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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9693 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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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"?

Trump exiting the Paris agreement is in my view the single most damaging thing he could have done. It was the one deal that guaranteed some degree of international cooperation, which is absolutely essential to reduce global emissions. He has also halted renewable energy projects (specifically he cancelled a contract with Vestas) and has worked to increase production of oil and natural gas.

Are you looking for actual policy?

I am looking for actual policies with the explicit purpose of fighting climate change. Something right wingers don't do. They may propose policies which incidentally help, such as making it easier to build nuclear reactors, but the actual purpose is always something else. In combination with stuff like what I wrote above, I can only conclude that climate change is not a priority for the right.

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...

  • "Fix all the problems" - observably exists for a variety of issues.
  • "Without raising taxes" - observably exists for a variety of issues.
  • "Without hurting anyone sympathetic" - this is the pinch point. But once the attention focuses here, you see that "considered sympathetic" is itself a free variable; you can coordinate the addition or removal of sympathy from "anyone", at scale and without apparent limit. There's good arguments being made from both sides that sympathy has been misallocated, and that this misallocation is, in fact, a serious obstacle to making things much better than they are. Policy starvation being what it is, people demand solutions, those solutions will route through the path of least resistance... and politics becomes, necessarily, an exercise in cruelty.

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.

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