self-preservation, currently, outweighs pro-social society wide benefit. That's liberal, "humanist" individualism for you.
What if giving him cash is just mathematically the most effective option? I occasionally donate to GiveDirectly because I believe in their premise: that the administrative efficiency of just distributing cash directly is so high that enabling the occasional bad behavior is outweighed by all the good behavior it promotes and bureaucratic behavior it avoids. I'd concede that not every individual would benefit from the cash-- I don't give money to homeless people directly because I reasonably suspect they would misuse it-- but that's a rule-proving exception. Deciding which particular individual you want to give cash to re-introduces the hated administrative burden; better to do something like a UBI or the libertarian negative tax rate.
I think I agree, morally, that no amount of government spending can ever replace charity... but some amount of government spending is just sensible economics.
I'm not sure that it is.
I think the left-wing position needs to reckon with the fact that some percentage of people have problems that can't easily be solved and, even worse, risk becoming disproportionate consumers (of welfare or police resources or park space, etc. ) whenever you liberalize controls on them or make systems more generous and less skeptical.
And perhaps worse than that, that you can move people on the bubble into that category.
Funny, I just saw a new left-wing outlet wrestling with research that hinted at weak results when people are given money.
Yes, there are some people who are bad targets for the policy. That's the exact argument for making these programs less conditional-- ideally, not conditional whatsoever. ubi pilots consistently show improvements in welfare, and while GiveDirectly wastes effort trying to pick specifically extra-disadvantaged villages, it redeems itself by distributing payments to everyone within those villages.
Consider this simplified model of the economy:
After a decade, semi-random economic events will have sorted people into "poor" and "rich". The "rich" group is mostly composed of people form Group A, and the "poor" group is mostly composed of people from Group B. But you know in principle that there are still poor people who might improve their lives with more money, and that, meanwhile, the rich people have mostly hit diminishing utilitarian returns for improvement-by-money. Your first instinct-- well, not your first instinct, because you're a conservative, but the first instinct of someone further left than you-- will be to take money from the rich people and give it to the poor people. At first, you see the lives of people of the poor people rapidly improve-- because they're improvers, and using that money to take all the low-hanging-fruit they were previously unable to. But soon, most of the improvers move into the rich group, and now you're just giving money that the improvers could be using to improve things to wasters instead, and the program fails. The better option would have been to take more money from the rich, but pay it to everyone. The richest of the rich would suffer a little as they're paying disproportionately more, but they're far at the reducing-rate-of-utilitarian-returns section of the scale. So given that they're also recieving the UBI, the only way they move from rich to poor is if they're wasters... and if they are, then society should want them to be poor, to discourage waster behavior. Meanwhile, the improver poor become improver rich, and the improver rich maintain their position, while the waster poor get to control a proportionately smaller share of the economy than they would if they were receiving direct welfare and also aren't facing any incentive to remain poor.
The funny thing is, I've also seen that same article, and I consider it direct proof of my point-- even though the leftist writing it doesn't seem to understand that. For example, they say,
but then turn around and say,
completely ignoring the obvious conclusion that if all these targeted giving schemes are failing, they should stop advocating for targeted giving schemes. Just give the money to everyone. The pregnant women/domestic violence victims that will use the money productively will still get it-- and so will everyone else that actually needs the money, and would use it to improve their lives. Sure, plenty of people who won't use the money to improve their lives will also get it-- but at least they're not directly incentivized to not improve their lives, and also they're probably going to be paying their money to people who can make better use of it.
Using the meme definition of insanity, this "transfer money to particular poor households" scheme is definitely it. Wealth-transfer research has promising results. Wealth-transfer-to-poor-people research has less promising results. Why do these leftists keep insisting that we trying to find even worse-off people to give the money too? That's just going to result in even worse results. Just give the money to everyone! The trump stimmy checks were the right idea, only held back by the fact that they were unfunded and increased the deficit (because deficit-mediated inflation is effectively a regressive tax on poorer people, who hold more cash wealth and suffer more from sticky salaries.)
To sketch out an ideal tax + welfare system...
Revenue:
LVT used almost exclusively as a revenue-generating tax
Pigouvian taxes applied in conditions of high economic certainty
Service charges for excludable use of sensibly government-provided services (e.g., getting your passport renewed, driving on a toll road)
Spending
Pigouvian subsidies applied in conditions of high economic certainty
security (including military)
contract enforcement (the courts, plus the parts of the regulatory state that do stuff like fine people for lying about the efficacy of medical treatments)
the strictly necessary parts of the administrative state (e.g., salaries for judges, lawmakers)
the parts of the regulatory state that exist to solve multipolar traps/tragedies of the commons/failure states of capitalism/etc. (e.g., climate change, national parks, trustbusting)
the parts of the regulatory state necessary for auditing the other parts
A UBI calculated to be the higher of {[enough so that almost* no one starves, dies of exposure, dies of easily treatable disease*, or otherwise lives considered strictly unacceptable for a citizen*], [Whatever figure maximizes the equation: RISE IN(MINIMUM OF(aggregate GDP, aggregate population utility*)) DUE TO PAYMENTS - FALL IN (MINIMUM OF(aggregate GDP, aggregate population utility*)) due to taxes]}
A service designed to care for people who are strictly unable to make economic choices (the mentally challenged, the insane, and the senile)
* I'm using fuzzy language in a few cases because some of these concepts/thresholds are strictly subjective... I concede that even in my "ideal" economic system there would be plenty for people to fight over and disagree about
The Trump Stimmy checks were in fact not universal.
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