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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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The Republican Party is doomed.

I don't mean they'll lose every election moving forward. My case, rather, is this: they know exactly what they want someone to do, but in an increasing number of institutions, there is no one left to do it. Increasing age and education polarization means that Republicans are rapidly losing the capacity to run public institutions at all levels other than electoral, and this trend cannot realistically reverse within a generation. The near-term future is already written.

The demands of a two-party system mean each party will typically adjust over time to capture, if not 50% of the electorate, at least enough to remain meaningfully competitive. There is no reason to expect that to change. Republicans are electorally competitive and will likely remain so, particularly given their advantage in rural areas with greater Senate representation. People zero in on that, but electoral politics is a small part of governance writ large.

I am one of the most conservative students at my law school. More specifically: I, a gay, centrist Biden voter, am one of the most conservative students at my law school. The Federalist Society here is anemic and widely derided, while there's a dizzying array of progressive organizations. The professors and administrators are, if anything, even more progressive. My school is in no sense an outlier in this regard, nor is this specific to law. The same patterns are overwhelmingly visible in every group of educated, young professionals. Bloomberg documents how donations skew progressive in virtually every field.

People want to say young and educated people have always leaned left, but that simply is not true. Not like this. The leftward skew is a recent, and accelerating, phenomenon. Democrats have gained more and more ground among young and educated people alike, and the rightward shift people are used to seeing just isn't happening as it did before. Among young, educated professionals, the salient political divide is no longer between Republicans and Democrats, but between liberals and various stripes of socialists. The New York Times and Financial Times document the way long-standing patterns have shifted.

What's the conservative coalition? Truckers, farmers, business owners, construction workers. Don't get me wrong: these are useful, socially valuable, necessary professions. But they have nothing to do with the day-to-day of governance on the ground. About the only governance-related profession they remain influential in is the police force, which tells you all you need to know about the current reputation of the police force among educated, young professionals.

This means that, for the medium-term future, Republicans are dealing with a coalition of the high and low against the middle when it comes to politics. They authentically represent, to one degree or another, somewhere near half of the country. They have representation at the highest levels of government, controlling the Supreme Court, maintaining razor-thin margins in the House and Senate, and remaining competitive within Presidential races. But because their voters are increasingly old, rural, and less educated, they lack all but the slightest foothold in the great majority of institutions run by and filled with young, educated professionals: that is to say, the great bulk of institutions involved in the day to day of governance.

The field of education provides a good case study as to how this plays out. Educators are overwhelmingly progressive in their inclinations. Left to their own devices, they will take a policy and curricular stance broadly in line with progressive sensibilities. Teacher's unions are unambiguously and emphatically against the Republican Party. Conservatives like to emphasize school choice, pointing to charter and private schools as potential alternatives, but even there, the great bulk of educators are politically liberal. Eva Moskowitz, founder of high-achieving charter school system Success Academy, champion of school choice advocacy, and a model of what conservatives point to as an ideal in education, is a registered Democrat.

The most successful recent conservative education advocacy movement, Moms for Liberty, tells you all you need to know in its name: it is a movement not of educators or of students, but of parents looking from the outside at a system that broadly opposes their values. Florida politicians have spent enormous political capital to pull a single, tiny liberal arts college towards a conservative ethos.

Here's the problem: by the time you're trying to legislate every one of your preferences, resisted at every level by the people put in place to enact those preferences, you've already lost. Republicans want people who want to enact their values. What they've got is equal representation in the part of the government that can swing a big stick around trying desperately to corral a group where even the educators supported by their policies are likely to want nothing to do with them.

What of the rising stars in each political party? For the Democrats, you have Pete Buttigieg: working within the institutions at every step, from Ivy League to consulting to military to local governance and smoothly into high-level tasks within his own party, focused on technocratic proposals dependent on high state capacity. For the Republicans, there's Vivek Ramaswamy: downplaying his past within those same institutions, rising to incredible wealth via private enterprise, smashing into the scene of his own party as an outsider obviously loathed by those who have spent their lifetimes within it, focused on a libertarian "burn it down" ethos. To be a popular Republican in the Trump era, you almost need to be an outsider promising to tear the government to pieces. Image

Conservatives right now are desperate for public intellectuals who reflect their values. As soon as a conservative-coded intellectual shows a modicum of talent or originality, they skyrocket into prominence. Jordan Peterson spent a career in obscurity in academia before a fight over pronouns launched him into an enormous platform with millions of followers. Chris Rufo became one of the leaders of the conservative movement in moments after speaking cogently about critical race theory. Richard Hanania, despite constantly telling conservatives how stupid and ineffectual he thinks they are, has gained a massive conservative fanbase by virtue of being able to argue coherently for some of their values.

Perhaps most telling is the example of Aaron Sibarium, recently profiled for Politico: perhaps the most prominent conservative investigative reporter today, a secular Jew who voted for Clinton and Biden but, because he opposes social justice progressivism, has sauntered into the wide-open niche of investigative journalism from a conservative point of view. Why is he filling that role so effectively? Simple: there was nobody else to do so.

On a smaller scale, even a few tweets that capture the conservative zeitgeist can shoot someone into the public eye overnight, as Darryl Cooper (MartyrMade) discovered when an articulate defense of the 'stolen election' feeling took him from 7000 Twitter followers one day to 55000 three days later, or our own @KulakRevolt found as he went from no public presence to being the rising voice of the burn-it-down ethos in a matter of a few months of well-written diatribes. Costin Alamariu launched an obscure work of academic philosophy to the top of the Amazon charts off the strength of an absurdist right-wing pseudonymous persona. Ask any of them what they think of the institutional Republican Party sometime.

Conservatives are so desperate for a shred of cultural influence that they turn people like Oliver Anthony (“Rich Men North of Richmond”) into overnight sensations, only to learn that they, too, have nothing but scorn for the Republican Party.

Put simply: right now, at the nuts and bolts of governance, the Republican Party has a much shorter bench of talent than the Democratic Party. Even conservative intellectuals are trained in overwhelmingly progressive institutions. This affects every level of politics, but since it doesn't necessarily harm them electorally, there's no incentive to course-correct at the level of electoral politics. Quite the opposite, in fact: every single Republican politician, and every single conservative influencer, benefits individually from their coalition’s weakness among young, educated professionals. In many ways, they’re living the dream: massive audiences hungry for competence with little competition fighting to provide that competence in any given field.

Some want to frame it as institutional capture, a battle against the ruling elite, that could be corrected if the right people are in charge. Is there some of that? Sure. But at most institutions, it's a simple function of the politics of the people seeking those institutions out. My law school is not overwhelmingly progressive because the Powers That Be want it to be progressive. It's overwhelmingly progressive because progressives showed up. You can only stretch the word "elite" so far, and by the time you get down to schoolteachers, you've stretched it past the breaking point.

Conservatives, to be clear, aren't going anywhere, nor is the growing dissident right movement. But even when Republicans win electoral power, they lack the human capital at all levels of governance to accomplish what they really want with it. Under Republican rule, half of top government officials work to enact the approximate will of slightly less than half of Americans while virtually every educated, young professional anywhere near politics resists any way they can. Only a few have even the vision of changing this by re-entering those institutions, with most seeing no recourse beyond slowly fading or burning every institution to the ground.

The Republican Party will remain visible. It may even continue to win elections. But at the basic tasks of governance and defining culture at all levels, its death warrant has already been signed. The Republican Party is doomed.

(Also posted to Substack)


While I prepared this post for a general audience, I have a few more Motte-specific thoughts. At this point, I think the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that, whatever else this space is and has been, it is one of vanishingly few incubators for intellectually rigorous thinkers with sympathy towards one shade or another of conservatism. Kulak is one of the most prominent examples, but far from the only one who has an impact far beyond these quiet circles.

After I Tweeted out an initial version of this post, a high-level Republican official contacted me about it, broadly agreeing with the thesis while pointing out that parties are composed, broadly speaking, of those who show up. In his words, a political party is an entity that exists solely to conduct elections, and things can change in a hurry depending on who shows up. Speaking in general terms, he's part of the Thiel-adjacent set. He made the case that there is a lot of room, given the short bench, for people outside the traditional, highly polished, consultant-safe pathways to have a real impact on things, which in some ways can be turned to the good.

I don't have any sort of call to action here, for myself or others, but I think it's worth having a clear-eyed view of the political dynamics in play.

Great post, of course.

One thing I've very hazy about, though, is whether this is an argument that stops with the Republican party being doomed, or whether it's rather an argument for all those institutions actually being doomed.

I remember years ago reading some prepper types making the point that America as we know it is not physically built to survive meaningful civil unrest; there's all sorts of infrastructure and pipelines and so on that are huge and spread out and essentially undefendable. But the reason for that is, of course, that America is largely peaceful, and has been relatively high trust in most places for quite a while, and so it has been built with those assumptions in mind (and indeed this is one of the huge economic benefits of having a fairly high trust society).

I think there's something very similar going on with all of America's ostensible shared institutions; at least in my view, the entire point of stressing the rhetoric of "consent of the governed" is recognizing that all of our various systems work because the lion's share of citizens are willing to accept the authority of those systems, even if they don't understand them or are wary about the people who operate them.

And in that sense, consent of the governed is a very different concept from some theoretical notion of democratic legitimacy, in the "majority of votes = legitimate" sense. I mean, on paper inner city police departments are propped up by local democratic governance. But one of the giant problems inner city black neighborhoods have long faced is a lack of trust about police as an institution from certain communities, and there are huge amounts of horrible downstream consequences to that lack of trust and consent. It is trivial as an outsider to look at a lot of that dysfunction and say, depending on your political point of view, "See, that's why people should trust police with a monopoly on violence" or "see, that's why police need to be reformed so that they can be trusted". But it turns out regaining trust in institutions is incredibly difficult in practice, regardless of the wisdom of the bromides. Maintaining buy in from random citizens is crucially important.

This stuff is obviously far from academic. I had an uncle in 2021 who was all in on the ivermectin stuff. He's in his late 60s. Not a dumb guy, in general. He's a senior engineer in some firm. He's also apparently very online these days. He and his wife had a pretty nasty time with COVID. They were very aggressively anti-vax. I wish I could have rolled my eyes and said, at the time, "See, that's why you should just listen to the various authoritative bodies and trust what they have to say!" And I'm not, by nature, inclined to think that populist medical treatment rumor mongering online is a better idea than rigorous, empirical medical science from well-functioning institutions. But of course, I also lived through the summer of 2020, and I was paying pretty close attention to those same experts and their public pronouncements too. And I remember being told that racism was the real public health crisis. I remember being told that everyone needed to stay in their apartments RIGHT NOW - SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING to save lives, until suddenly it was time for anti-racism marches and everyone needed to go back outside immediately. And I remember being told that it was more important that young black health care workers get vaccines rather than my older white relatives, despite the much more severe relative risk of death they actually faced. I'm not in the business of forgetting any of that.

And so what happens if more and more of the population stops accepting the authority of those various institutions? What if more and more of the country starts treating universities and various federal agencies and ostensibly mainstream, shared press and maybe even public schools in exactly the same way that certain inner city black communities treat their cops?

Because I feel certain that having a dearth of public conservatives in those bodies is likely to greatly speed up this process. There is no endpoint where the bifurcations sharpens much further, and meaningful consent of the governed somehow remains. The line of a nullification crisis runs through every human heart. And someone responding "but those bureaucracies fulfill essential roles - they are indespendible!" is understandable, but is in some sense fundamentally disconnected from the facts on the ground. It's much like saying "Those inner city neighborhoods need functioning police forces and rule of law (and locals schools, for that matter)!" All true, but there's no obvious mechanism from here to there.

One particularly interesting wrinkle in all this, to me, is the current Supreme Court. It is not an inevitable fact of nature that all the various institutions that progressives dominate should have actual power or authority within the context of America's political system. In many cases, a tangle of legislation, court rulings, and executive branch decisions are the basis for their explicit authority. We've already seen the current Supreme Court take a wrecking ball to topics of abortion and affirmative action. I've seen the claim made, recently, that prior to the current court, the last time the Supreme Court had a 6-3 conservative majority was back in the 1920's. Which is to say, before the New Deal. Before World War 2. Before several waves of massive expansion in the Federal government. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that the naked partisanship of a bunch of the institutions dominated by progressives right now, and the very overtness and antagonism of that partisanship, leads to partisan conservatives in the Supreme Court taking a sledge hammer to the foundation of some of those institutions. Which... is not a very conservative thing to do, of course. But live by who/whom, die by who/whom. I've seen a number of really furious, anxious progressive think pieces about the Chevron doctrine in particular recently, and the potential damage the court could do to the entire unelected federal bureaucracy and its power if that doctrine is significantly revised. But who knows.

I've seen a number of really furious, anxious progressive think pieces about the Chevron doctrine in particular recently, and the potential damage the court could do to the entire unelected federal bureaucracy and its power if that doctrine is significantly revised.

Could you link one or two?

I did not ask for a definition of Chevron deference; I didn't have it memorised, but I looked it up myself. I asked for a "furious, anxious progressive think piece" about Chevron deference and the "damage" that could occur if it's "significantly revised", because @CrispyFriedBarnacles said he'd seen "a number" of such pieces.

Not sure what meets @Questionmark's definition of "really furious, anxious progressive think piece," but there are a few I've seen around the net in the last week or so:

"The Case That Could Destroy the Government" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/securities-and-exchange-commission-v-jarkesy-supreme-court/676059/

Then there's this one, which originally had the title "A new Supreme Court case threatens to sow chaos throughout the federal government" https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/5/2/23706535/supreme-court-chevron-deference-loper-bright-raimondo

Then there's another Vox masterpiece: "The Supreme Court seeks a middle path between following the law and blowing up the government" https://www.vox.com/scotus/2023/11/29/23980966/supreme-court-sec-jarkesy-administrative-law-judges

And more or less every respectable news outlet had some opinion piece along the lines of Washington Post's "A conservative court intent on arrogating power unto itself" https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/01/supreme-court-administrative-state/

For comparison, Reuter's most recent headline on the topic is "US Supreme Court signals it could limit SEC in-house enforcement," though I do think that undersells it somewhat.

It was @CrispyFriedBarnacles who brought up the topic, not Questionmark. But thanks a bunch.