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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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Much of our politics is being driven not by events viewed rationally, but by narratives about events.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. There's no such thing as a "neutral" viewpoint. It's narratives all the way down, always has been. The liberal consensus is breaking down and as a result so is its narrative (which is what I presume you mean by "events viewed rationally"), and there are now two major narratives competing to replace it. The liberal narrative is dying because it's no longer a coherent frame for the things that are happening in our society. You can't just roll that back.

I do think that the classical liberal narrative is more rational than either the leftist narrative or the conservative narrative, but it's not what I really mean by "events viewed rationally". I mean more like, events viewed in their actual proportion. Political violence kills on the same order of as many Americans as lightning every year. It is disproportional to indulge in narratives where America is bathed in political violence, because it simply isn't.

I disagree that the liberal (meaning classical liberal) narrative is no longer a coherent frame for what is happening in US society. It seems at least as coherent to me as its main competitors. But yes, the competitors are growing stronger for various reasons, one such reason being that the modern American flavor of liberalism as a ruling ideology has shown itself as being much less able to tackle big problems, and much more prone to bumbling and/or misgovernment (Iraq War, COVID policy, inflation, etc.) than people would like.

There's no chance that lightning suddenly escalates after a few trial strikes and increases it's lethality by a double handful of orders of magnitude.