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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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How is it that so many people who are in favor of criminal penalties for recreational drugs use also came to believe that the covid lockdowns were bad because they were an assault on liberty? I think that an authoritarian argument such as "we like small businesses but we do not like drug users" at least is logically consistent although I find it disagreeable. But how is it that so many people who think of themselves as fans of liberty do not notice the contradiction? I believe that even here on The Motte there are some people who make libertarian-ish arguments against the lockdowns yet support the criminalization of recreational drugs.

In general much of the non-authoritarian right's attitudes toward recreational drugs make no sense to me. I dislike the authoritarians but again, at their arguments are consistent. Is this largely a matter of conservatism still being dominated by older people who have a learned-long-ago and now reflexive dislike of the idea of recreational drug use? A reaction against the hippies, some sort of view that drug use in general is politically left-coded and/or linked to sexual promiscuity? As a new generation of currently-young conservatives becomes dominant in the movement will we see the right become more accepting of recreational drug use? Given that so many on the right now enjoy thinking of themselves as dissidents against establishment orthodoxy, perhaps they will at least begin view psychedelics more favorably given that those drugs have at least some power to liberate people's mental attitudes from orthodoxy.

How is it that so many people who are in favor of criminal penalties for recreational drugs use also came to believe that the covid lockdowns were bad because they were an assault on liberty?

There's probably a way to square that circle and make the two positions cohere, but the better explanation of incoherent Covid stances on both the right and left is that it's just political tribes picking a side and circling the wagons. In March 2020 there were right wingers who were gungho on pandemic restrictions and left wingers who were blithe to the danger and also were anti-bigpharma vaccine skeptics. But a variety of factors pushed the median left winger to be pro-restrictions and the median right winger to be anti-restrictions. After that both sides rallied around the flag.