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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9287 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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And, when voting, they are going to fall somewhere between Dennis Kucinich and Mao.

Almost all recent immigrant groups have voting patterns which are far to the left of longtime populations.

Canada's different in this regard, or at least Ontario is (was?). IIRC, Indian immigrants were a big reason why Ford won again, voting for reasons that would be very legible to conservative voters.

That does raise the question of why Chinese and Indians are so far left in the United States. Naively, we might expect the opposite. India and China are far-right places. They are so far right they could fairly be called fascist or theocratic by western standards. I'll propose a couple possibilities.

  1. Indians and Chinese assimilate well and correctly recognize that leftism is the high-status choice in the US

  2. Indians and Chinese care more about racial solidarity than about other things like abortion, taxes, and crime

Perhaps it's because being far-right in China or India is the only way to achieve bare-minimum outcomes of civilization, kind of the way European governments tightened during both world wars. Those who managed to escape the bottom of the barrel wish to get what the Americans are getting in terms of social freedoms.
If they are able to be successful back home, and are well-adapted to the social expectations, there isn't really a reason to move. Servants are cheaper, the upper-crust are probably doing relatively well compared to other countries.

Without tight control of the population, these places literally start blowing up, trains derailing left and right, etc, then they just start eating each other by the thousands. Orgies and writing snarky articles about the government are not worth that risk.

In the US, the elites have been turning the dial on moral decay for decades for the fun of it, perhaps as a flex on other countries' elites as well, and yet, aside from a few hotspots of degeneracy and crime, there is a remarkable resilience of the economy, public safety...

India and China are far-right places.

What? China is a communist nation and India was explicitly ruled by socialists for most of it's modern history.

Gay representation in media is illegal in China.

  • Films with gay characters are banned and don't play in Chinese theaters.

  • Phone app games can't have characters with ambiguous genders, or effeminate men or anyone gay.

  • China has illegal gay romance stories published on websites. This is hypothetically illegal but the laws weren't enforced. Then they were. The women who write these gay romances were arrested and held in prison for long periods of time awaiting trial.

Us Americans are culture waring about trans women in combat sports. China is on a completely different level.

Their leaders are billionaires. They're whatever form of communism is rule by billionaires.

They are nationalists in the way I wish Americans were. We have a tragic deficit of nationalism. It might be terminal.

I once saw a homeless beggar in China. Two Chinese cops were standing in front of him and very kindly asking him to go away. My main complaint about American urban decay is forbidden in China. They have the will to ban it and enforce the ban.

It is hard to shoehorn everything into a simple left-right dichotomy. They like abortion and dislike economic liberalism. They aren't "right wing" in that sense. They are culturally conservative in a way some Americans would consider far right. If Republicans endorsed a fraction of Chinese state policy, it would be loudly denounced as far-right extremism.

Gay representation in media is illegal in China.

It was a problem in the USSR, too. It will probably become a problem in the West if actual leftists ever acquire real power.

I don't know if it is true, but supposedly gay Germans are very disproportionately supporters of AfD. The point being Western culture is fine with them being gay. Some other cultures not so much.

Alice Weidel is cringing thinking about what would happen to her and her domestic partner if Islamists ruled Europe. She wants her gay family to thrive. She's of course portrayed as a crazed right winger and a nazi for doing so.

This overrates the degree to which gays predict islamization. Most, as far as I know, are bog-standard mainstream progressives.

True, but gays who are not bog-standard mainstream progressives are relatively more likely to be anti-Muslim-immigration right-populists than they are to be other varieties of right-winger.

China is a quasi-fascist state. They practice state capitalism, not communism. They put Uyghurs into camps and prevent them from spreading their culture to the next generation. They are a Han ethnostate that bans nearly all immigration. Speaking on certain topics is forbidden. They execute political prisoners and harvest their organs. Need we go on?

India is a patchwork of different tribal, ethnic, and religious groups with a variety of practices that are entirely foreign to westerners including honor killings. Women are generally required to dress modestly but still face harassment when traveling alone (as any woman who has ever been to India can attest). Women are raped as punishment for the transgressions of their kin. Widows are stigmatized. Caste discrimination is rampant. People are murdered for rumored offenses against cows.

Note: this is far from a complete picture of either country, don't @ me.

The government China is far to the right of any western government.

The people of India are culturally far to the right of any western culture.

They put Uyghurs into camps and prevent them from spreading their culture to the next generation. They are a Han ethnostate that bans nearly all immigration. Speaking on certain topics is forbidden. They execute political prisoners and harvest their organs. Need we go on?

All of which is perfectly within the bounds of the far-left.

India is a patchwork of different tribal, ethnic, and religious groups with a variety of practices that are entirely foreign to westerners including honor killings. Women are generally required to dress modestly but still face harassment when traveling alone (as any woman who has ever been to India can attest). Women are raped as punishment for the transgressions of their kin. Widows are stigmatized. Caste discrimination is rampant. People are murdered for rumored offenses against cows.

India was straight up governed by socialists for something like 70 years post independence. They still have an intense and smothering web of racial carve-outs that would match to "DEI" in the West.

Calling National Ethno-Communists and the most racist socialists in the world "far-right" is terminology that is actively obfuscatory. Either group has far, far more in common with the Western far-left than the Western far-right.

All of which is perfectly within the bounds of the far-left.

Horseshoe theory, a banger meme with the added advantage of being true!

Red China is not on the western left-right axis - particularly in the current year where the western left-right axis is defined by somewhat parochial culture-war concerns and everyone from Bernie to Vance supports some form of state capitalism. In so far as it matters, China is neutral on white vs black skin, in favour of legal abortion, and mildly against public displays of sexual deviance.

China is neutral on white vs black skin

Eh, they place themselves at the top. Perhaps it's genre-specific, but the Chinese fantasy novels sometimes randomly drop levels of anti-black racism that would make Nathan Bedford Forrest wince.

Indians and Chinese do seem to broadly believe in abortion and progressive tax rates, and have little to none of the cultural grievances that thé contemporary right uses to avoid talking about economics. India is a deeply socially conservative place, yes, but in a very different way from what a westerner would recognize.

Yeah, a lot of their culture doesn't map into a traditional left-right axis which places primacy on ideas and not on identity.

For example, in the West, a leftist might support redistribution from the rich to the poor. A rightist might be against redistribution. But there's another perfectly legible viewpoint which is to support redistribution from you to me, regardless of who is poor or rich. I think a lot of Indians land here.

The idea of couching policies in terms of universalism is WEIRD. "Why must a policy benefit all of society?", the Third Worldist asks. "I vote so the government will give me money"

Indians and Chinese are mostly non-Christian in a group where the right-wing party's support base and agenda continues to correlate relatively heavily with Evangelical Christianity.

Agreed. I'd put that in bucket #2, I think. Identity >> policy.

The actual history of minority groups in America is to tend to become voters for the most moderate democrats available eventually.

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