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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   13073 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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Those ideals being... what, exactly?

Liberty, Truth, Justice, the American Way, Human Rights, Democracy, Transgender For Everyone...

Does it have any resemblance of a common culture

This what Scott Alexander coined the phrase "Blue Tribe" to refer to. American culture is not the Red Tribe. Plus, to be honest, I think there's just a general failure to model their adversaries' preferences on the part of right-wingers, where the weirdest, most idiosyncratic are assumed to stand in for the whole. Libs also like football, cars, car commercials featuring George Washington running over the British, and so on.

you're hard pressed to find a group of similar scale that doesn't have such contempt and outright hate.

Most of them? The takeover of the American conservative movement by people who hate America and Americans is fairly recent. While they're playing on pre-existing sentiments, the severity of the rot comes from the top.

The problem with "far more likely to be critical" is that they seem to never find one godforsaken occasion to be positive... It became too declassee to think that one's country and culture is something to be loved instead of apologized for.

This is another failure to model liberals' beliefs/preferences, or why they have an issue with vulgar tribalism. It is not that there is nothing to be proud of - libs are happy to celebrate* the space program, WW2, the abolition of slavery, rock and roll, the civil rights movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US Olympic team etc... The disconnect is that they feel conservatives want to be proud of things that are shameful or whitewash sordid elements of the past.

*this list is not meant to be exhaustive; it's just stuff that popped into my head

The actual question is akin to the one in that HBO Show with the Dumb and Dumber guy. If you cant answer it while referencing people who have been here longer than your ancestors, they better have been here a long time ago and you better agree with them.

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