site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It is the possibility of smashing their idols, of redacting and retracting the belief in liberty, equality, and fraternity.

It's not clear to me that those aren't the value of the American right, at least since they kicked the Royalists up to British North America. The differences between the mainstream American right and the mainstream American left are marginal:

Liberty: The right tends to put more emphasis on negative freedom rather than positive freedom. There have been times when, on social issues, the right has been sceptical of particular cases of negative freedom, but the basic assumption of the US right has almost always been individualist rather than paternalist; things like the Religious Right and the anti-woke movement have to justify themselves in terms of "This person's exercise of liberty X actually affects our liberty Y," which is fundamentally different from, "God says no" or "The man in Whitehall knows best."

Equality: Equality of opportunity (not in the silly sense of an equal chance, but in terms of equal legal rights and no unjustified discrimination) is the ideology of just about every last American. American conservatives might argue about the existence of certain types of discrimination or whether some particular case of discrimination is justified, but equality has always been integrally part of the American right's ideology, if not their practice. Of course, there will be the aberrant Nietzschean, Dominionist, Blood and Soil nationalist etc., but they are as alien to the American right as a working class Stalinist in the US left.

Fraternity: The US is unusual in being founded on an ideology (classical liberalism) and with the supposition that religion, ethnicity etc. are personal and/or local, rather than an integral part of the federal state. Trump is fraternal with gay people, trans people, hispanics, blacks etc. Some of his best friends are black. Some of his biggest supporters are hispanics. Friendship across race, religion, and "lifestyles" is as American as apple pie, and as American conservative as loving the US military, which itself has been multiracially fraternal for as long as most people can remember.

As you suggest, for the terminally online, it might seem like a different kind of conservativism had an ascendency in 2016. However, in fact, Trump and Trumpism was just mainstream US conservativism with balls. The average Trump supporter is as fundamentally opposed to reactionaries, Nazis, and the like as the average Hillary supporter.

So why does the terminally online alt-right link itself to Trump so much? I remember in 2016 when the left accused Trump and his followers of being white supremacists, misogynists, homophobic, far-right fascists and the response from them was that Trump wasn't any of those things; what the right movement stood against was The Establishment. I remember Trump waving the LGBT flag and being proud of receiving support from Blacks and Latinos.

I personally thought the accusations of Nazism towards the Trump movement were an exaggeration, but now ZHP and his ilk are saying, no, the left was right, we are all of bad the things they said we were. Things the average Westerner would consider not only to be morally repugnant, but the very values of the most reviled enemy in recent history. Debate between a Democrat and a Republican is possible because at heart they both share similar core values and goals; but is there even a point to debating those that admit to views that are the complete antithesis of Western civilisation?

So why does the terminally online alt-right link itself to Trump so much?

It's funny.

The terminally online right, much like the terminally online left, does not actually have a principled set of ideas that they're operating on. They don't have a central governing ethos, there is no set of principles to live by. There are vibes and there is owning the left. The more trad you are the better your vibes, and the more you own the libs the more trad you are. Does trad actually mean owning property, having a loving family, being kind, respectful, and upright in your moral beliefs? No! It means posting memes about "tfw no land" or "tfw no tradwife" or "tfw cities bad" or some such nonsense. Trump makes the left mad. Therefore Trump good. Do no further analysis than this. Go far enough right and you get to the wignats who call him ZionDon or whatever because he doesn't want to "gas the kikes race war now" and even they will laugh at the orange man's antics because he makes the left mad, and making the left mad is pretty much all the terminally online right actually believes in.

This is pretty much correct. The entire political online discourse is now "what can I do/say/believe that will make my outgroup mad?"

The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.