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I see that neither side of the culture war right now focuses on the positive, on something beautiful. Both sides see themselves as righteous oppressed victims fighting against the evil empire of the other side, but for both it is less a Star Wars vision than a Terminator vision. War machines running over skulls at night-time, death and lasers. The culture war is bleak and stark, it has no poetry, no romance. It is a grim attrition war, trenches and minor offensives but few large breakthroughs if by breakthroughs one means reaching one's opponent and convincing him of something. Where are the creative songbirds of thought and word who would transcend this opposition and maybe get both sides to become aware that both are equally stuck in the human condition? Has rhetoric truly reached the limits of its potential power? I have so rarely seen anyone change his mind about anything more than minor details.
It is all so tiresome. Maybe it is possible to move in some orthogonal direction and flank this whole conflict from a side that has the breath of fresh air behind it?
You describe how people are convinced about anything like ever. It always works frustratingly slowly and then suddenly and quickly. You do not convince people in one discussion, my working model is that you maybe shift their position 1 percentage point at a time. And as their previously 100% opinion reaches that 50% threshold after many discussions and personal experiences, then they suddenly flip their publicly stated and communicated position. It may seem very surprising, but in fact nothing dramatic happened - it was the same slow process as before inside their heads. The upside is that the new beliefs have deeper roots and they will not shift on a whim.
The second rule is that even if talking with true believers, the aim is not to convince them - although it is a plus if that ever happens even in the sense of mildly shifting their posterior. It is lurkers and bystanders watching from the outside, those who are interested in the discussion which are the true "targets". So you are not shifting one person slightly, you are shifting many more people slightly and depending on quality of your arguments you may flip public position of a few people on the margin. I know it happened to me and at least my friends I talk to, when over time we are more likely to get closer in our previously different opinions if the quality of arguments is good.
As for "creative songbirds" who transcend the polarization, they are out there. Prime example that comes to my mind is Breaking Points with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, a youtube talkshow where the former represents the progressive and the later conservative viewpoint on a given controversy of the day. The issue is that the polarization is in the eye of the beholder. Depending on who you ask, the Breaking Points is a cesspit of fascist propaganda or a commie plot sneaking into your bedroom. Again, not a new phenomenon - I remember similar research that asked to rate newspapers and their stance on Israel/Palestianian conflict. The evaluation of any given paper from people asked ranged wildly, depending on what piece from that paper different persons remembered. People often get stuck on things they dislike, it is hard for them to forget. You may know that saying where a man builds 1,000 bridges but sucks just one dick, and he is now forever known not as a bridgebuilder, he is now a cocsksucker.
There is a presumption here that the war doesn’t matter and isn’t about real meaningful things. I’m not a believer that “everything is fake” so I don’t see how people come together because some guy gave a nice speech.
Personally I think behaviors often changes before opinion changes. IMO eliminating legally things like DEI through the Supreme Court will end up changing a lot of opinions in time. Just like many executives today are woke simply out of lawsuit risks. The right needed to be legally allowed to exists before they could change any minds.
I don’t get the sense the left thinks they are victims. George Floyd isn’t a leftists. The “lefts” elite who hold him up and other “minorities” are not the “minorities”.
I’m currently going through a political shift in my life at the moment, as a result of an opportunity I’m pursuing that isn’t turning out the way I’m expecting. Progressives are currently winning me over on the ‘ethics’ of the Justice System. It’s doubtful they would’ve convinced me of their position absent my own experience. I couldn’t change their opinions. They couldn’t change my opinions. But experience is certainly changing my opinion.
Some of them clearly believe their own garbage. You saw that with the Bud Light commercials. I don’t think their executives wanted to take a shot at burning a lot of money just to get a rise out of people or ingratiate themself with the woke mob to avoid the tiki torches.
Behind closed doors, the right-wing is figuring out how to build alternative media and it’s own platforms, as a way to hedge against the inevitable shutdown they face, by operating their infrastructure out of a politically engaged and opposed technological backbone. You saw this with Vox Day’s attempts at creating Castalia House. You see this with Imperium Press offering perks to subscribers to keep cash coming in. And I think you’ll continue to see it grow.
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IMO there's a valid take that looks like this that I sometimes embrace: Kulturkampf is fundamentally bike-shedding and the narcissism of small differences writ-large. The things we spend so much time and effort arguing about are, at the end of the day, fairly trivial issues on the grand scale of geopolitics and human endeavor. We're discussing whether
divine preordination and free will can coexistFirst Amendment creative freedom weights against civil rights accommodation law require expressions the creator may disagree with, or about the impacts of marginal changes to tax policy.To defer to the canonical example, we spend so much time and effort debating the color of the bike shed at the nuclear power plant because everyone understands (or believes they understand) a bike shed. Nuclear safety requires experts and in-depth engineering, so between the smaller constituency (which is made further homogeneous because of the smaller education pipeline to such expertise) doesn't get as much debate. Voters don't care about "positive void coefficients" until an accident makes them, and often even then it gets reduced to "nuclear unsafe."
The Culture War is almost entirely defined by issues in which the general public at least feels an expertise: with very few exceptions, everyone has been in a classroom, everyone knows both men and women, has opinions on spiritual beliefs, and has opinions about their local environment. And so these are the things we argue about.
In the end, will Culture War issues be the things that really matter? I often doubt it, unless we let it tear us apart from the inside. It's a bit harder to decide what will write history, but, for example, whether or not the folks at Lockheed wear Pride-themed socks while assembling Tools for the Continuation of Pax Americana and broader Liberal Western Hegemony seems unlikely to be a deciding factor.
I sometimes look at the year of general unity following 9/11 as an example of what happens when we have reason to stop debating trivialities and find ourselves united by a common enemy: the differences between the median Red and Blue voter are pretty small compared to their differences to, say, the politics of Russia. I'm not going to suggest there isn't a legitimate case to keep each other honest sometimes, but I think there's something to the claim that politics is the real mind-killer.
In a Christian society this really matters, though. It determines whether crimes are people’s fault or not, whether people deserve rewards and praise for their achievements or not; it percolates all through society. The reason it looks trivial now is because Christianity ceased to be the core of our society and the implications of theology no longer mattered. For exactly the same reasons, details of left-wing woke culture that were considered trivial are now matters of life and death, sometimes literally.
(I don’t disagree with the broader point, it’s possible that society takes an unexpected turn and I too would like to hear more positive visions.)
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Those aren’t necessarily trivial issues though. Free speech is a fundamental right, and the ability to say what you want to say — and to be allowed to be heard — are critical in any sort of democracy. If I cannot say what I believe to be true, then there’s no possibility of debate, reason, or compromise. If I’m compelled to speak, it’s the same thing, dissenters are forced into participating in things they find odious and thus the ability to be creative in service to your own ideas is compromised because the state wishes to force me to say things I don’t believe.
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