site banner
PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28365 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Do Trump Supporters Actually Want To Win?

Prompted by this sanctimonious, if interesting, FT column. Emphasis mine:

Just because liberals have always feared the emergence of a competent demagogue doesn’t mean populist voters have yearned for it to the same degree. How much of his base did Trump lose after failing to build that wall on the Mexican border?

DeSantis believes that politics is downstream of culture, that culture is shaped in institutions, that conservatives have ceded those institutions to the organised left. The Gramsci of Tallahassee doesn’t just diagnose the problem. He is creative and dogged in installing a rightwing counter-hegemony. Ask Disney. Ask the educational bureaucracies of Florida. This is more thought and work than Trump has ever put in to the cause. It is also perfectly beside the point. I am no longer sure that populist voters want to win the culture war.

For a long time, a certain pro-Trump (or anti-anti-Trump, if you want) narrative on the 'intellectual right' was that there was no real alternative to Trump. Sure, they conceded that most criticisms of Trump-the-man were correct, but this was the Flight 93 Election. The alternatives were all versions of Mitt Romney or Marco Rubio, who didn't say the things Trump occasionally did. We can restate the Flight 93 theory like this:

"Trump is vulgar, he's a liar, he's a cheat, he violates conservative or even general principles of decorum and morality. However, he's the only person even discussing the things we care about with a large public audience, and therefore it is a conservative responsibility to vote for him even if this amounts, merely, to a roll of the dice. If he wins, there's a chance he might do some of what he promises. The only alternative to Trump is certain defeat."

DeSantis' presence complicates the Flight 93 theory. DeSantis has a record of some competence on conservative issues. Certainly not enough for the very online dissident right, but they had soured on Trump by late 2017 themselves, and so have no horse in this race. Whether DeSantis of Yale and Harvard is a 'true believer' is a complicated question, but then again the same could be said about Trump of New York via Wharton; the former certainly seems a much more capable administrator.

The column posits that Trump's success against DeSantis in this phony war stage of the 2024 primary campaign is a case of "vibes based politics" winning over 'substance based politics'. In 2016, intellectual conservatives could defend Trump because - whatever the vibes were - he was the only candidate on substance, too. In 2023, the banality of Trump's support is more clear. Ironically, it leads to a case for an interesting question - if Trump had merely attached his vibe to Ted Cruz' political platform in 2016, would he still have won? Was it less 'build the wall' and more who the frontman for building the wall was? The smart case for Trump would seem to be reducible to:

  1. DeSantis is a "phony" or establishment conservative who will turn in office and resign himself to implementing the Mitch McConnell checklist of tax cuts, deregulation, more money for the military and cutting some welfare spending. The problem with this is that Trump was in office and accomplished little but (some of) the above, and hardly has a lifelong history of staunch conservative politics himself. If the problem is associating with elite circles, Trump has a long history of the same.

  2. DeSantis can't win the presidential election even if he takes the primary, Trump can. This argument is more persuasive, if only because Trump's record shows he has technically convinced enough people in the right places to vote for him to show he can win. But Trump also lost a presidential election, never hit a 50% approval rating (even once, something Biden has apparently managed) and seems not to be experiencing any great groundswell of public support from swing voters. The promise of Trump is now tainted by the reality of Trump, so MAGA might ring slightly more hollow to those who aren't true believers.

liberals have always feared the emergence of a competent demagogue

I love this line because thinking about what your enemies fear is often an interesting thought experiment. Republicans are being presented with a choice between Trump and an American Viktor Orban. Nothing is settled, but they appear to strongly prefer the former.

I doubt the narrative that Desantis will be significantly more effective than trump, because we have a foretaste of who trump will appoint this time around and, say, Ken Paxton is likely to be at least as effective as Desantis when given a blank check. I really don’t expect trump to do much actual governing, I expect him to occasionally hold photo ops, nominate judges the GOP tells him to and give a far-right cabinet a blank check.

I think it was Hannania, who I think been crushing it lately, who said if a person takes a job in the Trump administration it’s the last job he will ever get while Desantis gives them the normal post administration options.

Perhaps this isn’t true but it feels correct to me. But I don’t think his cabinet with a check will have much power. They will be C people facing lawfare from everywhere. Putting out fires is all they will accomplish.

I think that that’s simply not true, and that trumps failure in the last admin is more attributable to resistance from govt employees.

This will likely be less of a factor in term two, because 1) trump can be expected to make it easier to fire the worst offenders and 2) he can be expected to appoint hardline rightwing loyalists.

Either Blues are too stupid to level the same firepower against a more effective Desantis, or Desantis wouldn't actually be as effective, or they would level the same firepower against a more effective Desantis. The first option seems quite unlikely, and the latter two give no advantage to Desantis.

Well Trump has at most 4 years. DeSantis has up to 8 potential years. That’s markedly different in a feud.

I think this grants too much agency to Blues as a group.

The level of firepower is almost never calculated. It’s intuited. Powerful blues do get to steer this process, as with news outlets trying to make a villain, but they’re responding to short-term incentives and easy narratives more than an overarching strategy. DeSantis will take less flak than Trump as long as he inspires less of a disgust reaction.

The level of firepower is almost never calculated. It’s intuited. Powerful blues do get to steer this process, as with news outlets trying to make a villain, but they’re responding to short-term incentives and easy narratives more than an overarching strategy. DeSantis will take less flak than Trump as long as he inspires less of a disgust reaction.

It is not obvious to me that Blue disgust with Trump was greater because of Trump's specific quirks, relative to his vocal commitment to Red values and the growing extremism within Blue Tribe itself. I am worried that Desantis, if he is an effective champion, will provoke an equivalent disgust reaction from Blues. Nor do I see how any of this bears on agency of Blues as a group; I am not claiming the apparent disgust was astroturfed or otherwise manufactured.

Don't be. (speaking form a blue tribe bubble and a leftist position here)

Trump is uniquely bad to the libs among us because he is a norm violator and has the affect and language of a low IQ prole type AND is also a tacky tasteless fat rich guy; a fucking unforgivable combo. Ron on the other hand is your standard political reptilian. Boring, in other words. Too bad for him, he is really on the horns here.

His problem is he needs to assume some of that trumpian glory and make himself exciting; which will also make people excited to vote against him. Him going full speed ahead on his culture war arc has the libs and the left taking notice; too many photos of empty library shelves and pallets full of books being removed, too much rhetorical light surrounding the don't say gay bill (eg; "its only grades 1-3/5/12/colleges also now) ; regardless of the how fake the whole thing is.

It's all great ammunition, and trump still being around is keeping the spirit alive in the base. I've been at socal wine tastings where the toast was "To trump and bidden: please don't die before 2025".

Basically, in order to inhabit Trump as a spirit totem, he needs to become more trumplike and piss off all the boring lib centrists out there.

I am worried that Desantis, if he is an effective champion, will provoke an equivalent disgust reaction from Blues.

This is my concern as well and I don't think it's unfounded. Every republican president has been literal hitler, and the volume of shrill panic has continuously spiraled upwards.

My blue friends have made no differentiation between Desantis and Trump (despite, in my mind, there being a massive difference in their approaches and palatability). I do think Destantis offers the people who work with him far more stability and long-term progress than his competitor, to @netstack 's point, and I think anyone who is reasonable as a moderate would be more likely to vote for Destantis than Trump.

No, part of being "more effective" includes, for example, drafting EOs with language that is less-susceptible to challenge than Trump's were, and avoiding explicit public statements which provide grist for the lawfare mill. Or being more familiar with the administrative process, and handling the promulgation of new regulations with the proper procedures. Or being more familiar with the wide variety of administrative and procedural tools that can be brought to bear against, e.g., rogue prosecutors, as DeSantis has been doing with Florida state's attorneys. Or being more dedicated to governing in an anti-progressive manner than in getting good press coverage (See, e.g., Trump firing Sessions, hiring Wray, appointing a special counsel re: Russia hoax, etc.)

I'm not arguing that Desantis can't be more effective than Trump. I'm arguing that there is no practical level of effectiveness that can prevent the FBI from ratfucking a president they don't like.

I agree that FBI opposition can harm an administration they don't like. However, I don't think that a more competent and audacious administration would have been nearly as harmed as Trump was by Russiagate. The FBI is nominally under executive branch control, and the President has the pardon power - an administration that doesn't concede to opposition pressure has ways of pushing back against rogue enforcement.

I think a middle ground exists where Trump is actually repulsive and undignified. Liz Cheney types would still around and the broad middle wouldn’t play ball with blue shenanigans.

I think a middle ground exists where Trump is actually repulsive and undignified. Liz Cheney types would still around and the broad middle wouldn’t play ball with blue shenanigans.

More repulsive than the Trans movement? More repulsive than the BLM riots and Antifa murders? If their judgement is that poor, why are they useful?

Those weren’t issues back in 2016-2020 as much. And after 2020 he had the election denial stuff.

Trump did things in 2016 like being mean to immigrants instead of just not wanting them.

Because Trump was the president. He defacto represents the R's, just like Bidden represents the D's.

Him being gross means that the R's are also gross through the transitive property, because he is king shit of R mountain.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats