This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It seems to me a lot of the issues the US is going through stem from the fact the US hasn't had a proper crisis since the Great Depression. A good crisis that wipes the slate clean by destroying existing debts and wealth would fix a lot of things:
property prices and the appreciation assumption
student loans
intergenerational wealth gaps
social security spending
All of these things can be fixed if the stock market takes a nosedive and the dollar loses 90% of its value. In addition, it will make American exports extremely competitive, so the recovery should be relatively quick; also, this will hurt the PRC more than it hurts the US.
The serious version of this post is the work of Mancur Olson, whose most layman-accessible book is the posthumously published Power and Prosperity.
The middle part of the book (which is largely a summary of his earlier academic work) explains how special interests organise in any sufficiently long-lived regime that isn't anarchy (which Olson refers to as rule by roving bandits) or despotism (rule by a stationary bandit). The key point is that the process takes time - it involves forming bonds of trust between people who are professional rivals in their day jobs, collectively agreeing (usually informally, without the possibility of government enforcement) to spend resources on the public-for-the-people-in-the-interest-group good of power-seeking activity, and institution-building to actually do it. So any regime that has been place for a long time without a clean-out of special interests will become sclerotic.
Olson specifically calls out the poor economic performance of the UK in the post-WW2 era as an example. Most countries had experienced either the Great Depression or WW2 as crises leading to the formation of a new regime which could ignore most of the old special interests. The UK "won" both crises (we mitigated the impact of the Depression with expansionary monetary policy leading to a housebuilding boom, and avoided invasion during WW2) so the elite was able to return to the status quo ante without an effective reset. (Olson died before the relative success of the UK in the post-Thatcher era became visible, but if you think that Thatcher carried out a partial purge of special interests, then this is a point of confirmation).
The last part of the book is about the economic institutions of Stalinism and the way it deals with the tend to sclerosis. Olson explains why the size and complexity of the Soviet state meant that it was beyond one-man control, and thus inevitably tended towards nomenklatura oligarchy, and thus to a regime which allowed the organisation of special interests. The solution to this problem was purges, which not only removed existing informal special interest organisations, but also cultivated a sense of paranoia among the nomenklatura which made forming new ones difficult. By the time Brezhnev came to power, the system needed purging but the top leader was too weak to purge it, so the Soviet Union became increasingly sclerotic until it collapsed.
In any case, the signs of special interest driven sclerosis in modern America are obvious - the most relevant special interests being suburban NIMBYs, public-employee unions, the military-industrial complex and the for-profit healthcare industry. I don't think a 90% stock market dive would be enough to purge them - it would take something at least as revolution-like as the New Deal. Note that all these groups work on both sides of the partisan divide and culture war (if you count cop unions as part of the public-employee complex) - this means that even if Ron de Santis is the competent populist bomb-thrower that Trump ultimately turned out not to be, neither he nor a left-wing equivalent is likely to solve the problem through normal partisan politics.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link