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 -
A motte for the term: The deep state
Without endorsing any particular theories here, perhaps the best way to think about the deep state is that it is simply parts of the government that have developed their own distinct political goals and capabilities, and are involved in the political process in ways that may or may not be visible, legal or proper. In some vague sense, a "deep state" may simply be a function of a government. Any government that remains stable for long enough will develop capabilities that do not require a given person at the top, since the leaders change over time. Those abilities will then be put to use in service of whatever political goals unite that part of government.
This becomes more open and more contentious in a democracy when parts of the government revolt against elected leaders.
Conservatives are trapped in a cycle. The more ‘free market’ a society is, the more money is central to status, the more opportunity the private sector offers smart capitalists over the public sector, the more leftist the civil service will be.
The civil service and academia in WEIRD countries trend inexorably to the left. Even if guaranteed not to be cancelled, few smart and ambitious young rightists would want to join the academy or spend 40 years in the education department. In America this problem is even more significant for cultural reasons.The ‘rugged individualism’, the ‘wild west’ spirit, the settler mentality, homestead aesthetic, whatever you want to call it - conservative US culture is anathema to working for the state except in the police or military, or possibly in some cases as a tough on crime DA or in the judiciary (in the latter case only to stop the left and be tough on crime though).
To be very smart and become a civil servant in the US, you essentially need to be either hereditarily very rich (a small minority of people who mostly do other things), or you need to believe that participating in the ‘capitalist economy’ is somewhat unethical, grubby, dirty, immoral. Not that you need to be some kind of staunch Marxist, but you usually need to be the kind of person who thinks that “billionaires are immoral” or whatever. Almost all these people are progressives, because smart, well educated PMC conservatives and libertarians go into the private sector.
In parts of Europe there once existed a patrician/noble conservative class who considered commerce to be 'common', but these never really existed in great numbers in the US and have mostly died out in Europe anyway.
The best thing the right could do would be to replace the civil service with McKinsey or Bain. Not because those organizations aren’t riddled with DEI and ESG (they obviously are), but because ultimately they are governed by and respond to financial incentives. They have clear hierarchies. People can be fired easily. Partners, above all else, want to make money. And so they’ll respond to instructions, even if they consider them vulgar.
I intended to bring this up the next time someone bemoaned progressive (or really just left-leaning) institutional capture, but I'm lazy so luckily you beat me to the punch. Conservatives have complaining about how left-wing academia has become at least since I was in college 20 years ago, but there's been little introspection about why this is the case; indeed, much of their other rhetoric actually undermined any chance of them having any influence at all. All we heard was that studying English and history and any other humanity or social science was useless for anything except academia, and it was pointless to spend a decade pursuing a PhD just so you could compete in a hyper-competitive lottery where the prize was a low-paying job at small school in the middle of nowhere. Much better to major in business or accounting or a hard science and make real money in the real world. And by hard science I mean major in cell and molecular biology so you can work in the pharmaceutical industry, not, like my ex-girlfriend, get a doctorate in cell and molecular biology from an unprestrgious school and focus your research on hearing in whales.
Government jobs are a little bit different since they're much easier to get. They pay less than comparable private sector jobs, but they usually have good benefits and aren't susceptible to recessions or corporate downsizing. But they aren't the place for over-ambitous young go-getters to make names for themselves. Pay is strictly regimented and promotions are slow to come by. Performance bonuses are all but non-existent. And even if you make it into senior administration you're salary will be capped at about 250k a year, you'll have to live in Washington, and you'll be permanently locked out of executive-level positions that go to political appointees. Unless, of course, you have the necessary connections and don't mind losing your job with the next administration or whenever the current one is looking for a scapegoat.
And then there's the added complication that conservatives have traditionally railed against bureaucracy as emblematic of government bloat and unnecessary spending. You look at the cube next to you at a guy who's been phoning it in for the past 20 years but who makes more than you due to seniority rules and can't be fired, and whose job it is to administer programs you think are a waste of money. Why would any conservative want to be part of this when they can make more money doing essentially the same thing at 3M, or US Steel?
Blue tribers(and let’s be real, this is a red/blue division more than a conservative/liberal one) say the same thing, they just don’t expect impressionable youth to listen to them.
Eh, it's more a combo that "blue tribers" are more willing to not have financially successful lives to get what they want. Like, there are a ton of creative people who won't even get all that rich, but will effect far more lives than the median franchise restaurant owner who got an MBA.
As I've said before, for all the blame on teachers or professors, the actual reason why the median 17-year old in rural Nebraska is likely far more liberal than they were in 1995 is they have access to the Internet and can watch videos of non-white people, LGBT people, and even people from other countries have normal lives, and be into normal things.
Like, some trans beauty blogger who has a few million subscribers on YT or whatever probably moves the needle on those kind of issues more than any kind of official lesson plan Red Tribers can try to ban via taking over school boards.
The internet might play a role, but it's definitely not what you describe here. Before widespread censorship done by Big Tech, all the progressives were terrified of the "Alt-Right pipeline", "alt-right" back then meaning "not agreeing with progressivism". It is only through controlling access to information that this "liberal" ideology can spread.
Yeah, those people were dumb. There was no great movement toward the Right of the youth during this time, as you can see by looking at actual voting results.
Even recently, there is a big story about the rightward movement among teen boys, and if you actually look into the numbers, it's barely outside of the margin of error and more importantly, no evidence of long-term change. Plus, it shows, as you'd expect, that most teens don't have an ideology at all. But even back then, the "alt-right pipeline" was a relatively minor part of Youtube, and yes, people freaked out about it incorrectly. Gamergate didn't cause Trump to win - higher turnout among low-salience middle-aged voters in the Midwest gave Trump the win.
I get it - just like my more left-wing friends think if they can just make the right arguments, everybody will be a socialist, you guys think it'd be a generation of edgy right-wingers if not for Youtube "controlling access to information."
But, most people are normies who don't want to be mean to people they get to know. Whether it's the nice Trump-voting waitress at their local Applebee's or the trans kid across the street.
Yeah, almost like censorship worked exactly like intended.
I mean, if controlling access to information is irrelevant, why don't you guys just stop? No skin off your nose, right? I'm happy to lose the game if the rules are fair.
Yeah, but voting for Trump, or not believing that trans women are actually women (to say nothing of opposing the more egregious issues in the trans meme-space) is not "being mean". You have to be actively convinced otherwise.
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
There are hundreds of applications per tenure track position - departments do not and will not hire out conservatives. Adjuncts are in no position to demand reform and this wouldn’t be it, anyway. The problem goes back to grad school and allowed research topics/positions…
The problem is worsening. We see increasing adoption of actual litmus tests (mandatory diversity statements) in which conservative positions are considered tantamount to hate speech.
How exactly would you have conservatives engage or reform this system?
My argument isn't that the system is easily capable of reform now, but that it got the way it did due to decades of conservatives ignoring it. Tenure track positions were always competitive, but you can't spend decades telling your kids to avoid academic pursuits and then act surprised when academia is full of you political adversaries, who didn't face the same pressure. One interesting development is that schools have become so reliant on adjuncts that there's actually a shortage of professors right now. Schools are loathe to give tenure when they can get away with it, and there used to be no shortage of PhDs willing to take low-paying positions to keep their resumes up to date. They didn't seem to realize that this was a temporary situation. When I was in college, most adjuncts were people who worked regular jobs in the community who wanted to teach and would take a small fee to teach one night class a semester in some niche topic that wouldn't get covered normally, usually an elective. Then the post-COVID labor shortage came and all the aspiring professors got good jobs in the private sector, and no one is willing to live on scraps anymore.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes you can't spend the entire time saying that nobody smart would ever get a humanities degree, and advise any young person you know against it, and then complain that no humanities academics are conservatives.
I think he forgot to write the part where he argues that despite all these good reasons not to go into these fields, and despite them not holding any prestige for that power, they hold real power, being an increasingly self-aware part of the chain that every executive decision has to go through to get actually executed.
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