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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   33493 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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Where does the state's legitimacy derive? Lysander Spooner's answer (it doesn't) seems to be the only one which makes sense.

And again this is the sort of thing that I'm talking about when I say that there is a giant Hobbes-shaped whole in the discourse. The obvious response that almost every red-triber learns as a child is "from the consent of the governed" and yet this concept seems to be completely alien to progressives and the wider left. A cynical man might even theorize that the absence of this concept is why the philosophical left seems to be so much more prone to devolving into totalitarianism and mass-murder that the ostensibly more authoritarian right.

The obvious response that almost every red-triber learns as a child is "from the consent of the governed" and yet this concept seems to be completely alien to progressives and the wider left.

I'm neither progressive nor part of the wider left, and your insistence that everyone who doesn't agree with you is has become quite tiresome. As for "from the consent of the governed", yes, I learned this in school as well. It appears among other places in the Declaration of Independence: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". But it's a fiction. Nobody "consented" except through tortured versions of consent ("if you don't move to an ungoverned place you've consented the government you're living under). And this "consent" cannot be withdrawn without punishment (as Jefferson, of course, knew). Government's powers are by and large not "just" at all.

Hobbes doesn't help, he just provides another tortured version of consent. Either the sovereign keeps you out of a state of nature in which case you should, by all means, consent because a state of nature is worse than anything the sovereign would do to you. Or if you don't consent, you're in a state of nature, in which case whatever the sovereign does to you is fine because that's what a state of nature is. So Hobbes's conception boils down to "might makes right", with some apologia about how it is right to bow down to might because only that might can keep you from the state of nature.

your insistence that everyone who doesn't agree with you is has become quite tiresome.

And for the umpteenth time it's not "everyone who doesn't agree with [me]", it's the specific set of "red-pilled" blue tribe academic types from progressive backgrounds that seem to generate the bulk of the anti-woke content here on theMotte. IE the sort of people I described above.

I would suggest that you find Hobbes' conception of consent (or willing submission as he would put it) to be "tortured" because it violates some closely held belief of yours. I am urging you to examine that belief.

You’re confusing culture with politics.

No u -- the whole entire point of the Red/Blue tribes is that they don't map cleanly to right/left and most particularly not Dem/Rep.

Blue Tribe is very much a thing, and lots and lots of them vote Republican -- mostly for different reasons than the Red Tribe Republicans, but that's the point.

Nixon would probably be considered Blue Tribe by your standards

Nixon was raised working-class religious in Yorba Linda -- so probably not Blue Tribe, actually. The Bushes would be much closer, despite their down-homey pretensions.

I don't know, I think the original definitions are useful in at least giving specific terms to a constellation of related characteristics. To borrow from someone else's 3-year-old comment:

If (for example) someone never attends church, lives in a city, tries to be vegetarian, doesn't watch football, doesn't own any guns, uses cannabis, listens to "everything but country", has a master's degree, and works in academia or technology, they are not part of the Red tribe, no matter how many times they vote for Republicans or write Reddit comments critical of progressives.

I'll confess, I don't know a more succinct way to articulate that divide than Red Tribe/Blue Tribe, but that might be a lack of imagination on my part.

Except it doesn't map cleanly to rural or urban either because you'll get guys like Joe Rogan and Bill Burr who are both very clearly Urban and Liberal while equally clearly coding as "Red".

It's a cultural heuristic not a firm binary and it does seem to map to a clear set of positions and personality traits that exist independently of Northern/Southern Urban/Rural and Republican/Democrat even if there are statistically significant correlations to each of those distinctions.

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