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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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I don't think the US culture war is Law vs Chaos - the "Red = Law, Blue = Chaos" and the "Red = Chaos, Blue = Law" narratives are roughly equally easy to write. "The real problem is that the Blues want total control of everything down to your kids' innermost thoughts while the Red just want to grill" seems to be the most common narrative on the Motte and is of the Red=Chaos variety.

The Blue tribe has room for the hippies and the HR ladies, with which of those groups is winning the intra-Blue conflict switching from decade to decade. Similarly the Reds have room for the Gadsden-flag waving hillbillies and the father-knows-best authoritarians. In both cases homo sapiens hypocritus leaves space for both in the same person depending on which is convenient.

In so far as there is a deep underlying conflict behind the US culture war (mostly, it is pure tribalism), it is elves vs dwarfs. Reds think that wealth comes out of the ground and that cities are parasitic on farmers and miners, Blues (and Greys, who are just dissident Blues) think that wealth comes from the application of human ingenuity and that rural areas are parasitic on productive cities.

As a centrist and a believer in horseshoe theory, I will admit that right-left doesn't cleanly split into chaos-order, because they're orthogonal. Right and left are more flavors of how the law should be applied. The typical rightist wants the law to control culture and behavior while keeping the economy free, while the typical leftist wants to use the law to control the economy while keeping culture and behavior free. The extremists on both ends want the law to control both absolutely everything, while only differing in what form they want it to take. The opposite extreme, the maximal libertarian, wants chaos and to just let everyone fend for themselves and hope it turns out okay."

From my perspective as a centrist, I think we need balance between all of these. And for the past 50 years or so there has been too much order and not enough chaos (on average, there are exceptions here and there). So the Order people on the left and right are the villains, trying to oppress their chosen hated group (whites or non-whites depending on which side), or just genuinely trying to do the right thing but failing miserably because their authoritarian policies cause bad outcomes when pushed too far. While the chaos people are trying to make us more free and marginally improving things when they manage to gain a little ground (even if they would cause problems if they took it too far).

I'm not fully satisfied with this breakdown. I think the elf/dwarf thing also makes sense to some extent, and probably does a better job of explaining the cultural differences between right and left. But I don't think it's the true driver of the conflict. Moderate right people and moderate left people are capable of getting along and compromising with each other. And if both were laissez-faire about letting each other live their own lives then they could live next to each other in harmony. The conflict is driven by the hatred between the authoritarian right and the moderate left, and the hatred between the authoritarian left and the moderate right. Because the authoritarians won't leave the moderates alone, so they are forced to participate in the culture war whether they want to or not. The broader left-right divide is then caused WW1-style via alliances: the ally of my enemy is my enemy.

"The real problem is that the Blues want total control of everything down to your kids' innermost thoughts while the Red just want to grill" seems to be the most common narrative on the Motte and is of the Red=Chaos variety.

That's on the surface Blue=Law, Red=Neutral. Although when you combine it with "Blues want to allow trans-and-minority criminals to prey on people while Red wants them in the sex-(not-gender)-appropriate prison", you realize that no, it's not; Red sees it as being about Anarcho-Tyranny vs Ordered Liberty, and Blue does also. (Both are wrong, but IMO Blue is much wronger)