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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9321 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.

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.

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.

A planet-wide Schengen Area, if you will.

They may make arguments along these lines, but I don't think that's their fundamental belief. For example, people on the Left (generally speaking) believe that there is a group of people called "Palestinians"; that this group has exclusive rights to something called "Palestinian Land"; that they have the right to exclude Jewish people (and anyone else) from this land; and that they even have the right to eject Jewish people who have been living on such land for many generations.

In other words, the concept of open borders applies selectively depending on who is in the in-group and who is in the out-group. Put simply, it's a question of "who/whom"

I freely grant that the wider left is often hypocritical, or at least, combines the above position with other positions that it clearly contradicts.

Right, and the direction in which they pivot depends on who and whom. The simplest model for Leftist principles is "More good stuff for us and our allies; punishment and humiliation for our out-group."

In other words, the concept of open borders applies selectively depending on who is in the in-group and who is in the out-group. Put simply, it's a question of "who/whom"

Of course. It only applies to countries with magic dirt and not to anywhere else. Those places are allowed to have their own ethnostates.

Right. You can pick a position in isolation and "steelman" it into some coherent principle, but once you start trying to apply that principle you find that the people you are steelmanning do not accept the applications of that principle. At which point you should just discard your "steelman".

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.

There's absolutely a kind of class resentment as well as a sneering toward 'white' understood in a tribal sense... but I do not think most leftists hate themselves

That doesn't change that they hate white people, that they want white people to have no influence, that white people don't deserve the same rights as non-white ethnicities to organize as groups, etc.

The fish doesn't know it's in water; the liberal-progressive doesn't think of itself as white. White liberals are likely the only people to ever exist with explicit outgroup preference. They might not hate themselves to a suicidal degree, that's all.

truly pathological cases are fortunately rare.

The popularity of White Fragility surely complicates your complication, though it's kind of a weird moral panic/fashionable decoration kind of example. I don't think every reader was truly pathological though I'm pretty sure Diangelo was/is. Worse examples exist in the stranger corners of the internet of course, as with anything.

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.

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