site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6157 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Has nobody brought up the Marjorie Taylor Greene thing? I guess I'll jump on that grenade.

After break with Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene will resign

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who rose to prominence as one of President Trump's biggest defenders and recently became one of his biggest critics, is leaving Congress.

In some respects, it seems like the current GOP coalition is beginning to fracture. Up until recently, MTG was a high profile face in the MAGA movement. The fact that she is bowing out seems to represent something of a sea change in DC politics.

Both parties seem to be having problems, and to me, at least, it's fascinating that the problems seem to have a lot of overlap. In no particular order, both the DNC and GOP seem to be having a lot of internal problems with the following:

  1. Israel
  2. Economic policy - particularly healthcare
  3. Nazis
  4. Epstein

In some respects, it almost feels like a realignment might be creeping up on us. Is anyone else getting a similar feeling? Are there any alternatives that fit current events better?

Are there any alternatives that fit current events better?

For a few years now I've been predicting the populist conspiracy theorist realignment where maga and the DSA left join up and the technocratic democrats absorb the never trump republicans. These rifts seem to be where roughly all the actual energy is. Of course I might be biased because I'm putting most of the people I most disagree with in one party that I can efficiently oppose.

I'm not saying it will never happen, but the technocratic democrats crave the validation of leftists way too much for that to be feasible in the short term. They might get the nevertrumpers to permanently sit in the cuck chair.

Marjorie Taylor Greene was brave. She was freethinking. She was also stupid.

There's a great Substack article that's been framing my thinking lately. One of the defining features of populism is revolt against cognitive elites.

The crucial feature of common sense, as Frank Luntz helpfully observed, is that it “doesn’t requires any fancy theories; it is self-evidently correct.” (One can think of this as the primary point of demarcation between the people and the elites – the people have “common sense,” whereas elites subscribe to “fancy theories.”) This distinction, in turn, does not arise from the ideological content of a belief system, but rather from the form of cognition employed in its production.

The problem is that one cannot run a modern government without "fancy theories" that conflict with "common sense". This creates a dynamic in which the easiest strategy for a politician is to:

  1. Campaign on red-meat populist issues: cheaper groceries, lower rent, fewer [immigrants/bigots] walking around on the streets, and then:

  2. Govern like a captured technocrat, because you don't actually want to destroy society.

You don't need an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology to notice the tension between the two points above. Frustrated voters respond by demanding candidates become even more populist, and populist politicians respond by focusing on certain key issues

This reservoir of discontent creates the opportunity that is exploited by populist politicians. Democratic political systems are fairly responsive to public opinion, but they are still systems of elite rule, and so there are specific issues on which the people genuinely have not been listened to, no matter how angry or upset they got. This creates an incentive to do an end-run around elites, and around institutions dominated by elites (e.g. traditional political parties), in order to tap into this fund of resentment, positioning oneself as the champion of the people. What is noteworthy about populists is that they do not champion all of the interests of the people, but instead focus on the specific issues where there is the greatest divergence between common sense and elite opinion, in order to champion the views of the people on these issues.

Right now, there is a vast gulf between popular opinion of neoclassical economics and Jews, and elite opinion of neoclassical economics and Jews. Solve for the equilibrium.

I don't really have an opinion on his overarching theory, but I think he overstates the case against populism or I suppose fails to consider the case against elite intellectual consensus seriously enough. Take his subsection about crime. Sure there are studies that punishment doesn't deter crime that well. But, is punishment actually the purpose of the justice system, perhaps the populist thinks so. Perhaps they are intuiting longer prison sentences will deter crime, and are incorrect. But, if thats the case, the populist has gotten himself to the correct opinion (tough on crime) for the wrong reason, while the intellectual has tricked himself into a bad position (soft on crime), by not considering what actually matters, that being public safety.

Take, for example this case of the CTA arson attack that is taking the nation by storm. The facts are fairly straightforward, a man with 70+ prior arrests and 15 prior convictions, including a felony arson just 5 years ago, beat a social worker so badly her retina detached. Instead of granting a detention petition (itself a new creation because Illinois repealed cash bail in favor of an arcane, and time consuming first appearance court set of procedures), the judge released the Felon with an GPS bracelet. That was subsequently removed by another judge just a few months later, and then the previously convicted violent felon with a pending felony charge poured a liquid on a woman on the train and lit her on fire. This man doesn't need to be "punished by society" he needs to be "separated from society" preferably permanently. However, elite opinion on crime has made that result in the State of Illinois, basically impossible.

And we can repeat this problem over a vast array of other social policies where elite opinion differs greatly from populist opinion. You have the trans issue where elites convinced themselves that someone's subjective opinion about themself was more important than looking at their genes and junk. You have the Joe Biden decline where for years they convinced themselves a cancer riddled (as we now know) 80+ year old was just fine as POTUS because he made one semi-coherent angry rant.

And there are other issues I'd be less stridently anti-elite, but simply would point out that they misunderstand the populists because they focus on the slogans instead of what people are actually feeling. "They took er jobs" and "They are eating the dogs" are not factual assertions, they are distillations of vibes. Lots of people know guys who can't work construction anymore without speaking Spanish, immigrants do make housing less affordable simply by the numbers, trade has made winners and losers domestically and has caused us to have critical vulnerabilities to key industries in times of global instability, and they probably were eating the dogs (but also, like defrauding medicaid and every other welfare system we have)! Climate change is another one, perhaps elite consensus is right and its happening, and its man made, very few elites seem bothered by the question: Do we even care?

And in the end, thats why I think the article is wrongheaded. The failure of elites to come to the same conclusions as populists is not simply that the populist is thinking on a less abstract level, it is also that the elite has focused on a specific part of the question that satisfies them, but perhaps quite often isn't the relevant part of the question at all.

I can see the point the article is trying to make (US tariff policy is pretty dumb, populism has its bad and overly conspiratorial elements) but also disagree a lot with how it makes the point:

Because of this, people who actually study behavioural change, by keeping records, tracking performance, and analyzing the relation to reward/punishment, wind up developing beliefs that contradict common sense. This is true not just of social scientists, but even animal trainers. They all tend to agree that reward is at least as effective as punishment, and in some cases more so. This generates an important décalage between expert opinion and public culture.

It is not difficult to see how this difference in view creates a state of affairs that can, in turn, be exploited for political gain in a democracy. The expert view on punishment tends to percolate out, influencing the behaviour of educational elites (and others who are inclined to defer to expert opinion). This gives rise to a set of views and practices among those elites, such as permissive parenting, abolition of corporal punishment in schools, a less punitive approach to crime, and opposition to capital punishment, which are basically out of sync with the views of the majority. This in turn leads the broader public to think that certain persistent social problems, such as juvenile delinquency or urban disorder, are a consequence of various institutions (not just the criminal justice system, but schools and parents as well) having become insufficiently punitive. The solution, from their perspective, is an exercise of straightforward common sense – all we need to do is “get tough” with offenders. The resistance of elites to these obvious truths is a sign that there is something wrong with them (e.g. they have been seduced by “fancy theories,” become divorced from reality, etc.).

Unfortunately, there are many cases in which the people are right to distrust elites. Analytical reasoning is sometimes a poor substitute for intuitive cognition. There is a vast literature detailing the hubris of modern rationalism. Elites are perfectly capable of succumbing to faddish theories (and as we have seen in recent years, they are susceptible to moral panics). But in such cases, it is not all that difficult to find other elites willing to take up the cause and oppose those intellectual fads. In specific domains, however, a very durable elite consensus has developed. This is strongest in areas where common sense is simply wrong, and so anyone who studies the evidence, or is willing to engage in analytical reasoning, winds up sharing the elite view. In these areas, the people find it practically impossible to find allies among the cognitive elite. This generates anger and resentment, which grows over time.

We tried the less punitive approach to crime and sure enough crime has soared since the low-points in the 50s. It's self-evident that if you get rid of the criminals, they can't do any crime. Whereas, if you let them out onto the streets after 30, 40, 70 arrests, they're fully capable of setting random women on fire in a subway.

Europe is run by elites much more than America and they've fucked everything up bigtime. Very smart, sophisticated people in the EU and yet they've managed to crush innovation and industry with their tax and energy policies, neuter the strategic relevance of Europe (historically, the strongest player in the world). British governance has been horrendous. Judges wrecked Birmingham's garbage disposal system. The Ajax armoured vehicle is so useless it's making soldiers sick, it's actually causing casualties to the operators. HS2 bat tunnels. Police clearance rates have fallen to negligible levels in fields like theft.

Elites are often terrible at actually governing, see also the painstakingly meritocratic Confucian officials who led Qing into national disaster.

There's a role for elites and genuine need for expertise but by no means should they be trusted unconditionally to have even a basic level of understanding of their 'areas of expertise'. It could just be Lysenko/Freud/humours theory garbage. If your doctor starts talking about the balance between bile and phlegm and fails to cure you with the leeches, it's very natural to get suspicious of him! That's what populism is, even if it doesn't necessarily know better. Elites need to do better to regain the social contract where they get status and wealth, in exchange for good leadership.

What a garbage article.

Unfortunately, there are many cases in which the people are right to distrust elites. Analytical reasoning is sometimes a poor substitute for intuitive cognition. There is a vast literature detailing the hubris of modern rationalism. Elites are perfectly capable of succumbing to faddish theories (and as we have seen in recent years, they are susceptible to moral panics). But in such cases, it is not all that difficult to find other elites willing to take up the cause and oppose those intellectual fads. In specific domains, however, a very durable elite consensus has developed. This is strongest in areas where common sense is simply wrong, and so anyone who studies the evidence, or is willing to engage in analytical reasoning, winds up sharing the elite view. In these areas, the people find it practically impossible to find allies among the cognitive elite. This generates anger and resentment, which grows over time.

This is completely false - there is no counter-elite in Washington fighting against wasteful foreign wars, there is no counter-elite fighting against immigration policies that enrich the wealthy by driving down wages and driving up asset prices, there is no counter-elite fighting against H1-b visa abuse, there is no counter-elite fighting against omnipresent warrantless surveillance, there is no counter-elite fighting against obsequious support for foreign nations that the majority of the population dislike. Where is the counter-elite arguing against illegal immigrant farm labor, a policy which Trump has explicitly come out and supported? "Common sense" is completely, 100% correct in these cases.

The elite, cognitive or no, act in their own interests and those interests are not the same as that of the populace.

The problem with demanding political correctness in speech, and punishing or ostracizing those who fail, is that it turns every conversation into a Stroop test, allowing elites the opportunity to exhibit conspicuous self-control.

No, this isn't the problem - the problem is that this language policing makes it impossible for the lower classes to object to the policies responsible for their impoverishment and elite enrichment. They're not upset because they aren't smart enough to play the language game (plenty of them can and do), but because the entire purpose of this language game is to deny them the vocabulary to describe their problems. Illegal immigration directly contributes to the impoverishment of the wage-earning class, and so their opposition to it is considered low-class and problematic because it comes from them. The reason that this system is breaking down is not that these people hate thinking, but because the failures of the policies endorsed by these "cognitive elites" are finally reaching the more privileged classes. Unemployment among people with degrees is skyrocketing, and tech degrees are now far less capable of getting someone into a good career - not because the people getting them are stupid, but because the policies of outsourcing, infinity indians and overt discrimination against men.

But to leave the article aside and return to your post...

The problem is that one cannot run a modern government without "fancy theories" that conflict with "common sense". This creates a dynamic in which the easiest strategy for a politician is to:

No, this isn't the case at all. These "fancy theories" are just so much squid ink deployed to mask the obvious underlying incentives - widespread H1-B abuse is a policy with very clear winners and losers. You don't actually need infinite immigration to run a modern government! What, exactly, is the fancy theory that justifies insider trading on the stock market by members of congress? That justifies immense corruption in military procurement (what's the fancy theory justifying 8000 dollar plastic wastebins)? You don't need a mass welfare scam run for the benefit of intertribal Somalian warfare, but that's exactly what all those "fancy theories" have produced. I'd actually go even further - when the democrats passed laws which meant the government provided vast amounts of money to their captive NGOs and political influence operations these actions are entirely understandable through the lens of common sense. It isn't that people are angry about these policies because they don't understand them, they are angry about these policies because they are directly injured by them!

What's curious is that there was (and is, though less so now) an influential group of cognitive elites that themselves revolted cognitive elites: Hayekian free marketers. They'd rail against "social engineering" with theories that are difficult for the lay person to grasp. And there's indeed a naively realist technocracy implicitly buried within populism that assumes various social issues can be easily solved. "Just ban X Y, Z..." attribute quite alot of highly cognitive, problem-solving power to do good to the technocratic elites.

The difference is the popular opinion of neoclassical economics doesn't affect how well neoclassical economics works; it only affects how well your country works. Whereas if our resident Jew-posters get their opinions enshrined in law it very much affects the Jews.

There was also some reporting by Punchbowl claiming other Republican members may resign as well. The House is currently 219-213 in favor of Republicans. With Democrats expected to win 2 upcoming special elections for currently empty seats and Republicans expected to win an upcoming special election for a currently filled seat. With those results and down MTG the House would stand at 218-215. Republicans would only be able to afford to lose one vote on any legislation and four resignations would give Democrats the majority.

I think Trump is holding the Republican coalition together. I do think that a lot of the recent obsession (Dreher etc) with the “groypers” is somewhat overdone - which isn’t to say they aren’t a major force - but there are divisions. There was a lot of triumphalism on the right this year, some of it overestimates the hatred for the entire left platform, which was more about the total cavalcade of woke stuff than every individual point. A lot of the particular rightist beliefs taken for granted even on regular trad (not dissident right) twitter are not hugely popular or widespread among many groups who vote Republican. Violent crime rates are also falling in many places, and suddenly rising crime rates from 2020-2023 was a very real and powerful driver of Republican gain in vote share among all demographics.

I do think that a lot of the recent obsession (Dreher etc) with the “groypers” is somewhat overdone -

somewhat?! it’s social relevance is completely made up controlled opposition. It’s exactly like Qanon. I never met a single person on the right who subscribed to it, yet somehow from the left and media it was everywhere. The groyper scare is a completely astroturfed attempt to police and taboo/discredit certain opinions on the right

I've met both. Neither of them were people who had any chance of being popular but they exist.

Yes, of course they exist. What I said is made up is the 'social relevance'.

I think you're making the same kind of mistake a lot of people on the left made when they assumed that having people banned from society for publicly admitting to being racists meant that there weren't anymore racists in society. Something like 80-90% of republican congressional staffers are groypers or deep-cover groypers, and their numbers are heavily concentrated amongst right wing youth (there aren't many 50 year olds watching Nick Fuentes).

When people get evicted from polite society for revealing that they're groypers, you don't actually create a society free of groypers - you create a society where you can no longer trust that any given individual is or isn't a groyper, which is very different (and in my opinion worse).

Qanon was very real in my area. Local town square had weird little protests for a few months with people waving qanon slogans.

At a certain point, republicans embracing(fully embracing) gibs and machine politics is inevitable. These policies lose because they're tied to the losing side of 80-20 issues about the police, race, gender, etc. But we're past the point when republicans will inevitably embrace handouts and try to win over political machines. They're already starting on the process and this stuff is just too popular when you've already lost a huge chunk of the donor class.

Is MTG all that important to Republicans? I haven't seen much than a passing, "huh."

Marjorie Taylor Greene had an average 24% Approval Rating among Republicans. Most Republicans didn't recognize her name in a poll:

Most who were asked about Greene said that they had no opinion of the congresswoman. Republicans were less likely to be aware of or have an opinion about Greene than Democrats, with 64 percent of Democrats weighing in compared to only 44 percent of Republicans.

Greene is more important to Democrats to show how crazy Republicans are, than she is to Republicans who largely don't think about her at all.

Trump doesn’t like her, and Trump retains the support of much of the public (it can’t be overstated how many of his fans aren’t obsessively online about the Epstein thing, even if they’re vaguely in favor of disclosure when polled).

Most Republicans didn't recognize her name in a poll

Now there's an interesting question. What percentage of sitting congressmen could beat 44%, do you think?

In some respects, it almost feels like a realignment might be creeping up on us. Is anyone else getting a similar feeling?

I get a similar feeling, but sometimes I feel like the Dixiecrat realignment never fully resolved and we've been dealing with it (Goldwater, Reagan, Gingrich, Trump, etc.) ever since. The movement from Dems = labor and Rep = management/bankers/owners into whatever we have now never seems to have reached a stable equilibrium.

We are also dealing with the fall of the soviet union. The elite were terrified of ending up like the tsar. The current elite is self entitled and is't worried about an uprising i the same way. Competition between the Soviets and America for who had the best system kept the elite more loyal to the populace. The current political elite give some symbolic issues to their base and then pander to elite positions.

In conditions of full suffrage, there aren't enough management/bankers/owners to sustain an entire political party by themselves. They/we tend to cluster in a particular party, and pull off a certain faction of the middle/lower class to make up the numbers. So you can have aristos + loyal yeomen against the middle class, or the Wall Street + blacks + LGBT alliance, or the bankers + tech + based alliance, etc. But these tend not to be stable long term.

In conditions of full suffrage

This might be the key difference that I hadn't thought about it. However, even after full suffrage and that division fracturing for presidential elections, Dems basically controlled the house from FDR until Gingrich. That probably hid some of the realignment that was going on.

But these tend not to be stable long term.

The donor class of Team R still being management/bankers/owners who desire Big Line Go Up Forever while the base is increasingly anti-immigrant chuds (it's not a boo-light, I'm one of them) is definitely not stable.

The donor class of Team R still being management/bankers/owners who desire Big Line Go Up Forever while the base is increasingly anti-immigrant chuds (it's not a boo-light, I'm one of them) is definitely not stable.

A stable alliance between the business segment of the GOP and the anti-immigrant chuds is entirely possible in the near to medium term, if it dawns upon the business segment of the GOP that a large portion of immigration is dysgenic—whether it be through legal or illegal immigrants and their Birthright Citizenship children—and could compromise the ability of Big Line Go Up Forever. Or if even Big Line Go Up for Now: Pocket Go Evermore Thin Fivever as more of take-home pay gets chomped by NPV of net-tax transfers.

The if is, admittedly, doing a lot of heavy lifting there. People can remain oblivious longer than they can remain solvent.

A stable alliance between the business segment of the GOP and the anti-immigrant chuds is entirely possible in the near to medium term, if it dawns upon the business segment of the GOP that a large portion of immigration is dysgenic—whether it be through legal or illegal immigrants and their Birthright Citizenship children—and could compromise the ability of Big Line Go Up Forever. Or if even Big Line Go Up for Now: Pocket Go Evermore Thin Fivever as more of take-home pay gets chomped by NPV of net-tax transfers.

I think to get such an alliance you'd have to offer the business segment something in exchange for losing some of their workforce -- relaxed labor, environmental, and building regulations. Problem is, that's not only outside the Overton window, it's not what the anti-immigrant chuds want. They're basically like 80s Democrats, only anti-immigrant.

I feel like it is worth pointing out that this would absolutely be better for the businesses in question. Microsoft have embraced H1-B visas and Infinity Indians with open arms... and look at what's happened to their products. These policies aren't actually good for businesses at all in the long run, but they are good for executives who get quarterly performance bonuses and are incentivised to jump ship with a golden parachute before the consequences of eating the seed corn actually show up. I don't think these people are just morons who don't know how to run businesses, I think they're responding rationally to the incentive structures around them, incentive structures which are ultimately bad for the businesses in question.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats