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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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This is the best image I've seen to understand the symmetry of the woke left and Trump-right when it comes to foreign affairs. Partisans are willing to jam round pegs into square holes, and so leftists squint and see the Israel vs Palestine conflict as white colonizers vs oppressed brown natives. This worldview is incoherent when you do deeper analysis, but it has sufficient surface level appeal to rip left coalitions apart in circular firing squads around the world. The right (ala Trump) is steadfast in its support of Israel apart from the unironically antisemitic fringe who'll end up throwing in their lot with Trump anyways as part of the coalition process.

Hlynka's analysis is basically just that the woke left and Trump right both want change and are willing to flirt with authoritarianism to get it. There's some stuff about Locke vs Hobbes in there but that's just intellectual salad dressing for the previous sentence. If status quo bias and democracy vs authoritarianism are the only thing you care about, then yeah the two sides probably look pretty similar. But go beyond those and the differences are massive.

So is Hlynka right? Are we going to see the far right attempt to form an alliance with the left in the hopes that their shared antisemitism will be sufficient to gain political power?

No lol. If anything, expect Israel vs Palestine to simply become more partisan. As leftists become more flippantly pro-Palestine, expect the right to use this as ammo to justify tacking towards Israel to an even greater degree. Public polling backs this up.

How would you not see "white colonizers vs oppressed brown natives", even without squinting?

For starters, colonialism has two major cleavages: settler-colonies (e.g. USA, Canada, Australia, etc.) and old-fashioned imperialism (e.g. most of Africa, Latin America). Most criticism of colonialism is of the latter portion, whereas Israel more closely resembles the former. Settler colonies are harder to criticize because they've tended to have fairly good outcomes. At most you could criticize what they did to the natives they displaced decades/centuries ago, but few people argue that the USA should "give back the land" to the natives, which is functionally what Palestinians are demanding in Israel's case.

Second, while many Jews have white skin, most people would say they're culturally and obviously religiously distinct from whites in a number of ways.

I would go into more detail, but looking at your posting history I'm not sure it's justified. I'm happy to dive in more if you respond though!