site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This is an interesting trend in history, but i think another way to look at it is why its happening, and why certain societies and not others?

First and foremost, this doesn't seem to follow geo politically. It seems to be a phenomenon that's unique to specific societies, like the US, and this "progress" is not uniform nor takes place everywhere.

Most of east Asia is much more "racist" & "sexist" than the west. China is insanely oppressive and controlling, they are not democratic in the slightest. Out of wedlock births are few and are stigmatized in those societies, they do not allow gay marriage.

Ukraine is currently "losing" its war with Russia.

What would be the morally correct position on the Israel-Palestine conflict? Can we say that history is bending towards Palestine, Israel, or a 2 state solution?

The Taliban taking over in Afghanistan.

There is a loss of privacy & general alienation that comes with modern technology.

Why does this only happen in certain countries and not others? If its about morality, why is history permiting some "immorality" in some places and not others. What makes progressives such a cultural power house in the states?

It’s due to the nature of social progress and western responses. De Maistre defined how the revolution would be defeated 200 years ago; not through a revolution against, the Orleanist solution that failed not only in France but with Franco’s shogunate and which is at least unsuccessful in Iran, but through the opposite of a revolution, adaptatory and distributed change which coalesces into its own antithesis in a reverse dialectic, gradually restoring the civilization of the west.

The western right by and large does not realize this, and does not realize how to do this; this despite the distributists completing the system of de Maistre’s counter-revolution in an inculturated form nearly a century ago. In east Asia, things are different, as the embedded Confucianism of these societies naturally generates its own antithesis to revolution, resultant in the dialectic restoring their tradition passively. But we’re talking about the west, here, where Confucius is a strange foreign import of made up wisdom to sell fortune cookies. Things are different, and that’s ok.

What can you do? You can join real traditional communities and contribute to rebuilding functional villages which, by their very nature, will seek to confederate, turning into a standardization feedback loop that rebuilds a healthy society over the centuries. Quick and cheap doesn’t work; neither right wing Leninist vanguard parties nor neo-orleanism can push the process through, although political accommodationism to this societal rebuilding is probably a good thing.

How are you using distributism here? You seem to mean something smaller scale or more grass roots than I am accustomed to.

I am used to seeing distributism proposed as a full-scale alternative to socialism and capitalism. Distributism in that sense seems unachievable in an industrial or post-industrial society; it will eventually reduce to capitalism or socialism, depending on how you treat the accumulation of capital. A small-scale approach is far more interesting.

Distributism as a full scale alternative to socialism/capitalism is selling a bill of goods, and more of a feature of neodistributism than chesterbelloc(indeed continental contemporaries attempting this saw themselves as doing something different).

But while neo-distributists have nothing useful to say about running a whole economy, their discussion around the conditions pertaining to small scale capitalism are very interesting. And that smaller scale refugia is necessary to build the basis for a societal rebuild. There are entire industries dominated by cultural enemies which cannot simply be dispensed from, even as their alt version never needs to rise above the ideologically driven niche- and ideologically driven niche capitalism at small scale is the version of distributism advocated by most of the neo-distributists, with the Belloc version rural by necessity- unlike Medaille’s theories.

You've lost me with the references to particular schools and thinkers. I can't promise to pick it up right away, but I'm likely to have some more reading time soon – is there a source you'd suggest starting with?

Hilaire Belloc was a British Catholic reactionary intellectual from the interwar era- in other words, from the same milieu and basic worldview as JRR Tolkien, GK Chesterton(with whom he cooperated on his vision of distributism), etc, and his vision shares the expected blindspots of such thinkers- that is, it's not very well suited to modern industrial society, because it's agrarian, ruralist, and asystematic in approach due to the aim of preserving traditional, and by that point more or less dead, social structures. John C Medaille is an academic economist or philosopher or something, it's hard to tell(he doesn't have an advanced degree and the University of Dallas plays kind of fast and loose with the separation between the two), who attempts to bastardize the theory into a modern industrial society compatible version, which of course in practice would at broad enough scale probably reduce into vanguard party socialism. He does, however, put together an interesting framework for small scale and less profit-oriented businesses to compete in the modern USA, and can point to a few small scale successes, mostly on the scale of reviving main street in singular small towns and the like.

Where this gets interesting is applying his ideas to the sorts of industries which hold back attempts at building genuine parallel societies, a la the Gab endgoal. Like it or not a parallel society in the 2020's USA needs an alternative to big tech, hollywood, etc, and 'just be Amish' is unworkable. The traditionalist project can only succeed by forming a parallel society which takes over the American mainstream through natural population growth, like what mohammedans are doing to some Euro countries. Ideologically driven niche coordination problems tacking into the winds of economic rationality are literally the problem. Once that precondition is solved and begins achieving broader adoption it generates a positive feedback loop which of its own volition begins to purify the stratum embracing it of modernist influences, and superior social function increases the appeal still further, sort of like how the gradient of Jewish practice in Israel drags the entire country increasingly to the right. Yes it takes time and needs kinks ironed out but traditional structures can only come about through traditional, not revolutionary, means.

Like it or not a parallel society in the 2020's USA needs an alternative to big tech, hollywood, etc, and 'just be Amish' is unworkable

Being Amish also will not be workable in a long term.

Amish existence relies on big pile of unprincipled extemptions from the system with dubious constitutional legality, that were granted long ago, and could be revoked at any time when TPTB decide that Amish are problems that needs to be solved (before it grows into unmanageable size as in Israel).

It will not come as bolt from clear sky, Amish have rather good PR among normies, so to do it, full propaganda artillery preparation would be needed. The best angle to go about it would be animal rights - Amish attituda to animals is fully trad, with all what this means.

edit: link

The reason thé haredi size is unmanageable is that they do not do productive work(they live off welfare fraud). The Amish do not do this, they work to pay their own bills.

Now there are certain jobs thé Amish do not do. They’re never going to be most of the world’s strippers or tech workers. But at the end of the day society really doesn’t need all that many of those people. It does, however, have a blue collar laborer shortage.

The Amish are pacifists. What happens the next time there is a world war and you need to draft a significant fraction of your young male population? Civilian Public Service only goes so far.