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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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He fights, he makes libs cry, and traditional, "respectable" conservatives are now seen as cucks who conserved nothing and are committed only to losing politely. MAGA cares absolutely nothing about propriety or decorum, because that's a chump's game, and any discussion that veers in the direction of "What happens when the other side does this?" will get a hundred stories about how the other side is worse anyway, the other side has been defecting forever, and only after we crush them and make them lick the soles of our boots might they learn to behave and restore a kind of equilibrium.

Yes, I think that roughly describes my feelings on the matter.

The feeling’s now pretty mutual from the left too, in no small part due to not-so-veiled declarations of war like this one

My only hope is that y’all can be crushed at the ballot & soap boxes first, before the full consequences of this deranged White Terror can be realized… and before the bullet box ends up coming into play.

Sure. My statement was a recognition that I think @Amadan's predicted answer is correct: both on the ineffectualness of decorum-conservatives and that these sentiments have been coming from the Left for my entire adult life if not before (the Left in Britain played 'Ding, dong, the Witch is Dead' to mark the death of Britain's first female PM, and I was getting death threats from Leftists IRL in 2015). The left will recognise the importance of decorum only once it becomes clear how indecorum has worked out for them.

I doubt very much that the American Left will be crushing anyone for the next ten years even with the bullet box in play as it already indisputably is - they are wedded to incredibly unpopular positions, a terrible record, and they openly loathe 50% of Americans on the basis of their gender and >50% on the basis of their race. They may be able to retrench under a different banner but that will take time.

The British Conservative party, by way of contrast, has pursued the cunning strategy of being so utterly ineffectual, self-sabotaging and spineless that a left-wing PM has been forced to become a conservative and try to show them how it's done, though he will inevitably fail. Personally, I see Trumpism as having considerably better return on investment.

…both on the ineffectualness of decorum-conservatives and that these sentiments have been coming from the Left for my entire adult life if not before (the Left in Britain played 'Ding, dong, the Witch is Dead' to mark the death of Britain's first female PM). The left will recognise the importance of decorum only once it becomes clear how indecorum has worked out for them. The war such as it is has been going on since 2014.

I’m sure you believe that.

I doubt very much that the American Left will be crushing anyone for the next ten years

Agree more-or-less-completely, both for ‘logical’ reasons and for more fundamentally emotionally-pessimistic ones,

even with the bullet box in play as it already indisputably is

This I do, in fact, dispute! Years of Lead may very well be in our future, but (for now) the fears of -and some calls for- the bullet box has dramatically outstripped its actual presence. That could very well change, though.