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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7306 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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I'd like to contrast two opinions that were posted here a while back to hopefully make a larger point.

Below there are arguments from @Southkraut posted in this chain of discussion:

By the right wing in a political spectrum that has shifted so far left that even the most tepid immigration control measures are considered the extreme of permissible politics. I'm sorry, but no, this movement to the right in no way proves that the left is not in firm control. Their electoral setbacks are, in the greater scheme of things, temporary and minor, while their social and demographic victories are permanent and far-reaching. Yes they overreached, did too much too quickly and alienated voters that way, but the left needing to spend some time without control of this or that executive or legislative and seeing a small fraction of their accomplishments rolled back is not proof of the lasting ascendancy of the right.

Even if this should be the full awakening of the natives to their intentional replacement and the imminent grab for power of the right over all the governments of Europe and even the end of all immigration, the demographic damage is done. The left can afford to let go of the reins of states for a while, or maybe even altogether. It won't change the fate of the continent at this point.

Yes we currently have an upswing of right-wing sentiment as the leftist strangelhold on public discourse slackens, but that's because the leftists, in their time of triumph, overreached somewhat while already on the finishing line. But it's only a stumble; they can and most likely will recover, and if the footrace metaphor holds, then this stumble makes no difference because the right is crawling along far behind with its legs hacked off and bleeding out.

The left has already won. The takeover happened, and it held, and still holds. All public institutions all over Europe are firmly in the hands of leftist partisans. All the predominant narratives that public discourse rests on are shaped by leftist framing. And above all, greatest accomplishment and final victory of the left, demographics are a done deal. The natives are on an inescapable track towards becoming minorities in their own countries, and foreigners will become the majority in Europe within this century. There is no fixing this, and there is no suriviving it for the right.

And below is a comment by @MaiqTheTrue:

My thoughts are that this stems directly from their view of the world. To them America and the West are a dystopian nightmare.

White Guilt, and present militarism

In Liberal circles, white people, and particularly white Americans, are racist, militaristic, and colonial. They also perceive that none of it is changing even a little bit. We support Israel which is racist and genocidal, we hold down minorities, and enrich ourselves at the expense of the non-whites of the world. And they see it as nobody aside from them actually caring.

Environment

Liberals believe that Earth will be literally uninhabitable within their lifetime. The air will be choked with pollution, the rivers poisoned, global warming creating deserts and rain forests and making things too hot. Nobody wants to do enough to fix it, and quite often want to go in the other direction. They see that nobody aside from them cares.

Capitalism

The rich run the world for the rich and everyone else suffers. Poverty is common, and all the things that should be free are instead not free. College costs too much. Health care costs too much. And again, none of this is noticed by anyone else, so nothing will change.

Trump

You might not notice, but we elected Literally Hitler in November. He’s going to build work camps. He’s going to round people up and either imprison them or deport them. The Handmaid’s Tale is going to happen. Again, nobody notices or cares and worse, half the country likes it. Which proves that white people are evil.

All of this is a profoundly negative world view. Dystopian even. Everything is terrible, and at best going to stay terrible forever, and very likely to get worse. If this is how you really see the world, obviously that’s going to give you anxiety and depression, especially if you’re hanging around others who share this view, and have few or no outside interests.

As far as I'm concerned one can also add "Sexism" and "Social media" to that list. (We can certainly say, for example, that the Blue Tribe mainly blames supposedly harmful social media trends - basically the fatal lack of external censorship and repression - for Trump's election victories in 2016 and 2024 and for Brexit as well.) And as far as the anti-anti-Zionist liberals are concerned, their attitude towards anti-Semitism is the same. Either way, this summary does strike me as spot on. Whenever I encounter members of the Blue Tribe online or even offline it's undoubtedly this pessimistic, doomerist, resentful, even elegiac vibe I'm getting most of the time, especially from single women. And this seems to have been a cultural trend since Gamergate. In contrast, I think the victories of modern liberalism have mainly stemmed from its image of representing not an ideology but the consensus among cool and smart people promoting the vision of a better tomorrow, basically someone like your cool and cheerful wine-drinking, pot-smoking aunt/uncle. It was this vibe that helped them gain electoral victories as well and now this vibe is completely dead. Now we're at a point where the political parties in the EU representing Blue Tribe normies are basically campaigning with the message to having to fight yet another great Eastern European war in the very near future which is supposedly necessary to avert some even bigger disaster or something.

I'd argue that it's actually the profound pessimism of Blue Tribe messaging and its political consequences that Southkraut's pessimism is not taking into account.

Some thoughts on this one of the most important things that I feel often get overlooked here is that AOC is not the average democrat she's the farthest left Democrat in congress, Biden won the primary running against universal healthcare and the woke approved candidate Bernie lost. When it looked like Bernie was going to win centrist democrats were having breakdowns live on CNN Most democrats in congress still support Israel and Kamala and Biden both barely made a peep about Gaza while still sending Israel. The type of liberal endlessly critiqued here doesn't have that much influence in the democratic party despite their huge influence on culture.

Now some might rightly point out that these are foundations of sand and I agree the democratic establishment is on borrowed time and I agree but it is still a massive juggernaut and I'm not confident it will be overturned in the next presidential politics. While the online is bleeding into real life it's not fully there yet everyone online was all for Bernie or maybe Warren Biden was essentially null totally unrepresented and if you listened to the online voice he had no chance because no one was for him and yet the olds and conservative black primary voters loved him and pulled the lever for him.

Of course those people have little influence on culture and aren't posters so their invisible to the very online and even the culture war, they aren't fanatics either endlessly pushing so they'll likely lose foundations of sand and so on but any political analysis here should have to deal with the fact that the type of progressives endlessly skewered on the motte can barely muster ten seats in congress. In the EU too many of these parties are center right in coaltion with the center left, Germany for example and France with a right wing government led by Macron.

Now there are some things Biden was radical on, Trans kids and immigration for example, but even here liberals actually don't want open borders. Liberals all think that is a "Republican lie" because they don't they want easier immigration and asylumn seekers to be able to come. But most liberal Americans supporting immigration means supporting the immigrants here the actual details are immaterial.

Now we're at a point where the political parties in the EU representing Blue Tribe normies are basically campaigning with the message to having to fight yet another great Eastern European war in the very near future which is supposedly necessary to avert some even bigger disaster or something.

Because they view the Ukraine war as an existential threat to the end of history and they liberal world order. They are threatened by the Russia attack on Ukraine the way you are threatened by immigration. And they aren't saying they should fight a war just they they should arm themselves to protect themselves and their families as Russia has shown itself to be a threat. A very conservative message if you think about it, and the fact that Normie liberals are willing to fly Ukrainian flags and raise money voluntarily for weapons and equipment for Ukraine should show that they aren't all civilizational nihilists willing to lay down and die when their version of civilization is threatened.

Because they view the Ukraine war as an existential threat to the end of history and they liberal world order.

It rather seems that they did away with the ‘End of History’ thesis already and no longer believe that the process of globalization can continue in they way they generally imagined (well, fantasized) that it would. I think this should, in turn, reinforce the perception that they have recently (around 2014 or so) adopted a rather pessimist worldview. They are now treating Russia, China, North Korea, India and their ‘puppets’ as an enemy bloc that is to be sanctioned and cordoned off from the rest of the world that has inexorably and thankfully transitioned to liberal globalism.

And they aren't saying they should fight a war just they they should arm themselves to protect themselves and their families as Russia has shown itself to be a threat. A very conservative message if you think about it

I argue there are aspects to Western foreign policy regarding Ukraine that should at least make it rather questionable to conservatives. The most obvious one is that it’s happening in the context of a long-term policy of eastward NATO expansion (with a bunch of consequences of its own) which I think US conservatives should at least be skeptical about. The second is that whenever liberals emphasize the supposedly huge cultural differences between Ukraine and Russia the always focus on the wonderful globohomo-ness of the former; this should at least make conservatives think twice about the whole affair. The third I can think of is that the more cynical liberal-adjacent talking heads seem willing to admit that it’s not for the prosperity and well-being of the Ukrainian people that the war should be escalated but to weaken Russia which in turn is supposed to have fantastic benefits in the future or something. Again, obvious grounds for skepticism, I think. Four: conservatives should ponder what exactly the long-term goal of Atlanticist policy regarding Ukraine in particular was after 2004 or so and especially after 2014.

Now some might rightly point out that these are foundations of sand and I agree the democratic establishment is on borrowed time and I agree but it is still a massive juggernaut and I'm not confident it will be overturned in the next presidential politics.

I’m guessing you’re referring to the gerontocratic nature of the Dem leadership?

but even here liberals actually don't want open borders. Liberals all think that is a "Republican lie" because they don't they want easier immigration and asylumn seekers to be able to come. But most liberal Americans supporting immigration means supporting the immigrants here the actual details are immaterial.

Liberals don't advocate for de-jure open borders. But they believe that everyone who just walks up to the border should be able to make an asylum claim. And what do you know, liberals also believe that they should all be allowed to live and work while waiting for their claim to be processed, and of course they also believe that only an evil nazi racist would deny their totally valid claims.

Liberal red lines taken together always result in de-facto open borders under any interpretation. They do not advocate for de-jure open borders, but any non-open border is one that liberals will work tirelessly on tearing down.

Liberal red lines taken together always result in de-facto open borders under any interpretation. They do not advocate for de-jure open borders

Except when they do, i.e. "No human is illegal". They tend to leave that in the mouths of "activists" but not always.

Liberals don't advocate for de-jure open borders. But they believe that everyone who just walks up to the border should be able to make an asylum claim. And what do you know, liberals also believe that they should all be allowed to live and work while waiting for their claim to be processed, and of course they also believe that only an evil nazi racist would deny their totally valid claims.

Don't we have recent lived experience of this not actually being applicable when the refugees happen to be Boers?

It's open borders, but only for assholes. Not everyone is admitted, the price of admission is lying and cheating. After all, you're not actually a persecuted refugee, if you were, you wouldn't have made it halfway across the world in the first place. Someone who is honest would be denied, or rather, someone who is honest would apply for a work visa and get that denied.

In fact, it fits the rest of the repertoire of left-wing policy, such as easily-scammable social programs or being lenient on crime. All of it rewards assholes at the expense of honest people.

True. The liberal goal is in fact worse than open borders.

The cricial point here is that the left is not just a mirror image of the right. Defeat of the right does not imply victory for the left and vice versa.

Looking at immigration, the left's goal is "infinity migrants" not "replacement of the whites". This is a crucial difference, and many right wing great replacement consoiracy theorists completely fail to understand their opponent. They want all the poor third worlder victims on the planet to get a plot of magic dirt and a chance at a better life.

100 million migrants is more than enough to turn Europe brown and permanently end the right's hope for a white homeland. But there are still 5 billion more hapless victims out there. This isn't victory for the left, they've just barely gotten started.

Looking at immigration, the left's goal is "infinity migrants" not "replacement of the whites". This is a crucial difference, and many right wing great replacement consoiracy theorists completely fail to understand their opponent.

The mistake of the Great Replacement theory is the second word, yes.

(Well, that, and attributing it all to a secret cabal of suspiciously Semitic people, but never mind.)

The left-wing position as I understand it is basically that everybody deserves a chance at a better life and that nobody should be privileged or disfavoured because of where they were born. That ends up rounding to open borders. There is no valid argument against this (in their minds) because it is inherently illegitimate to discriminate on the basis of race, culture, or language. Everybody therefore has a right to move anywhere they like. A planet-wide Schengen Area, if you will.

If pressed they can support that with something about wealthy countries having responsibilities to poorer ones, but that's not necessary for the argument.

Nowhere here does the idea of replacement comes in. If you have large-scale immigration like this and the native population is declining due to low fertility, then you will inevitably see immigrants make up a larger and larger proportion of the population, but remember, it is always wrong to discriminate between people on the basis of race, culture, or ethnic origin. It is thus impossible to argue that changing the ethnic distribution of the population could be bad.

Now having said all that -

I freely grant that the wider left is often hypocritical, or at least, combines the above position with other positions that it clearly contradicts. This is most obvious in cases involving subaltern or indigenous peoples. First Nations or Native Americans or Aboriginals or Whatever do get to play the blood-and-soil game. But nobody else does. Nonetheless the existence of immigration-maximalists who don't hold that position (e.g. Bryan Caplan) makes me think that this is not an inherent part of the maximalist position, but rather a contradiction of coalitional politics.

It is also worth mentioning how native citizen is defined. Leftists often believe (and a lot of statistics too) that after 3-4 generations of living in a country, that makes you a native by default. So as long as the majority of the population does not consist of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants, replacement is literally impossible.

Nowhere here does the idea of replacement comes in.

It does when you consider how much they hate white people. Your pitch here is the steelman in autarky. They also think "less white people" is a good thing, and "less say in politics for white people", and other less savory things besides.

It is thus impossible to argue that changing the ethnic distribution of the population could be bad.

I predict that approximately 100% of leftists would say it was bad if an ethnic distribution became more white.

It does when you consider how much they hate white people. Your pitch here is the steelman in autarky. They also think "less white people" is a good thing, and "less say in politics for white people", and other less savory things besides.

Most of them are white people, which I think complicates this picture somewhat. There's absolutely a kind of class resentment as well as a sneering toward 'white' understood in a tribal sense, cf. the way Scott has talked about Americans-criticising-Americans as a kind of tribal equivocation, but I do not think most leftists hate themselves, and truly pathological cases are fortunately rare.

but I do not think most leftists hate themselves

I honestly do think this is a major factor. A significant number of the devoted leftists I have known personally seemed to be clearly using the ideology as a tool to displace their own self-loathing. The general form goes something like "Whatever my flaws, I can't be a bad person because I support this noble cause. My flaws are actually caused by this war and that lying son of a bitch Johnson systemic issues beyond my control. Becasuse I'm one of the special Elect who sees that, not like the rest of the sheeple, I deserve absolution and near-total moral authority to judge others."

To be clear, I am talking here about the rarer group of proper leftists, people who would embrace a label at least as extreme as DSA. I don't think I've observed that phenomenon in any regular old Parks&Rec progressives.

But there is a meme on the right that "leftism is a biological phenomenon", and I wonder what would happen if some of those guys went on T-therapy.

I wonder what would happen if some of those guys went on T-therapy.

Probably nothing, or maybe they get even more leftist.

The Low-T thing is more like Ira Glass and other NPR types whose politics are indistinguishable from women. They just want to go along to get along, never be mean, and avoid criticism.

So they cluster with women in the moderate-left camp, with an extra dash of current thing.

Since we live in a moderate-left society, it's true that most low-T men would move right with with a little pharmacological help. But the extreme left has a lot of high-T psychos like Hasan Piker or Che Guevara who would happily stand you up against a wall and pull the trigger.

But the extreme left has a lot of high-T psychos like Hasan Piker or Che Guevara who would happily stand you up against a wall and pull the trigger.

Anyone who won a war before 1970 is a free space. Piker though... every clip I see of the man he's whining and bitching and defensive and generally seems to be having a miserable time about it. I would not call him high-T. Not quite low either, though. If I had to guess, it would be that he's been on a Clavicular-style famous rich kid cocktail of controlled supplements for so long that his endocrine system is just a disaster.

Plattner was the actual obvious choice. God, I miss him. I mean, good for the Democrats, it was the right call both for the country and for their party. But he was the most fun candidate since OG Trump.

Okay, fair enough - I was taking 'leftist' to mean basically the 35-40% of the population that would identify as being, in some way, 'on the left'. My mental model of politics is that roughly 30-40% or so of people consider themselves on the left side, 30-40% or so consider themselves on the right, and then the last third contains those who are checked out of politics entirely, those who consider themselves 'moderate' or 'centre', and a handful of special snowflakes with esoteric views who don't see themselves falling into the system at all.

If you just mean the 5-10% or so who would identify as strongly capital-L Leftist (or Progressive, Socialist, etc.), then sure, I'll concede the point. This group is mostly what Hidden Tribes calls Progressive Activists.

I do still think that their own race is important - the Leftist/Progressive Activist demographic is a disproportionately white one, so I do think there's something hypocritical and symbolic about performative hatred of whiteness on their part. The scorn for and hatred of 'whites' is real, albeit often with an implicit 'but I'm one of the good ones' exception attached, but I don't think they actually expect to do themselves harm. A great deal of what we're talking about is kayfabe.

The scorn for and hatred of 'whites' is real, albeit often with an implicit 'but I'm one of the good ones' exception attached, but I don't think they actually expect to do themselves harm.

This has been discussed ad nauseam but it’s just intra-racial status signalling. The progressive leftist outgroup is not other races/immigrants; they don’t necessarily see themselves as being in competition or even in the same social worlds or status hierarchies as them, the outgroup they would most like to distinguish themselves from is the poorfag hick whites who worry about low-status things like manual or unskilled work being outsourced to waves of Oppressed Refugees who massively increase the supply of low-skill labour and are willing to perform these jobs for lower pay. By embracing these kinds of lax immigration policies, they distinguish themselves not only as one of the Good Whites but also as one of the Cultured Whites, who are magnanimous in their kindness, enlightened enough to accept and understand the value of other cultures, and most definitely not a part of the lowly social stratum at risk of competition from migrant workers. They are too genteel to care about that.

It bears mentioning that the converse exists too; those who hold the opposite view are countersignalling in a way that marks themselves as the populist voice of the masses, as steadfast advocates for the Real Salt-Of-The-Earth Americans/Australians/Canadians/[insert nationality here] who are so impervious to social control that they’re willing to go against the Establishment, but their base position is also just less inherently paradoxical than that of white racial progressives and it’s no great mystery why they would hold this position.

Yes, I think that's largely the correct position. Well put.

I'd argue that it's actually the profound pessimism of Blue Tribe messaging and its political consequences that Southkraut's pessimism is not taking into account.

On the surface, there's nothing inherently contradictory about both sides being pessimistic. Suppose that the Left is successful in its mission to make whites a minority in the West. That would surely be a bummer for most conservatives, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the Left will get the other things it wants, or at least seems to want.

But at a deeper level, I think the issue here is that Leftism is not really an ideology so much as a process by which people compete for social status by purporting to advocate on behalf of the downtrodden (and presenting themselves as the downtrodden). Leftism is like a dog chasing a car. The point is to chase the car not to actually catch it.

Even if the Left got the permanent democratic majority they are seeking, it wouldn't really help with their pessimism. A huge schism would immediately develop between the most progressive elements and the second most progressive elements. Any time someone from the latter group became president, the person would be castigated as a Nazi.

I mean that's just party politics, look at all the insane smears in the 1800s between Adams and Jefferson. Remember all the conservatives convinced Obama was a Muslim and a Communist? I knew people who bought chickens and goats for when Obama caused Soviet food shortages.

Even if the Left got the permanent democratic majority they are seeking, it wouldn't really help with their pessimism. A huge schism would immediately develop between the most progressive elements and the second most progressive elements. Any time someone from the latter group became president, the person would be castigated as a Nazi.

"There is another theory which states that this has already happened"

I'd argue that it's actually the profound pessimism of Blue Tribe messaging and its political consequences that Southkraut's pessimism is not taking into account.

You can cut 90% of what I wrote above and just reduce it to the point about demographics. It makes no difference whether all the liberals are sad and the progressives bemoan the state of affairs - they fatally wounded Europe, and there's no coming back. They won that particular fight, whether they're happy about it or not. Of course if they just lie down and die now, then it will have been a victory of Islam rather than for Leftism, but either way it won't be the non-islamic Right that comes out on top.

Leftists and rightists simply view reality in completely different ways. Let me list some views that in my experience are still fairly common with leftists, and you will see:

  • Trump is a populist liar who is only in it to enrich himself.
  • Great replacement theory is an alarmist lie. Sure, some immigrants cause problems, but on the whole they are no better or worse than the native population.
  • Medical transitioning is a necessary procedure for trans people, and them not having access to it puts them in danger.
  • The idea that trans people are somehow dangerous is an alarmist lie.
  • Climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity. Coastlines will be flooded, harvests will fail, hundreds of millions of lives will be destroyed.
  • The right tries to divide us based on our identity. But the only divide that actually matters is rich vs poor.
  • The resources that could be used to solve poverty, hunger, and global warming already exist. The western world is obscenely rich and produces enough to more than cover everyone's needs. The reason why this utopia has not been realized is billionaires hoarding the majority of resources for themselves.

divide that actually matters is rich vs poor

Then call me the General Secretary because I've been on this since I was a teenager. That's not always completely true. But it is generally fairly true.

I wish the left still believed the only divide that mattered is rich vs poor - that's a defensible place to be, and one I'm not at all unsympathetic to! The reason I'm politically homeless is that the majority of the left no longer feel that way, no longer feel a lot of ways they used to, because identity is a Top Tier Issue now. The left is able and willing to throw other cherished principles under the bus to placate an identity group. And it seems, other than a small carveout for communism proper, the further left you go the more they're willing to throw under the bus - not a 2:1 or 1:1 trade, but 1:2 or worse.

Noting my approval for this post because it's a rare successful attempt by a (presumably) right wing person to express left wing beliefs in more or less the terms they'd use themselves.

I'm hardly on the left, but:

Trump is a populist liar who is only in it to enrich himself

This seems pretty uncontroversial?

Climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity.

Up until AI, yeah, but mostly by default because what competition was there?

The resources that could be used to solve poverty, hunger, and global warming already exist.

Yes? But I largely give capitalism credit for this. There probably is enough food production worldwide that hunger is just a distribution problem at this point in time (and if not, well, GMOs can help with that!), and global warming has a lot of good ideas that can solve it... nuclear, cloud seeding, etc.

Just descriptively, I think that the statement "Trump is a populist liar who is only in it to enrich himself" is widely believed on the left, and widely disbelieved on the right.

It's not universal - for what it's worth, I think that statement is true, and I probably qualify as being somewhere on the right - but if you had to generalise, yes, I think people on the left would mostly agree that it's true, and on the right, while there are some like myself who agree with it, many would disagree. It would be a matter of real controversy.

I did only say 'mostly' on the left, because I think there are people on the left who would disagreement with that statement because they think that Trump is sincerely a fascist of some kind, who is in it for genuine if evil ideals.

Trump voters would probably assume the guy is not a liar. And my experience with right wingers is that they often don't view climate change as a serious problem demanding urgent and resource-intensive action.

As for the last part, the controversy is in why that distribution problem has been unsolved. The position on the left is that this is because billionaires and large companies are hoarding all the resources, so government intervention is needed to stop this. That is why we get higher taxes and state funded charities. I am not sure what the right-wing position is, but I imagine they would probably blame government regulation and corrupt officials instead.

And my experience with right wingers is that they often don't view climate change as a serious problem demanding urgent and resource-intensive action.

This is a Motte and Bailey, though. There's a big difference between 'dramatic climate change is/would be a serious problem and we should make efforts to ameliorate it' and 'Standard Leftist approaches to Climate Change make any sense whatsoever and we should all Greta Thunberg together as one'. I do know some people on the Right who think that Climate Change is totally not happening, and I know a lot more who think that it's an incredibly complicated topic that the incentives of Alarmists around means that sloppy science tends to happen a lot and that the vast majority of proposals/other interests of the Leftblob means they're frequently wildly counterproductive. Strong campaigns targeted at dictating the behaviors of affluent countries with tiny population whilst the developing world just kinda gets left to do whatever they feel like and supported to breed unchecked make no sense

And yet I cannot think of a single policy designed by the right to explicitly fight against climate change. Sure, the right wants more nuclear power plants, but the stated reasons are sovereign energy production and supporting datacenters. When it comes to policies with the stated purpose of fighting climate change, all I have seen happen for decades is the left proposing and the right rejecting. Right wing politicians will need to actually propose serious policies for me to believe they care.

Trumps actual policies on climate change:

  • make permitting easier, for nuclear, solar, natgas, etc
  • legalize smaller cars/pickup trucks
  • stop using the power of government to hinder the one guy who is electrifying transportation (to protect left wing cronies in the UAW)

Obama/Biden policies:

  • small trucks are quietly banned
  • subsidies for green-sojnding projects, which get blocked at permitting
  • hinder natural gas, which mostly replaces much worse forms of fossil fuel
  • block nuclear
  • impose silly constraints on industrial projects, including green energy (to get the subsidies you must hire x% women or similar)
  • funnel money to purportedly green boondoggles like CA high speed rail (0 miles of track built)

Are you looking for actual policy? Or do you just want trump to say "climate change is bad and somehow related to freeing Palestine"?

You are skipping over that he did stop the federal subsidy for EVs, which, I know, subsidies don't actually make EVs cheaper, it just spreads the cost around. But if you believe, as many people do, that the externalities of gas vehicules are not being captured by the cost their users pay (and it's not just the environmental externalities, but the geopolitical ones too) and that those externalities are being paid by society at large anyway, then EV subsidies feel more like evening the playing field than robbing non-EV drivers to pay for EVs.

Trump voters would probably assume the guy is not a liar.

I don't dispute the term. He lies to position people where he wants them, he lies to protect his ego, he lies to embelish accomplishments, he lies for pure showmanship.

The thing is, none of that is as bad as "if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor" style lies, much less the Kremlinist coming from actual leftists.

Trump voters would probably assume the guy is not a liar.

I think most would rather say that he's the victim of isolated demands for rigor, considering they've seen politicians lie to them with media covering up for them all their lives, that claiming Trump is an exceptional liar as a politician is simply due to the media not covering up for him, and that anyway someone who sometimes lie in a way that they deem aligns with their own interests for a change is a good thing.

Whether it does align with their interest is up to the reader to decide.

I think most would rather say that he's the victim of isolated demands for rigor,

I think this is an important point. The anti-establishment right is the most paranoid of the four quadrants (on pro/anti establishment and left/right axes, which I think is more accurate nowadays than the traditional political compass/Nolan chart 2D model), and they think that all politicians are crooks and liars, but Trump is at least entertaining about it.

Matthew Yglesias has a good post about how the anti-establishment right are in tune with the median voter on this point. The tl;dr is that the median voter thinks that politicians have a "fix all the problems without raising taxes or hurting anyone sympathetic" button right in front of them which they are not pressing, and that the only reason not to press the button is some kind of payoff. He goes on to say that the anti-establishment left also feel this way, and is explicit that various leftists are taking advantage of the dynamic by making straightforwardly false allegations of corruption against the pro-establishment left.

The tl;dr is that the median voter thinks that politicians have a "fix all the problems without raising taxes or hurting anyone sympathetic" button right in front of them which they are not pressing, and that the only reason not to press the button is some kind of payoff.

I don't need to believe that to think that the establishment was lying about every important issue that came up during my life time.

Obviously - there are smart reasons to hate the establishment, but empirically most people who hate the establishment do so for dumb reasons.

I don't think the claim is whether Trump lies (all politicians lie) but in what service Trump lies. Probably, many politicians at least start out with the genuine belief that their policies are good ones that will help people, even if these goals eventually get subsumed by the idea that their party is better (so anything that keeps them in charge or, rather, prevents the other party's awful policies is worth it).

Trump seems to much more heavily prioritize self-enrichment and what he believes will be glory for himself.

Well Southrkraut hasn't been fully vindicated yet, but I'm not even sure what test you would run to know when he is vindicated. "Left" and "right" are moving targets and so the two will be struggling even after we are all dead.

The delusions that Maiq points out are not really relevant. For one example, as of now in 2026 the climate alarmism was finally admitted to be made up or whatever. In what sense is Southkraut not "taking into account" Blue pessimism? I concede that the Blue Future will have more depressing vibes than today, and it certainly won't be anything bright and utopian like Star Trek. The reason is something like: Blues are perfectionists spoiled by winning so hard, all they do is focus on their small losses.

For one example, as of now in 2026 the climate alarmism was finally admitted to be made up or whatever.

Not everyone has heard this happy news and some are still panicked about climate change. Such as most young Americans according to some polling.

I think climate has taken a backseat to more pressing issues. People aren’t talking about it as much, but I haven’t seen the conservative-but-still-very-bad models disproven. And the forecasted AGI and population collapse may temper our adjustment to the new climate.

For one example, as of now in 2026 the climate alarmism was finally admitted to be made up or whatever.

I do not know what this is referring to.

Mostly the changed public perception of Greta Thunberg, I think?

I'll just link meta-meta-commentary on the report. As you can imagine, anyone can say whatever they want about the vibes -- am I "misrepresenting it" like Trump is, or am I "directionally correct?".

The point is "everyone knows that climate change will end the world" is a partisan lie used to justify pessimism.

If we don't want to talk about lies we can just talk about other silly source of the pessimism:

The rich run the world for the rich and everyone else suffers. Poverty is common, and all the things that should be free are instead not free. College costs too much.

It's phrased here too-honestly so that readers won't attribute the opinions to the poster. But obviously (as I've mentioned before), poverty doesn't exist in the West.

From the meta commentary

The most pessimistic scenario now shows lower emissions than 15 years ago, when the prior scenarios were developed, and the most optimistic one now shows more.

This is expected: as 2100 nears and we get better at predicting, the predictions become narrower.

It sounds like the scientists maybe misrepresented (i.e. “not made clear”) that the worst prediction was actually unlikely. But the important part is that even the “optimistic” predictions are still really bad, and those haven’t been disproven or disclaimed (except the most optimistic one became worse).

Obviously no one got up and said "I'm wrong", but climate issues have taken a back seat to open borders / Palestine as the things that the left cares about.

It was in 2019 that AOC said "The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change."

No one is doing that anymore, even though since 2019 that climate has warmed as projected by forecasts or even faster.

Obviously no one got up and said "I'm wrong", but climate issues have taken a back seat to open borders / Palestine as the things that the left cares about.

It was in 2019 that AOC said "The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change."

No one is doing that anymore, even though since 2019 that climate has warmed as projected by forecasts or even faster.

Well I think it comes down to what it means to have a "view." When it comes to culture war issues, beliefs are often more about signalling virtue and group membership than anything else. As opposed to serious beliefs which form the basis of actions and decisions which are not necessarily for public consumption and entail personal stakes.

Given that nobody seriously believed in climate alarmism in the first place, arguably it doesn't even make sense to talk about an admission of error. It's like admitting that bell bottom jeans or poodle skirts are wrong.

All you can really say is that the Current Thing has changed. The way you show that you are a good progressive is no longer to parrot doom and gloom predictions about global warming but instead to accuse Israel of genocide. And probably in a couple years the Current Thing will change again.

On another note, it's astonishing how little Roe v. Wade is discussed. To paraphrase NIN, that god is dead and no one cares.

Obviously no one got up and said "I'm wrong", but climate issues have taken a back seat to open borders / Palestine as the things that the left cares about.

This is certainly true. I've gone to many environmental meetings/protests over the year and they have withered in the past few years. Though I would say a lot of this isn't necessarily that the environment has shrunk in salience, it's just that for a certain activist cohort it has been replaced as the issue by which to advance the omnicause. There were people who thought that the way they were going to abolish capitalism was by convincing people that capitalism was the fundamental cause of climate change. Now those people are saying capitalism is the root cause of the genocide in Gaza. I would say those people probably care about the environment just as much as before (which is to say, very little).

Can you be more explicit about the larger point you're trying to make?

Here's how I would interpret the two comments.

The left has taken over nearly all institutions and has achieved nearly all of its goals. Yet, instead of celebrating, they have a deeply pessimistic worldview. I think this is intentional. It's a form of the "perpetual revolution" envisioned by Mao and ensures their continued hold on power.

Consider, for example, how people today wear the mantle of counter-culture and protesting as if it were still the 1960s. The protestors won. Counter culture won. Drugs, premarital sex, gay marriage, mixing of the races, the welfare state, paid taxpayer gigs for radicals? All these things happened and then some. Its all official state doctrine now. And yet, artists, actors, and musicians constantly are "protesting" against an order that died long ago, working to actively reaffirm and support the dominant culture that replaced it. The underground was fully co-opted in service of the cathedral.

The right, on the other hand, has not figured this out. They often think in terms of solutions. They get elected as a protest vote when the left break things. Then they fix the broken things. Then the problems are forgotten, people go back to voting on vibes, and the left breaks things again. Fixing problems is not a way to maintain power durably. You have to keep the vibes in your favor by constantly manufacturing grievances. Trump, of course, has done just that.

But in the end, it's not healthy to have two revolutionary parties. The old model of breaker and fixer works better. (Or call if thrive/survive for a less partisan viewpoint). In democracy, the demographics of the society will determine how much breaking has to occur before fixers are brought in. In the case of South Africa, the breaking is infinite. In the case of Singapore its very little. This chud coefficient determines the fate of nations.

The right, on the other hand, has not figured this out. They often think in terms of solutions. They get elected as a protest vote when the left break things. Then they fix the broken things. Then the problems are forgotten, people go back to voting on vibes, and the left breaks things again. Fixing problems is not a way to maintain power durably. You have to keep the vibes in your favor by constantly manufacturing grievances. Trump, of course, has done just that.

This is exactly word for word what liberals think about the right that the right are wreckers who break things on purpose to cynically show government doesn't work and then liberals need to come right the ship only for the dodo electorate to forget and foolishly elect Republicans' who will mess it up again. They think liberals just want to govern and be nice while Republican voters get outraged by mad up grievances on Fox News that don't really matter,

Probably, but how in the world can they think that when Baltimore and Detroit exist? It is remarkable how they'll blame Republicans for problems when a Republican hasn't sniffed public office in 50 years.

This is very true culturally. I don't think it has anything to do with Mao though. Rebels are cool and in America rebels are coolest. A lot of people stand to benefit from cosplaying like it's 1965 actually that might be my number one gripe with American culture/politics the amount of people who refuse to believe it's not 1965 and refuse to acknowledge tat they have cultural hegemony.

The left hasn't achieved it's goals outside of culture though compared to Europe economically America is still fairly economically conservative, every state is at will except Montana, no universal healthcare and drugs except weed are still illegal albeit semi openly tolerated.

I mean until recently the left was much better at branding. They have an image of themselves as aspirational, as the party of the cool people, the people who are knowledgeable and have the right ideas. And they’ve built an image especially in the last two decades of themselves as the arbiters of moral values to the point that most left leaning people see even listening to a heretic let alone agreeing with them on anything as evil. The right is now synonymous with the worst elements of humanity in the twentieth century.

The right has no similar branding. There’s certainly potential. The right could seek to be seen as counterculture, the cool kids who just don’t care what anyone thinks. The ones unafraid to stick a thumb into the eye of power, the ones who challenge the substitute teacher. The class clown or the punk. Instead, they mostly come off as angry boomers. They come off as paranoid school marms afraid of the world.

The groups that I find attractive are exactly what I’m describing. I find the ones that say “you know what, I am tired of pretending that I agree with these common conventions and im not going to go along anymore.

Until recently they had a plausible enemy as well with the religious right. The Bush years had a lot of plausible leftist rebellion because of the religious right's influence on culture.

The right could seek to be seen as counterculture, the cool kids who just don’t care what anyone thinks.

Maybe.. but I think you might underestimate how much cultural support the left had even back in the day when it was the counterculture.

To quote Paul Simon: "And when the radical priest / Come to get me released / We was all on the cover of Newsweek"

Even back in the 1950s, the counterculture still had support from the media, academia, lawyers, etc..

The right has none of that, even today.

It's easy to be the "counterculture" when the cathedral is helping you with one hand while fighting you with other other. Hard to be the counterculture in a truly repressive society. Where is the North Korean counterculture?

Yes, you can be a cool detached ironic racist in New York City today. But you aren't going to get your art celebrated in the New York Times. The right has to march through a lot of institutions just to get where the left was in 1950.

The right, on the other hand, has not figured this out. They often think in terms of solutions. They get elected as a protest vote when the left break things. Then they fix the broken things.

Or they don't. Either way, the voters go back to voting for the left -- in one case because the problem was solved and they no longer need to vote for the Party of Evil, and in the other case because the Party of Evil was unable to solve the problem so they might as well go back to the Party of Good.

I'm not convinced of it's accuracy, but "the left proposes changes, not all good, and the right resists them, especially the worst ones" as a framework wouldn't be completely unworkable. Lots of continuous improvement sorts of systems work this way. We try things, and adopt them more widely when they work, and revert them when they don't. Our willingness to try things varies over time. To use a car analogy, not every model year improves over the last in every way, but most consumers probably prefer a 2026 Western (or even Chinese) model over an unchanged 50-year-old Lada design built this year.

It's not my favorite model, but I am not really in favor of letting either side of the CW declare moral victory.

I'm not convinced of it's accuracy, but "the left proposes changes, not all good, and the right resists them, especially the worst ones" as a framework wouldn't be completely unworkable

This is a model, sure, but it equivocates two meanings of left vs right. Clearly, the right can propose brand new changes that are right-wing in nature. Any change can be evaluated by its position on the leftism-rightism. This is entirely different than being biased towards proposing changes or resisting changes. You could, maybe, call that progressiveness vs conservatism. But you might have a right wing progressive and a left wing conservative.

If that sounds weird, I would guess it's because leftism correlates positively with progressiveness, defined this way. But I doubt the correlation is near 1.

Yes, that was the point I was trying (poorly) to make.

The chud coffiencent, let's call it C, determines the rate at which change is resisted. A poorly calibrated chud coefficient leads to a system that either changes too fast or is too brittle. And, as we know now, the largest factor which determines C is demographics.

The problem happens when one side doesn't just propose change, it also proposes to alter the coefficient itself via mass migration.

This fundamentally alters the harmony of the ecosystem, especially when a lower C leads to more immigration leading to a still lower C, etc... Suddenly its all grasshopper and no ants. At that point its not enough to simply resist change, one must become a reactionary to roll back change. I think that's what Trump has represented in the US, and he's somewhat succeeded in his second term by actually reducing the foreign born population for the first time in 60 years. But this is a painful process and we'd be better off if we never had to undergo it.

I think we ended up here because until recently most people on both sides of the aisle did not realize that immigrants were inherently more leftist than natives, so the runaway nature of the problem was not understood, and demographic change was mostly not resisted.

Are immigrants inherently more leftist than natives? If you look at ground zero of the most extreme social and economic viewpoints in the American left, it's not recent immigrants; it's mostly whites whose families have been here for generations. (This may change, but even AOC was born in the USA, as was her father; her mother was from PR which may have an intermediate status.)

It's not Mexican laborers demanding trans rights. On the jerbs and handouts side of things, it's more complicated, but American whites are still leading the charge.

Heavily Hispanic areas in the US tend to be represented by extremely moderate democrats.

Agreed. Portland is more lefty than Irvine, but less diverse.

Irvine California? Asians don't count as diversity. The whole point of BIPOC is to exclude Asians and "white and Hispanic" people.

Yes, non-European immigrants and their descendants vote for the Democrat party by large majorities except for a couple small exceptions like Cubans and Vietnamese.

Have you seen the maps that show what the electoral map would look like if only whites/non-whites could vote? In the first case, Trump wins like 45 states. In the second case, he loses all 50.

For a long time, Republicans coped with the idea that people from poor countries were natural conservatives because of strong traditional family values. This has not born fruit. I get that Sima Aunty doesn't want her kids to get transed. But that doesn't matter if she always votes for the party that does. Indians and East Asians are one of the most reliable democratic voting blocks, and have recently started to become major players in the DSA/Looney Left branch of the party. There is still lots of white surplus to be redistributed, and only when its gone will the coalition have to fight over the rest.

Trans issues, as comical as they are, are not really a big deal in the arc of history. Trends come and go. Demographic replacement is forever.

A lot of that depends on how much of classic Anglo-American conservatism you can discard. Latin America shows you can have western conservatism in a majority non-white society if you allow patronage. You will have to bend certain principles of the Anglo-American right, but US demographic change doesn’t mean leftists run the table completely.

Latin American conservatives mostly do what they can within the system they’re in but the problem is that either (as in Brazil) they’re prevented from doing anything by all powerful courts and a constitution that they can’t overturn or substantially modify (eg almost all Brazilian government spending is constitutionally protected ie a coup complete problem), the central government itself has relatively little power in the face of rampant lawlessness, powerful regional governments, organized crime and anyone who tries to realistically challenge that will either get killed or enough of their lieutenants on the ground will to make reform impossible (Mexico), or, in situations where reactionary coups are possible and do occur, any right wing movement finds itself so impossibly indebted to and a mere patsy for either a corrupt non-ideological military hierarchy that just wants to extract maximum loot out to Miami, organized crime groups (who mostly want the same) or a combination of both to the extent that unsustainable levels of graft eventually bring down any political project by stifling economic growth and competition anyway.

For a long time, Republicans coped with the idea that people from poor countries were natural conservatives because of strong traditional family values. This has not born fruit.

The thing is, if you accept the "WEIRDest people in the world" thesis (which I do), these immigrants' values are not actually "conservative" from the perspective of a Western (white) society, because the Western tradition is itself "liberal" compared to non-Western societies. There was a half-hearted attempt at an ideological synthesis 10-20 years ago (from the alt-right / neoreaction camp) to try and resolve this paradox by saying "we need authoritarianism at the border so we can have liberalism in the interior" (which also would involve mass deportations to "fix" the last several decades of immigration). However this doesn't seem to have had any impact - I never hear anybody on either side of the immigration debate making this argument.

Which part was not explicit enough?

I wonder if it will ever be possible again to get a proper, ideological-Turing-test-passing account of the Blue worldview on this website, because your quote from @MaiqTheTrue for sure is not. You depict a right-winger being dramatic over an essentially true development, and imagine lined up against him an array of left-wing delusions. How easy it would be, if only we could get our opponents to see reality! (Maybe they just need to go outside and touch some grass.)

The actual fundamental disconnect between Right and Left that your juxtaposition fails to capture is that both are driven by real urgencies based on their respective circles of concern, in a way that relief is mutually exclusive. Just zooming in on immigration concerns, the right-wing doomer view is essentially something like "are there no brakes on the replacement train at all? You already got like 20% Muslims or something in and we understand that in practical terms those 20% will never leave or decrease, why can't you even have so much grace as to pause and let us see the consequences?". In this lament, the left-wing doomer hears something like: "of all the people that are actively living and dying in misery at our hands as we speak, you have managed to save some. This horrifies us. Can't you at least take a break for a few years where you let them all die?". The Right watches in horror the irreversible ratchet of their nation being diluted; the Left watches the irreversible ratchet of lives being wasted.

Perhaps a comparison with abortion would be apt. Third-world immigrants are to right-wingers roughly as fetuses are to left-wingers. One sees a group they care about (natives/women) enslaved and oppressed for the benefit of some prop that has negligible moral value (uncivilised foreigners/lumps of cells). The other one sees uniquely vulnerable human beings who they have a special duty to protect (babies/victims of their ancestors' cupidity) being callously left to die for the comfort of the spoiled and morally reprehensible (slutty women/narrow-minded nativists). The right-wing perspective, to the Left, then winds up sounding about as monstrous as "you have already forced so many women to give birth unwillingly. Can't we at least take a break for a few years where we abort all/most of the pregnancies?"

It is mostly about being a good person and treating others well even if doing so requires self sacrifice. Humans are humans regardless of where they live. Instead of seeing the world as different tribes which you are tied to by blood and culture, the world is a global village. And those who possess wealth and power have a duty to help those who do not.

Instead of "my group versus your group" (although human nature being what is, this is often what it turns into) it is closer to "selflessnes vs selfish greed". The latter being people with resources to spare, who either refuse to help those in need, or use their resources to straight up harm others. Whether it be through blocking health care for trans people or refusing entry for refugees. There is a consensus that the resources of the world will do much more good if they are spread evenly among humanity, rather than being centralized in the hands of billionaires who waste money on pointless luxuries or simply hoard it in their bank accounts.

There are of course failure modes to this. Sometimes you let in people who genuinely wish you harm, or you give power and influence to people who have no business holding it. But ultimately, leftist ideology is optimistic about human nature and generally leans towards trusting others (especially the marginalized) until proven wrong. Keeping the wrong people from slipping through the cracks is much less important than giving aid to those in need.

Not sure if this is your position or not, but I think this is a pretty good steel man of the left's worldview.

The first sentence though already has a term that has been redefined by leftists: "good." The liberal progressive (leftist) framework narrows morality (or what is "good") to a subset of what most human traditions have counted as good. The word "good" carries a ton of rhetorical weight for them. It's often worded as though no reasonable person could weigh loyalty, duty, or rootedness as moral goods rather than as selfishness.

Note that "good" for progressives is very much a moving target, and that previously-good things sometimes become "bad". Not usually overnight, but see how "ending the drug war" was going to solve all our drug problems two decades ago, and compare to today when many municipalities and states have effectively unilaterally withdrawn from it. This has led to excesses that we hear a lot about today, and the vibe, from what I can tell, is shifting towards "maybe letting all this chaos happen in cities hasn't been compassionate" and even "the trains and busses should be safe and run on time". A century ago, progressivism was pushing Prohibition, because alcohol was "bad", although given cultural shifts in drinking before/after, I'm not sure I can easily judge that, honestly.

To be a bit generous, the worst excesses here seem to happen in areas for which there seems to be no good answer: it's nice to think that restricting the police will reduce violence and let drug addicts hold down jobs. But it's also naive to think that will wholesale fix our problems. And a lot of the excesses seem to be assumptions that going harder on the "nice" idea will fix it, when we're well beyond the diminishing point of return: "more school funding" when our failing schools already have 2-3x the per capita budget of the rest.

It is my position and it isn't. I like the broad idea, and I don't think that I straight up disagree with any of what I wrote. But I do believe that in practice it is overly idealistic, and I think that identifying as a leftist easily leads to a dangerously simplified worldview. Besides, I have too many problems with leftist activists and leaders to really see myself in that movement at this point.

I do wonder whether true steelmanning is really possible.

For me, it would be easy to write a good steelman of many leftist positions if I started with the same assumptions that the left does.

But the reason I'm not a leftist is that I believe those assumptions to be untrue. Yeah, if all racial groups are the same genetically, then it's difficult to explain differences in group outcome other than racism. But writing a steelman based on an assumption I know to be false doesn't feel like charity to me, it just feels like lying.

That isn't to say that strawmanning is a good thing. We shouldn't invent assumptions for the opposing groups that they don't have.

of all the people that are actively living and dying in misery at our hands

I'm assuming this is meant to refer to victims of global warming and colonialism?

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