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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Do Trump Supporters Actually Want To Win?
Prompted by this sanctimonious, if interesting, FT column. Emphasis mine:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
No, if Ted Cruz's platform includes monkeying about with Social Security (which he supported as a Senator, but went quiet about once he started running for President). The fact that Trump was not affiliated with the traditional right wing of the Republican party and was therefore credible when he promised to protect Social Security and Medicare was critical to his ballot box success.
Trump would have lost to an empty suit in 2016 in the Democrats had managed to run one and did lose to an empty suit in 2020. Thinking that Trump is unusually popular with the median voter is "How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him" level stupid. DeSantis, on the other hand, was re-elected by a landslide in what used to be considered a purple slate.
Then how can we explain Trump's dominance over DeSantis in polls and prediction markets? He's currently at 70% to win the nomination, and he is slaughtering DeSantis in the polls.
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11370/2024-republican-nominee-for-us-prez/
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/gop_primaries/
I'm sure name recognition plays a part, but as time goes by this becomes less and less credible. Republicans love Trump. They don't love DeSantis.
Certainly DeSantis has been popular in his own state, but this doesn't seem to translate to nationwide success. DeSantis might even win fewer non-Republicans than Trump. Trump seems to do well with some minority voters who love his machismo, even if he plays for the wrong team. DeSantis, with his high IQ and whiny voice, will not attract those voters. I hope I'm wrong, but 2024 seems to be a replay of 2016 for the Republican primaries, with Trump consistently being underestimated. He reaches people.
Those Prediction Markets are predicting the Republican nominee not the general election. It's totally plausible Trump is extremely popular with the Republican base and not popular with the general electorate.
But is DeSantis more popular with the general electorate? There was a time when this would have seemed plausible, but the headlines he's generated since he became the media's golden boy have all been related to whatever culture war bullshit he's promoting in his state. He painted himself into a corner and now he finds himself running to the right of Trump. Had he focused his campaign on administrative competence that vaguely hinted at effective implementation of MAGA-adjacent principles, I'd say he has a good chance of winning the general election. But the hasn't done that. He's publicly waged an all-out war against wokism and LGBT stuff, not to mention his quixotic war against Disney and the stunt where he sent immigrants from Texas up north. If he'd done these things quietly it may have provoked some kind of backlash but not nearly as much as centering his entire public persona around them. Plus, he seems unwilling to give interviews to anyone who will do anything other than lob softballs at him. It's nice work if you can get it, but he can't do this all the way through a fucking presidential election and expect to win. Remember, he needs to convince people in swing states who voted for Biden that he's the more reasonable candidate than Trump, and those states have all either stood pat when it was expected they may shift right a bit (Nevada, Arizona) or decisively shifted left (Pennsylvania, Michigan).
Trump was able to win in 2016 largely because he was a totally unknown entity running against a lousy Democtratic candidate. Once people knew what to expect, he lost. DeSantis doesn't have that advantage, and simply being a Trump who can wage the culture war better provided he has a compliant legislature isn't going to convince moderates and independents that he's much of an improvement.
Yes how could a candidate win without just getting softballs from the media. Wait, every single democrat successful presidential candidate from recent memory.
Also it’s far from obvious the “anti woke” stuff doesn’t play with independents. Most people for example don’t like elementary kids having porn in the school library. Taking a stand against that historically would be an easy win for a politician. My guess is we aren’t so degenerate that it still is an easy win.
When conservatives talk about bias in the mainstream media, they're referring to any media that isn't specifically right-leaning. And the only kinds of people who regularly watch (and not hate-watch) specifically right-leaning media are people who aren't going to vote for a Democrat anyway, so there's no need to, though most Democratic candidates usually will throw a bone to mainstream right-leaning outlets like Fox. Republicans don't have that luxury. Yeah, you can dodge MSNBC but probably not regular NBC or CBS or even CNN. Fox news averages fewer than 2 million daily viewers while the big 3 networks combine for about 20 million for their evening news broadcasts. 60 Minutes alone averaged over 8 million viewers this past season, and that number would probably top 10 million if a major party candidate were interviewed. Their interviews with Trump and Biden ahead of the 2020 election drew around 17 million each. One simply can't get that kind of "earned" exposure by sticking with pliant conservative outlets, and these numbers obviously don't include the people who read articles summarizing the interviews. And does he plan on skipping the debates, too? A guy like Trump can get away with that since he has a comfortable lead, but DeSantis doesn't have that luxury. It's hard to make the case that Ron's a fighter if he isn't even willing to throw down with fucking Lesley Stahl.
As for anti-wokeness, I think it does play well with independents and probably most Democrats. I'm a Democrat who wishes this shit would just end, and a lot of my friends who are otherwise a lot more liberal than I am feel the same way. Ron's problem is twofold. First is that his solutions are more heavy-handed than a lot of people are comfortable with. If his "war on wokism" or whatever were limited to making arguments about how intellectually bankrupt and incoherent it is and refusal to play games in the name of whatever, then I think it would be palatable to independents. If it means enacting legislation to do things like curb private speech (e.g. restricting corporate DEI initiatives) then it's a totally different ballgame. The second problem is that even though a lot of people are annoyed by wokeness it's not necessarily something that's high on the priority list. Most people have no personal experience with the more egregious examples floated in the media, and even those who claim specific knowledge that isn't widely reported have, in my experience, mostly heard it second and third-hand. Like the guy at the bar who was claiming CRT material was being distributed in a nearby school district to where we live—he doesn't have kids or grandkids in school and is relying on reports from his cousin's son's friend or whatever. For most people the most they see is the occasional pronoun in an email signature, and while that's irritating it probably isn't something you're going to change your vote over. One thing the most recent two midterms taught us is that bread and butter issues win elections. The Democrats who flipped seats in 2018 did so on the backs of Republican threats to healthcare, and the Republicans who flipped seats last year were milquetoast moderates. The culture warriors did miserably. That's what it's going to take to flip D votes R, and I don't know that DeSantis really offers that kind of thing. I'd say his chances were better if he ran culture war to boost his chances in the primary but backed it up with solid moderate stances on mainstream issues, but I haven't seen that from him yet, and I think it's too late for him to change tracks now, especially since, at least so far, he's making Trump seem like the moderate option.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link