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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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I'm libertarian and have a bit of experience fighting losing political battles. I have to say I'm often suspicious of any group that claims to need some form of total victory for any success to be seen. Because they tend to quickly turn towards violence when their victory is not immediate.

There should be intermediate changes in any political plan, here are some reasons why:

  1. You can verify that the underlying belief system is good and useful. If intermediate changes produce obviously bad outcomes then you need to rethink stuff.

  2. Your followers can be happy about something.

  3. Your enemies will see you going slow and they won't all fight as if this is an existential crisis. (some minority will treat it like its existential anyways, politics attracts crazy people)

As it is, that plan is basically going to wind up being "kill my political enemies, and then things will be great".

I'm libertarian and have a bit of experience fighting losing political battles. I have to say I'm often suspicious of any group that claims to need some form of total victory for any success to be seen. Because they tend to quickly turn towards violence when their victory is not immediate.

I have long shared this suspicion. On the other hand, it sees trivial to find examples in history where the political problems really were so locked-down that revolutionary violence was the only way out. The pre-civil war era in America for one: John Brown and Fort Sumner are examples from both sides of stepping off the brink for lack of an apparent better option. Russia, or any of the big Communist states show the pattern more starkly: once they consolidated power, there really was no fixing things in an incremental fashion.

Incrementalism is to be strictly preferred to revolution, but it requires some minimal level of cooperation to operate. Whether that level of cooperation exists is a really important question.