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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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The refusal of Dems to say "okay we won but let's change things so everyone is more comfortable next time" may be the single most important thing behind the future death of America.

I feel like that might be overstating it, though I have no real strong argument for anything else being a more important thing other than maybe AI being the one most important thing behind the future death of [all nations]. But it's certainly an important point, and I'm not sure why other Dems don't get this, other than hubris, ego, and blindness by hatred. It seems obvious to me that, for my party to be the party that actually deserves to win, it needs to actually be better in some meaningful sense than the other party, and for them to be better in any meaningful sense requires having enough humility to open oneself to attacks of cheating and fraud and other bad things, taking those seriously, and correcting ourselves based on that, especially when they come from our opponents whom we've judged as being evil or whatever. This is abusable, but also, the reverse is also far more abusable.

Though the saying "the way you do anything is the way you do everything" isn't strictly true in every case, I do believe that when it comes to ideological thinking, it's almost always true. The only way we can have any confidence that our proposed policies are truly better than the other guys' proposed policies - instead of merely policies that we've convinced ourselves is better - is by coming to those policies in a humble, self-critical way (necessary, not sufficient, though), which we can only have any confidence we did if we also treat political attacks from our enemies in a humble, self-critical way. The idea of crushing my enemies in order to forward policies that I've genuinely convinced myself is better than the other guy's just because I genuinely consider the other guys evil seems just completely obviously far more evil than that to me.

I feel like that might be overstating it, though I have no real strong argument for anything else being a more important thing other than maybe AI being the one most important thing behind the future death of [all nations].

My pitch here is that the worst about Trump is and always has been the way that people respond to him. The response concerns about elections created an cavalcade of disasters - selling out objectivity and professionalism to oppose Trump, BLM Riots and the inequality in response to Jan 6, accepting the way that tech and public health put fingers on scales (and that includes governmental agencies messing with the election), media collusion, the tremendous failure that was the Biden administration (and the way that the administration should be the biggest scandal in the history of American politics and just isn't). All of these things are about Trump, but second run is the place that most generated some of them.

America in the mind of many isn't really a democracy anymore after that election and I think it's going to be a long time before the loser accepts the results again.