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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9452 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.

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.

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.

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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