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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9450 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.

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.

I do not know what this is referring to.

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.

Given that nobody seriously believed in climate alarmism in the first place

People definitely believed and still believe in climate change.

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).

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