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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5170 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.

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.

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.

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.

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