site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 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.

11
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I finished reading Peter Turchin's new book, End Times this past week, which visits many elements of the culture war, including Trump, immigration, 99%ers, even Ukraine. I hadn't read his previous books, but apparently they included more of the data and graphs that he works with for his research. This one is branded more populist, from the name, bright red cover, and relegation of models and graphs to the final third of the book, which is all appendix. He comes across as a moderate Marxist, who's trying not to alienate American conservatives.

The basic argument is that a core part of nation ending turmoil is a cycle of what he calls the wealth pump and overproduction of elites. A society will start out an epoch with a more or less equitable share of power and money between the workers and the elites, but at some point, this is disrupted by the elites ovedrawing resources from the economy, often because they have too many children, or allow more upward mobility than downward. Then popular immiseration sets in, where the workers have decreased access to the kind of resources they need to thrive -- land, capital, opportunities -- and the elites have a "wealth pump," which seems to be his way of talking returns on capital outpacing returns on labor. Also, increased immigration to keep labor costs low, and benefit employers. The wealthy grow, the poor grow, and the middle class shrinks. Elite competition becomes more and more intense, both because there are more people competing for roughly the same number of positions, often simply because population growth outstrips the growth of important positions, and because the alternative of downward mobility looks worse and worse in comparison. So everyone with any money or influence tries extra hard to get their kids a good position at whatever their era's version of the ivy leagues are, so they can benefit from the growth of the top 10%, while desperately fearing falling into the precariat. There are a bunch of young intelligentsia without money or positions, but a lot of education and family investment, ready to become counter elites or revolutionaries. Often they wage wars until enough of them die to relieve the social pressure, and the cycle starts over.

Turchin's main prescription follows the outlines of the New Deal -- high tax rates for the rich, a growing minimum wage, labor unions, low immigration, perhaps public works projects, that kind of thing.

I found the prescription, especially, underwhelming. Turchin doesn't really go into the kinds of jobs workers do, or how that might influence things, and there's no real commentary about going from an agricultural labor base, to industrial manufacturing, to service, and the growth of a suspicion that it isn't just the aspiring elite jobs that are basically useless, but many of the "workers" are as well. A large component of the current malaise seems to be the impression not only that there are too many leaders, not enough followers, but that, increasingly, the followers are all simulated, automated, or passive consumers, not workers at all. It seems like any plan that could hope to stabilize society over the next hundred years would need to incorporate the possibility that most middle class jobs, especially, as well as a decent number of working class ones, will be automated, while higher level positions and things like garbage collection and construction continue to be necessary much longer. Sure, we could probably move to an economy where each person's job is to care for some other person's parent, child, or pet, but that doesn't seem like a great outcome. He does not mention this at all.

Marxism has been tried, over and over again. Always it produces shortages, usually it produces skulls. Why do we have to keep doing it?

Sure, Marxism mostly fails to create good economies. However, the part of Marxism where you drag rich people out of their homes in the middle of the night, shoot them in the back of the head, and toss their still-warm bodies into a ditch is appealing to many people. So what if everything goes to shit afterwards? You still got your revenge on the previous elites, and nothing can ever take that away from you.

The other thing is, command economies are pretty effective if you want to speed-run a society's development from mostly agricultural to mostly industrial and if you want to introduce stuff like public education and women's rights on a mass scale. Many people die in the process, but a few decades later the survivors look back and see that they went from having no prospects except subsistence farming when they were children to now working as factory professionals or bureaucrats.

Can capitalist economies accomplish the same thing? Sure, and probably with less death on average. US-aligned dictatorships murdered over a million civilians during the Cold War, whereas the failures and repressions of communist regimes led to probably an order of magnitude more deaths in communist-controlled countries during the same period. However, this is a rather subtle point and the difference is not so obviously glaring as to immediately cause the average person to throw out Marxism as a clear failure. For most of the history of the competition between capitalism and communism, in most of the world, the average person's choice has not been between modern-style US liberal democracy and communism, it has been between non-communist dictatorship and communist dictatorship.

For most of the history of the competition between capitalism and communism, in most of the world, the average person's choice has not been between modern-style US liberal democracy and communism, it has been between non-communist dictatorship and communist dictatorship.

Granting that this is true, Park Chung Hee was a much better ruler than Kim Il Sung. Pinochet was a much better ruler than Allende. Etc, etc.

Park Chung Hee was a much better ruler than Kim Il Sung.

Both killed many people but yeah, I imagine that Kim Il Sung probably killed an order of magnitude more people.

Pinochet was a much better ruler than Allende.

Not sure about this. I have never heard of Allende being responsible for killing anyone, although being a politician he probably was. Pinochet, on the other hand, clearly was responsible for killing many people.

I have never heard of Allende being responsible for killing anyone

In large part this is because Allende was overthrown before he could transition to actual communism. So perhaps my statement should have been "a much better ruler than Allende would have been".

Allende is set to opposed the threat of a good example. But now Pinochet exists as an example of a bad capitalist.

I have a friend from Chile who is absolutely opposed to the woke (and to a somewhat lesser degree the broader left) but wants to vomit when you bring up Pinochet. His family personally suffered.

I'm going to take a page out of the tankie playbook and say that if your friend's family suffered, it must mean they were commie bastards who deserved it.

What is this comment supposed to achieve? Are you being ironic? Are you literally saying someone whose family personally suffered deserved it? Speak plainly and less inflammatorily.

More comments

Cycle of violence my friend. I'm going to assume with a comment like that that your family ought to be Roman-offed.

More comments