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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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There seems to be a link between having values on foreign policy similar to John Bolton and being woke in Europe.

If there is, it's not a strong one. At least here, being anti-US and anti-NATO still correlates mostly to being far-left, though there's a smallish far-right section with that view, too. Of course, one could argue that the anti-US far-left is not generally the wokest part of the left, but I know both anti-American woke and non-woke leftists with equivalent views on NATO/US/Ukraine.

However, at the moment, being pro-NATO, pro-Ukraine and concurrently pro-American is the view shared by the vast majority of the population, with NATO support being something like 80 % at the moment. Within this section, the most fervent nuke-Moscow crowd tends to be politically of centre-to-centre-right variety and not really particularly concerned with things like wokeness and non-wokeness.

being anti-US and anti-NATO still correlates mostly to being far-left,

This tends to more old left rather than the super woke left.

the most fervent nuke-Moscow crowd tends to be politically of centre-to-centre-right variety and not really particularly concerned with things like wokeness and non-wokeness.

The center right tends to support liberal interventionism consistently. The center right was the most pro war in Iraq, Libya and Syria to then start complaining about the millions of migrants these wars yielded. In Israel-Palestine the conflict is between those who want Arabs to live where they have lived for generations and those who want them to move. The center right strongly supports large numbers of Arabs having to move. That the same people who wanted to spend trillions defending feminism in Afghanistan are pro war isn't surprising. That the center right supports the next military venture isn't surprising. The surprising part is that the people who used to be opposed to the foreign wars largely falling in line this time around.

This tends to more old left rather than the super woke left.

This is all very much at the margins of political discourse here but at least in Britain anti-NATO sentiment, which there isn't really that much of anymore, seems to come as much from Sultana-esque young left-wingers as it does from older Galloway-esque ones.

This tends to more old left rather than the super woke left.

One part of this might just be that the super woke left just isn't particularly interested in geopolitics, or only interested in a perfunctory way. However, I, at least, myself know people who could probably be put on the "super woke left" and are pacifists, or anti-interventionists

The surprising part is that the people who used to be opposed to the foreign wars largely falling in line this time around.

At least here (and I don't think that there are any countries where the switch has happened as hard and fast as here), this is mainly just an effect of the fact that in Feb 2022 (not literally on that month, but in and around the months before and after the invasion), the entire society fell in line around a new foreign policy consensus that is pro-Ukraine, pro-NATO and pro-American. Basically the only people that didn't were the ones who had a really firm anti-NATO line before that month, and even many of them (like me) were affected.

However, even after that switch, the super-woke types don't tend to be the most eager NATO supporters; that, as said, is mostly the avenue of he center-to-center-right types who, with some expections, tended to already be pro-NATO before the invasion.