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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   22942 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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How did we lose these moral antibodies? Best I can think of is that they adapted to the busybodies from the right, which were more church/establishment coded, than the left-flavored ones we have now.

We didn't lose them. 2010s wokeness won against considerable opposition, including opposition from other forms of leftism. (2016 Bernie was the less-woke candidate). The question is "Why did 2010s wokeness overcome the antibodies when 1990s PC couldn't?"

There are a few obvious stories (and I have no idea what the relevant contributions are):

  • It really was academia. 1990s PC lost in most places, but they won in certain parts of the academy, and used their academic platform to indoctrinate a future generation of elites.
  • The Sailer/Hannania theory - long-term culture change caused by the normalisation of anti-discrimination compliance activity in universities and workplaces. People in leadership roles in the 1990s had grown up in a world where anti-discrimination law was new and felt like an outside imposition. Power leadership roles in the 2010s had grown up in a world where of course it was illegal to mistreat members of protected groups.
  • The people who should hold the line on far-left idiocy (namely the establishment centre-left) can't because Hilary Clinton goes full wokestupid in the course of attacking Bernie from the left on cultural issues in 2016.
  • Social media made everyone dumber and more susceptible to bad ideas. It also enabled a new type of pile-on, where a random small business can find itself on the receiving end of several thousand requests to fire an employee. Jon Ronson published So You've Been Publicly Shamed in 2015 and about half the shamings he is talking about are social media pileons on randos whose unwoke behaviour went viral.

The question is "Why did 2010s wokeness overcome the antibodies when 1990s PC couldn't?"

Policy Starvation.

Politics runs on hope. "Hope" was the theme that won Obama the White House. People organize politically because they hope to secure better outcomes; having so organized, if those better outcomes are not secured, obviously the previous political organization didn't work and you need to try something else. Blues expected things to improve significantly when Obama replaced Bush in 2008. Six years later in 2014, it was pretty obvious that the current set of Progressive policies weren't delivering sufficient progress, and so Blues collectively pushed for more radical policies.

Feminism and race were two of the most prominent drivers of Social Justice as an ascendant ideology, and both seem like strong examples of policy starvation. There was a really good article I would dearly like to relocate that talked about the detente established around the turn of the century between blacks and whites, wherein Whites would help improve conditions for Blacks, and Blacks would stop calling Whites racist. Well, what do you do when, after a decade or more of this, conditions for Blacks haven't measurably improved? Likewise for women: previous waves of feminism rewrote the social contract between the sexes on a purely consent-based framework, and yet lots and lots of women still feel like they're being violated. The only category for violation their model recognizes is of consent, and so they model the problem as a rape epidemic, and frame their new policies to match.

In both cases, Social Justice went the way it did because people found that their current policies couldn't sustain hope in a better future, and so turned to more radical alternatives. I guess I'd say that this bolsters rather than replaces the stories you listed.

  • The Academy probably was not aiming for 2014 Social Justice specifically, but policy starvation forced them to abandon left-neoliberalism in favor of something more radical.
  • Anti-discrimination law didn't work. Outcomes for Blacks remained quite bad. Therefore, it became a floor rather than a ceiling, and policy starvation forced those concerned to aim for something more radical.
  • The establishment center-left couldn't hold the line because their credibility was already burned; they'd been ruling for at least the last six years; you can't promise hope and change when your government and its consequences are why people are hoping for change.
  • Social Media offered what appeared to be new (and more radical!) methods for solving problems: national-level mob action, for one obvious one. These methods hadn't yet been discredited, so people could hope in them.

Of these, it seems to me that Social Media is the closest to being a genuinely novel development rather than an incremental evolution of what came before. Smartphones and related technology radically reshaped the media ecosystem in a very short period of time, and in a way that heavily favored upstarts and rabble-rousers and heavily disadvantaged the establishment.

1990s PC didn’t really ‘lose’. It experienced a backlash from just after the LA riots (which, occurring in a big, wealthy, progressive city that was the home of the entertainment industry, turned off many white liberals from the most radical proposals of that age), the OJ trial, and the extremely high levels of violent crime in the early 1990s (this is an underappreciated reason; white liberals were far more likely to be mugged in NYC in 1992 than they were in 2014) that lasted through to around 2001.

After that 9/11 froze the nascent culture war into a weird stasis that lasted for a few years where you had a surge in Bush II era symbolic patriotism, Dixie chicks cancellation and so on. Then the housing crisis, Obama election and great recession took a lot of oxygen out of the culture war for a while and it took until 2012/13/14 for things to heat up again. The actual original backlash was in the 70s to early 80s at the end of the civil rights era when courts blocked things like quota-based affirmative action (in 1977 I think).

A thought I had over a decade ago is that my generation (elder millennial) grew up with the notion "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross" being fed to us so consistently and ubiquitously that the notion that it could come while burning the American flag and destroying the cross never even accidentally crossed our minds. Thing is, of course, we were also force fed the idea of challenging power structures and rebelling against the hegemon, which would necessarily involve challenging such notions that we grew up swimming in, and it used to confuse me why so many people seemed not only to refuse to take this obvious step but to be downright hostile to it.

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