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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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Interesting, but in practice this would be super hard and cause major problems for some institutions.

How are you going to get a 50:50 split in the police or military? Do you really want aome of these organisations to reflect the voter base, rather than the base of people who want to work in that field?

My understanding is that the military is already fairly split by voting preferences among active-duty military, e.g. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2020/08/31/as-trumps-popularity-slips-in-latest-military-times-poll-more-troops-say-theyll-vote-for-biden/.com

In general, in all nations, the military is a fantastic candidate for balanced ideology, since coups require the support of the military in 100% of cases (the support of the media is also essential).

But if the military is always split relative to the nation's voting preferences, then it's really hard to take over the military as a part of a coup of the government. It's a great way to protect democracy.

And regarding the police (and ICE), a great way to get the left to stop attacking law enforcement so much (and to hopefully improve community relations and improve the skewed perspective most leftists have about law enforcement), would be to get more leftists working in law enforcement. I'm sure there would be some negative effects, too, but there are some big major positives about ideological balance in law enforcement.

Do you really want aome of these organisations to reflect the voter base, rather than the base of people who want to work in that field?

This is a good question, and I think that ideological fairness should be assessed in the same way that things like gender fairness or racial fairness are often assessed: that as long as you can show that the workplace is not hostile, and that no minimally qualified candidates were rejected, then if there simply aren't enough qualified leftist/rightist candidates that applied, then it's fine if there is a resulting imbalance.

The reality is that a lot of media/academic/government workplaces are massively hostile to conservatives, and a lot of conservative talent is not being admitted nor hired.

would be to get more leftists working in law enforcement.

No I agree that this would solve the problem you're describing, and I think it's an interesting perspective I hadn't heard of before.

But operationally, how do you encourage e.g. lefties to go to police academy or righties to go to the department of fairness and equality (or whatever).

Institutions bust their ass to get e.g. women into the police and they can't really make it happen.

It's another good question.

Since I come from a leftist activist background, I basically fall back on the types of suggestions that leftists make to increase "representation" in other areas:

-Advertise more in those spaces

-Increase representation in the media

-Reduce any hostility in the workplace for those kinds of people, if you reasonably can

-Make them aware that they have legal rights

-...and if all else fails, simply accept that if people don't want to do those jobs, even when fully aware of the opportunities, then so be it. People can't be forced to do things they don't want to do. But you can at least make the opportunities available and raise awareness.