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I think we are collectively stuck in a sort of counterpoint/anti-establishmentarian state of mind. Everything must be explained and understood in a way that jives with the assumption that the establishment is rotten. And this is an idea that permeates both sides of the political spectrum. The left claims it is rotten from systemic prejudice. The right is a bit more complex and varies based on the part of the political spectrum, with the alt-right exhibiting the most purity in this respect.
But they all have their preferred poor babies and elites. And I think that’s really how they each connect into the counterpoint/anti-establishment framework, through populism.
The left fails to understand their considerable influence in the institutions they champion, and their downfall will be their religious commitment to perfection, as required by the revolutionary and ideological underpinnings that define them. i cannot fathom an outcome that would lead to this collective acceptance that social justice has been achieved, and it’s time to move on. I think it will probably just fade away, as it already has to some extent, as people fail to see these convictions as an accurate description of the world and, probably more precisely, will fail to see the provided solutions as having merit.
I find the right to be harder to analyze. I think a big part of it is that I am in a progressive bubble and don’t know any republicans. The only views of the republicans I am exposed to are those provided by progressives who would characterize republicans as unspeakably evil regardless of what the republicans were actually doing. it leaves me with this feeling that I don’t actually understand the Republican Party. I don’t actually know what they are like, as I don’t actually know anyone who identifies as a republican or even right leaning. And the media I consume, Bloomberg and Reuters (while I do believe is among the highest quality out there) does have a bias and I don’t believe it accurately reflects the republicans. The articles appear to be very unbiased, but the issues and perspectives the authors feel warrant an article, as well as what the author finds problematic about those issues and subjects, are where the bias is evident. The bias is more structural than anything.
I think the biggest reason I don’t know what’s up with the right is that there just isn’t as high a degree of political involvement on the right, except among the alt-right. On the left, especially among progressives, the spirit of activism is much more core to their identity. So they’re much more outspoken about it. But on the right, they aren’t, as a whole and philosophically, based on the assumption that injustices are rampant and need to be remedied. They’re, philosophically, the establishment party. And defending the status quo just doesn’t rally people in the same way that claims of injustice do.
And I think at this point in time there is a view that being overtly right-leaning is a liability. That it can get you cancelled, that can get you alienated. And it has merit, especially when businesses are going out of their way to demonstrate their foundational commitment to progressivism. That’s very alienating to anyone who leans right, and if you lean right the feeling is that if it becomes apparent that you do not support progressive objectives you are vulnerable to alienation. Those who share a bias don’t see the bias. Progressives don’t see the threat of alienation, they don’t see the threat of cancellation because they are the ones perpetuating it, and they simply are not threatened by it.
I think there’s a latent yet widespread opposition to the institutionalization of progressivism.
It's interesting that you've framed this as a comparison between "progressives" (a political belief system) and "Republicans" (a political party and its supporters). In that case, you could argue that "Republicans" are just the political coalition of different interest groups that are opposed to progressivism for one reason or another. But if you'd said "Democrats" instead of "progressives" you could just as easily say "Democrats are the political coalition of different interest groups that are opposed to conservatism". Lots of people vote Republican because they really don't like some key progressive policy and have nowhere else to go in the USA's two-party system, and vice versa, as opposed to enthusiastically supporting the whole party platform.
Occasionally somebody will say something like "In politics, at some point you have to go beyond just opposing things you don't agree with. You have to actually be for something." This is harder for conservatives from a political standpoint because in many cases, the solutions they favor for problems (when they agree with progressives on what things are problems) are more personal, private and local, and so there's no alternative government solution to propose.
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I don’t really oppose all progressivism. I oppose modern progressivism. I think they’ve ran out of ideas to make the world a better place so we get narrative progressivism.
I don’t think BLM ever had any good ideas. There’s no data cops were more violent to blacks than whites and data that contradicts it. I’ve never seen a black person treated worse than an equivalent white person. The only thing they have is differences in outcomes but that’s explainable by HBD. And we have tried a lot of things to close those gaps and nothing works. We’ve done affirmative action and spent more to black schools and given preferential job access and the gaps don’t close. So then since we’ve tried a bunch of things progressives went to structural racism but are never able to point to what’s causing the issue. When a lot of obvious data to me seems like hbd. If you deny reality then you end up trying to force thru policy which is worse than the status quo.
And trans right seems like a social contagion they’ve created to me. And they are actively causing mental illness in a lot of young people. 30 years ago we had a very small trans population. There was probably some hidden but it feels like their turning the old goths and tomboys going thru confused adolescents into confused trans. Unless there is some toxic polluting messing with hormones it just doesn’t make sense for the differing percent of trans people in different regions/ages other than social contagion. And giving kids gender confusion is a mental illness and bad for them.
So in short I think there ideas are just bad. Now these are not really conservative views. Church every week types. They are just anti-program views. I don’t think today we have many things for progs to attack and improve.
I agree the right doesn’t have activists. The right is filled with mind your own business people that just want to see their community do well, have a family, and be nice to their neighbors. That why it does seem to me that the culture wars from the right are a reactionary move to the activision in the left. A realization that something bad is going on. Normally they would just stay home but at some point you have to defend good things.
Worse, they refuse to acknowledge when their ideas aren't working or have made things worse and are thus in need of change, ironically.
They seem stuck in a mode that assumes that if a given policy hasn't succeeded, that is only evidence that they haven't applied it aggressively or universally enough.
Nuclear energy being a huge one there. Maybe they could notice that we haven't had any truly horrible nuclear meltdown incidents since Chernobyl, that safety has improved, and that nuclear is far more reliable than almost any other option we have, and we've got the nuclear waste problem mostly squared away.
But no. because some subset of the left is still aggressively anti-nuke they quadruple down on other 'green energy' approaches that are naturally subpar.
And let's leave aside that progressivism is basically ruining the one thing that gave it the actual edge: Effective and rigorous academic sciences that were free to explore any idea that seemed potentially useful.
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My brother and 3 of his friends/roommates got pulled over for a traffic violation a couple years ago. It was a major interstate in the U.S. about an hour from a large metro area. There was a white guy driving and a white guy in the passenger seat and two black guys in the back seat. Culturally, they were all middle-class college kids. The cop/trooper asked for the driver’s ID and the ID of the two black guys, not the white passenger.
I’m cherry-picking a bit of your post that’s beside the point you’re trying to make, but it’s fair to say that sometimes people (including law enforcement) let stereotypes drive their actions.
It's also fair to say that sometimes stereotypes are more reflective of reality than of individual bias.
(not refuting your point, tho)
This does relate to story I told though. You could argue that because black people in the U.S. are statistically more likely to be criminals or have been convicted of a crime the extra scrutiny was warranted. While that may be true, that wasn't relevant in this case, and I believe that none of the passengers should have received extra scrutiny.
Can you provide examples of stereotypes that are "more reflective of reality than individual bias?" I'm especially interested in stereotypes that are accurate enough that individuals should be treated differently based on the stereotype.
Like one stereotype that comes to mind is "Tiger moms" or asian parents that are super invested in their kids' success. It's a good stereotype to make jokes about, but should communities/governments make specific policies around it other than just enforcing existing child-welfare policies?
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I would agree that the culture war movements in the right are largely just a reaction to the left.
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The right in the US is a collection of interest groups and not something top down. Hence, no overarching narrative. You’ve got rural people, you’ve got religious people, you’ve got certain business interests- all of which believe they’re being targeted by the government for progressive-ish reasons that mostly are not the same. You’ve got people who are sympathetic to those groups for whatever reason. You’ve got pro-growth libertarians. You’ve got populists. You have a much smaller group of racially conscious and socially conservative but not driven by religion- sort of alt-right adjacent.
These groups might agree on some things in broad strokes. But, they’re going to have different views on root causes and very different narratives.
I don't disagree, but what's interesting is even just last year or perhaps the year before the view was that the left is fundamentally a collection of different interest groups. They've always been perceived as being more fragmented, which is to some extent a necessary function of the fact that they commit so passionately to given causes, which themselves are typically focused on a given group. Especially because those causes usually compete to some extent for primacy within a hierarchy of suffering, the end goal being which group suffers and experiences prejudice the most.
But to some extent your comment is what I'm talking about. I don't think that description is inaccurate, but I'm skeptical that it tells the whole story. I think intellectually there is much more cohesiveness on the right, and it the most relevant split is between the alt right and the conventional right. That also strikes me as somewhat of a progressive's conception of the right, in that it frames the primary binding force of each segment of the right as the perception that they are being targeted by the right. That glosses over the true character of the right in the way I'm suggesting Reuters and Bloomberg do. It's accurate in that those groups do, generally, vehemently oppose progressives, but it's a pejorative articulation of that view, in that it frames it as necessarily conspiratorial, and implies that their view of progressives are of poor enough substance to not warrant further examination.
But, similarly, those groups you describe on the right have always been present and have coexisted in harmony to the point that they were able to operate as a unified front.
I think what’s missing here is that conservatives are, well, conservative and liberals are, well, liberal. Or to put it another way- there’s real personality difference, or at least differences in ideal personalities, which tend to strongly affect how institutions and coalition mates interact with each other to the same or greater extent as personality differences. Thus you see less infighting on the right in a lot of cases where they have less to agree on.
That sounds plausible. Can you elaborate on that?
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I'm pretty confident that the left is also a collection of interest groups. We're just in closest proximity to the Extremely Online segment. The Internet makes it easy to claim membership in half a dozen issues at once, but the people who take one seriously are way less likely to get along with the others.
To clarify, are you talking about interest groups like non-whites, non-straights, non-cis, etc.? All of these groups don't necessarily disagree in the way that hydroacetylene is arguing. That is to say, I'm not aware of black progressives claiming that homophobia isn't a problem, or that there is even one specific root problem in the country - they seem to argue that there are as many problems as there are bigotries.
In contrast, a modern atheistic alt-righter is not going to agree at all with a religious conservative on the problem facing society, though they may just strategically delay that fight.
I think this is a difference between the modern left and right: right-wingers, at least in America, seem somewhat more likely to be single-issue wonks (hence the disparate coalition that has been the GOP, between business libertarians, evangelicals, and nationalists); left-wingers tend to glom onto multiple causes at once, only favoring one thing over others when the zeitgeist calls for it.
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No, I mean anti-racists, feminists, communards, gender abolitionists, tone police, et cetera. It’s way easier to add a bunch of hashtags on a tweet than it is to show up to rallies for competing causes.
The relationship between LGBT advocates and Black advocates might be a good example. Black Americans are not particularly trans-friendly. Intersectionality attempts to paper over this with discussion of how poorly the Black LGBT population is treated, skirting the question of who perpetuates such treatment.
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