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Steve Bannon is back in another interview asserting that Trump will get a 3rd term. Like previous times where he's said this, he doesn't really go into too much detail, besides saying they have a plan and they're working on it. I get this is Bannon's schtick lately and he's a political operative and so maybe this is just something he bangs on to rile up the base, but for fun, I want to consider here what the actual plan could be.
Bannon does give away more here than I've seen in other interviews where this has been brought up. I'm going to focus on 2 statements that I think start to give the plan away. When the interviewer says the 22nd Amendment makes it clear that Trump cannot have another term because he's on his 2nd term already:
To me, this is a point in favor of the theory that's been floated around already that their plan relies on some very literal reading of the 22nd Amendment.
Key word: elected. Fairly straightforward, and again, not anything that hasn't been brought up before. Trump runs as some other GOP candidate's VP, they win, and that candidate immediately steps down, making Trump president despite not having been "elected to the office of the President". He's been elected twice, but the 22nd says nothing of being President more than twice. The usual objection to this is that the 12th Amendment prevents this by barring someone who is ineligible for the presidency to be VP, but you can also play word games with this. If you interpret the 12th Amendment's "constitutionally ineligible to the office of President" to just mean "doesn't meet the requirements laid out by Article II", then Trump is still eligible to be President. He's just ineligible to be elected.
But isn't this against the spirit of the 22nd Amendment? Bannon:
It's one thing for Trump to lose the election and then try to still hang on for a 3rd term. But it's another if--given he's able to get on the ballot as VP for 2028, which I think he probably could in enough states--he and his Presidential candidate do actually win. Then the messaging becomes much easier. But how can Bannon be sure enough that the American people will elect Trump in this manner? Simply rig the election. Many say this is too difficult because you'd have to rig so many individual elections, and the states control elections, and if it's easy then why don't we see evidence of it being done in the past, etc. I'll admit this is probably the weakest part of the plan. But if you step back and say, "What steps would be required for this to be doable, and are they doing them?" then there are definitely signs. Dominion was recently bought by a Republican operative, and Trump's people are already signaling they want to mandate election rules for states in time for the midterms in 2026. A Trump DHS appointee who will be in charge of election infrastructure told all 50 states at a recent meeting that they
Even if they can't pull off mandating election rules at the federal level, Trump may have enough state legislatures in the bag that they might just take enabling actions "independently" of any top-down federal enforcement.
Also, you know, he could just actually win legitimately, that's completely possible with the state the Democrats are in right now.
So yeah, this isn't really anything genius. Win the election or rig it so that you do + creatively interpret the 22nd and 12th Amendments. Some quick responses to possible objections:
Lower courts yes, SCOTUS I'm 50/50 on. There are smart people who know the legal world far better than I do who are certain that even the current SCOTUS would rule 9-0 against Trump on this, so maybe. But smart people have been wrong about many matters involving Trump, and SCOTUS has disappointed me before. I don't care that "such-and-such legal scholars have written X about the interpretation of the 22nd/12th Amendment" because at the end of the day it's just SCOTUS that matters. I've seen a theory that SCOTUS has been forgiving to Trump in recent rulings because they know this day is coming, so they want to build up credibility with him for when they inevitably have to rule against him on this. That just seems far too giga-brained for me.
I never really bought the claims that "2020 was the most secure election in history" even though I don't think it was rigged. I just think if someone really tried, they could. Voting machines are repeatedly shown to have security flaws, and I don't think that all the swing counties that matter will use paper ballots and do risk-limiting audits to verify the results.
Maybe, although by 2028 Hegseth may be able to fire enough people and appoint loyalists in their place to make this a non-issue. Someone with deeper knowledge of the US military can comment here. I don't take the "swearing an oath to the Constitution, not the President" thing too seriously, because while I think it may hold at the top, I don't think it holds all the way down the chain of command, and that's what matters if it comes to having to forcibly remove Trump from the Oval Office. However the Courts rule also plays into this, if it can be framed that this whole thing actually isn't violating the Constitution.
Congress continues to abdicate its powers in favor of letting the executive do whatever they want (both parties) and I don't see this changing anytime soon. The only defectors from the GOP we see right now are MTG and Rand Paul. Trump is still going strong despite his age, and I think the people in the MAGA-sphere surrounding him have sunk too much into it to do anything other than milk it until he dies in office. I've completely given up hope that anybody in the White House or Congress will take a principled stance on this. Democrats will continue to be very concerned and maybe organize a No Kings march to no effect.
I can't take Bannon saying this to mean anything or indicate anything serious. He's just talking out of his ass from a position of no authority. Furthermore, Trump will be way too old to run next time. Furthermore, if they actually tried to run a strategy like this for any length of time, as opposed to just talking about it, that would push every centrist like me, who doesn't take anything Trump says about himself seriously nor takes anything Trump's detractors say about him seriously, into a realization that Trump is in fact a threat to American democracy. It would prove every leftist correct, that Trump is the worst thing ever, a wannabe dictator, the whole thing. Then Trump would lose in the biggest landslide ever.
There are people out there who still think "American democracy" exists? Who TF cares about 'democracy' unironically.
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Strongly disagree. I think there's probably very few people who aren't already convinced of this that would then become convinced by him trying a 3rd term. He already tried to hang on to power after an election whose results he disagreed with via very legally dubious means. I don't get the reasoning that sees the fake electors plot and concludes "Yeah, now that he attempted that and faced no consequences, won reelection, and has a Supreme Court ruling now saying he can't face any criminal liability for his actions as President, he probably won't try anything like it again".
I've only voted for Trump harder each time he came up on the ballot, but I'm not going to vote for him again. I'm happy with what he's done so far but it will be the time for him to pass the buck on to someone else. There's no way I'm supporting a trump for life ticket.
Why not? Why pass up an opportunity to keep blue tribe under the heel of your boot? “My rules > your rules fairly > your rules unfairly…”?
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I certainly would react as @haroldbkny describes. I have argued for 8ish years that Trump is not actually a big deal and people are freaking out over nothing. I thought the Jan 6 riot was a complete nothingburger and I think the "insurrection" talk is coming from a place of fearmongering rather than any actual basis in Trump's actions. If he tried to actually run for a third term, that will show that the left has been right about him the entire time, and he actually is a threat to democratic government in this country. I'll vote for literally anyone the Democrats run against him.
What's your opinion of FDR?
I hate him, though not for the fact that he ran for four terms if that's why you ask. That was legal at the time, so whatever (I am not one who believes that custom should be given serious weight like that). I hate him because he wiped his ass with the constitution and largely destroyed the original vision for this country by centralizing so much power within the federal government, power that it constitutionally could not (and still cannot) have. Only extremely disingenuous motivated reading of the commerce clause (with Wickard v Filburn being the prime example) allowed it, and everything he did under that aegis should be walked back. That won't happen of course, because a strong federal government is actually pretty popular with the masses.
But yeah, in short I think FDR was one of the worst presidents the US ever had.
It would have been better if the New Deal had been implemented with a constitutional amendment; however, the state governments were not capable of responding to the Depression on their own, and had Washington continued to do nothing, the nation would have had little prospect of avoiding a far more blatant rejection of the Constitution, as the desperate masses turned to either a Red or a Brown alternative.
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I agree, but the general consensus does not impress.
I actually think Trump running again would be an extremely bad idea for a number of practical reasons. But more and more, I'm flatly unwilling to engage in the pretense that there's some civic foundation that future norm violations are supposed to be undermining, that even a single stone of those foundations still rests upon another. This perspective doesn't necessarily resolve in endorsement of further violations, but if I'm going to oppose them, I'm going to oppose them for real reasons, not fake ones.
Yeah, I know people rate FDR highly. It's one of the things that lowers my level of hope for this nation: that a president can make his entire policy platform to do blatantly unconstitutional stuff, thoroughly destroy the original social contract on which the nation was founded, and be rated as one of the greatest leaders in the country's history (rather than as one of its greatest villains) as a result. George Lucas was a little on the nose with the Star Wars line "So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause", but he also was basically correct imo. When freedom is taken away from a people, it is popular to do so (until it's gone too far and then it's too late to stop it, let alone reverse it).
I'm not saying that Trump is committing the first serious norm violations in our country's history. He isn't. We have been steadily eroding those norms for a century. But I am saying "two wrongs don't make a right", and I'm going to fight Trump just as hard on constitutional principles as I would've fought FDR back in the day had I been alive. Not that it means much, of course - Trump doesn't even know I exist, much less care what I think. But to the extent I can do something if he goes down that road (i.e vote against him, rather than for someone I would prefer), I will.
A century?
People accused George Washington of abusing presidential power.
There has not been a president in history who was not at some point accused of exceeding his authority and violating the Constitution. Granted, some of these accusations were more bad faith and politically motivated than others, but still- I'm not even disagreeing with @FCfromSSC at this point that the Constitution is literal paper, but "norms" have always been a nebulous fuzzy thing manipulated by the politicians of every era. Just as the Supreme Court has always been in a sort of "dialog"/adversarial relationship with Congress and the Executive branch, making rulings as much to uphold their own legitimacy as to interpret the Constitution in some theoretically "objective" way.
There was never a period in American history when the political class was treating the Constitution as a rulebook that could not be deviated from to their own advantage. Some individuals treated it so- even some presidents! But they were not the norm.
To the degree I have been in more-or-less continuous disagreement with FC and other "America is dead" drumbeaters over the years, it's not with the facts before us today but rather whether these facts actually represent a meaningful difference from the past.
Where my own thinking has changed is that I think we may be the generation that sees the bill come due, the inherent instability in the system reach the breaking point, the ruin in the nation exhausted.
At this point, my optimistic hope is that the nation outlives me. Just need to eke out another few decades.
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Do you believe that "Constitutional Principles" protect you or anything you care about now, or will at any point in the forseeable future? Do you perceive your position to be one of enlightened self-interest, or is it more a terminal values thing?
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Personally, back in '37 I thought he was a Supreme Court packing Bolshevik.
Seriously though, I couldn't possibly know what I would have thought at the time. He wasn't going against the Constitution, but rather a very strong precedent. He had some serious arguments for why he might need to break that precedent. And I know he had his detractors, but I'm sure he did not have half the country saying every day since he put his name on the ballot in 1932 that any day now he was going to try to become the dictator of America.
A lot of people at the time really, really hated FDR and did see him as a would-be tyrant. Obviously less than half the country given that he kept winning elections, but he wasn't uncontroversial. I've yet to meet anyone who refuses to ever even utter Trump's name, whereas my great-grandfather supposedly referred to FDR only as "that man" until his dying day.
'The Orange Man' 'Drumpf' 'Cheeto'
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I meant more your present retrospective. I've been told my whole life by the authorities that he's a solid contender for best president of all time, only marginally edged out by Lincoln.
Yeah, but I mean, i think my present retrospective doesn't mean much, if we are trying to make a comparison to Trump trying to run a third term. I'm living in the Trump era surrounded by contemporary opinions about him, and I could never have that for FDR.
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I am a centrist and while Jan 6 didn’t bother me, this would. I interpret Jan 6 as mere bluster that nobody (including his supporters) took seriously. If he actually became president for a third term this would cause me to admit that the left was actually correct about the seriousness of Trump’s antidemocratic tendencies.
The American meltdown over Jan 6 was hilarious.
Century of toppling foreign governments, some of which were democratically elected by their people? I sleep
A bunch of Gen X wander around a government building for a few hours, largely make fools of themselves, and then nothing happens? Literally worst thing to happen to America since 9/11 / pearl harbor / the civil war.
I see this “They just walked around a government building for a few hours” thing all the time and I think it’s a pretty dishonest way of downplaying what happened. Was it a real insurrection attempt that had any chance of working, like the most hysterical people on the left say? In my opinion, no. But a police officer died probably as a result of it, and by all outward appearances it was intended to stop the certification of the election. And intentions do matter. Republicans would rightly freak out if a mob of libs tried the exact same thing and entered the Capitol during the certification of Trump’s win in 2024, even if it didn’t work.
And because the BLM riots always get brought up as a counterexample, yeah, those were also bad and did much more damage. There is a lot of hypocrisy in how these two events were covered and the subsequent reactions to them. I don’t have a problem saying both are bad, and we should be honest about what actually went down in both cases.
No, he didn't.
They did similar shit during the Kavanaugh hearings. Republicans freaked a little, no one else cared.
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That's fair
It was a legitimate attempt, just a horribly executed one.
It definitely makes it funnier to play it down to contrast the CIA coups vs "Gen X morons walking around and dying of heart attacks". But that was biased.
The meltdowns still hilarious though.
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I am convinced that the outrage in Congress was a reaction to the immense shame they all felt for blowing the chance of a lifetime: whoever went out and confronted the mob and pulled a calm, collected "have you no shame, have you no decency" response would've been elected President in 2024. Instead, they all ran away, and that knowledge will burn them forever.
I think it's truly the most banal of explanations - all those other riots, those didn't put them at risk. They saw the burning but the burning was for other people. But this one? Oh god that impacts me! Add a media class that identifies as part of the same DC elite that was terrified, and then you get the push.
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I think there are a lot of people even just in this forum who would disagree with you about what centrists would and would not take seriously, and I'm speaking as one of those centrists.
I think Trump crossing the well established and easy to understand bright line in the sand that has existed in spirit since 228 years ago, and in law since 74 years ago would be far more of a damning behavior than the 2020 election craziness. It ultimately likely comes down to the plausible deniability of Trump's actions, whether it could be seen in any light as (yet again) something that was potentially taken out of context, just his enemies ganging up on him to make it seem like he's doing something worse then he is. Seeing language on Wikipedia claiming he "devised a scheme" doesn't do much to convince me of the neutrality of the sources reporting on it.
I consider myself pretty much a centrist. I don't like the left and I don't like the right. And I think Trump's actions during the 2020 election are inexcusable and, if not legally, then morally, disqualifying for holding the office of President. That was basically the line in the sand for me and my registered Republican family members who voted for him the first time around. They didn't vote for him again (as far as I know), and they might have if it weren't for 2020. So I do think I have at least some knowledge of what centrists think.
This seems overly uncharitable to me. Of course we can never truly know, but say he had done what the Wikipedia article says. What language would you expect or want them to use? "Devising a scheme" is just straightforwardly what one would call that.
"crafted a plan"
to be frank, there are many ways to more neutrally describe someone communicating with a group of people to come up with a plan to accomplish something
that you cannot even think of a way to describe such a thing without the negative connotation demonstrates what wikipedia is being accused of (which you're apparently blind to)
Let's assume the 2020 election was illegally stolen. What should Trump have done?
What he initially did: make his case in court, where he had the opportunity to show evidence of vote tampering or other forms of fraud significant enough to change the outcome of the election. It was his right to do that, and it's good that we allow it in our justice system. After he lost all these cases, he should have conceded and let it be. Instead he continued to pursue hanging onto the office via other means with much less legal justification behind them.
The contingent/alternative electors were appointed before he lost all of those court cases and their appeals. If they had not been, they would have missed the deadline for appointing electors and he would have lost even if the courts ruled in a way that would make him the winner. If you think court cases should have the power to affect the outcome even after that deadline, that implies support for appointing the "fake electors" (or for the more extreme measure of trying to outright ignore the deadlines and appoint them after the fact).
There's a reason Gore's lawyers were considering doing the same thing in 2000 before the Supreme Court rendered it moot. The whole complaint about the "fake electors" seems to me like something people ended up focusing on because it was easier to use as a pretext for prosecution of him and the electors themselves, because the thing he actually did wrong (be a conspiracy theorist who falsely believed the election was stolen) isn't illegal.
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Okay, so if the courts refused to look at evidence, and even refuse to put a statutorily required hearing to see that evidence onto the court schedule (e.g., in the case of the Georgia election contest), then still he should do nothing else?
He should just allow the illegal election be stolen and allow the criminals who stole it to gain power and wreak further havoc on the country?
Using the process explicitly defined in the Constitution of the United States to contest electoral counts from states who unconstitutionally and illegally conducted their elections resulting in fraudulent outcomes does have plenty of legal justification behind them.
I don't believe the fake electors plan falls inside of that explicitly defined process. The memos and testimony we have now show:
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Very well, you may be a centrist, I may have misjudged the validity of your centrist card. You're just a different one from me. But I still stand by the fact that many people in the forum may agree with me but not you. The vice versa may also be true.
I just also want to put out there that I do specifically know people who claim to be centrists but always align on the leftist position. I'm guessing they do this to try to gain cred with people like me. I can't say if you are that or not, because I haven't seen your track record.
Sorry, but I just absolutely disagree with you here. Never ever use the phrase "devise a scheme" unless they're Snidely Whiplash. For reporting on real world events you say he "planned to" or "was alleged to" or about a hundred other obviously neutral ways. Let actions speak for themselves on neutral sources. "Devise a scheme" is loaded loaded language.
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