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 -
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.
...Because Democrats control the academia, and Democrats control the media, etc... is an evergreen argument that DNC Partisans have been making for literal decades now. To be blunt, I don't think it's true anymore today than it was back in 1992.
As much flak as I catch for it, these sorts of arguments are why I maintain my Hobbes vs Rousseau model of Right and Left, it seems to cleave reality at the joints. Example being just how "top-down" your entire model of society seems to be here. You talk about the Republican having a much shorter bench of talent like it doesn't have a whole raft of Republican Governors and state-level legislators who could conceivably be promoted to the national level. If anything, it seems to me like it's the democrats who are suffering from a short bench. Otherwise they wouldn't have to depend so heavily on the visibly senescent Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Et Al to represent them.
At the risk of accidentally agreeing with @KulakRevolt on something I don't think the most likely outcome of the progressive march through the institutions is a final victory for gay pride and a free Palestine. It's an erosion of the influence of said institutions. There was a time where an article in the New York Times was something to be taken seriously. This is not that time. At some point the "experts" in the federal government are going to say "do X" and Florida or some other red-coded state is going to reply "Nah" and in that moment we will find out who's really doomed.
I actually agree with this point here, though with the proviso that I don't think that's a likely outcome so much as a guaranteed consequence that has already arrived (just look at COVID). The progressive march through the institutions doesn't mean that the left wins forever - it means that the institutions they took over get looted of their social and reputational capital as people realise that Academia has transformed into a left-wing advocacy group rather than serving its original function. The same process is being compounded in another way by the commercialisation and abuse of science for profit via financially motivated studies discovering that their corporate backers are right. People were willing to listen to experts when they believed they were getting expertise, but that imprimatur of authority and trust was too tempting a target for political activists.
Of course this doesn't mean that the institutions will suddenly discover their mistakes and adjust course. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00789-5 They're going to see that they're hurting both their own institution and the cause of the left more broadly, and then they're just going to keep doing exactly what they're doing without changing. It sounds insulting when phrased like that, but you can just go and read them talking about how they're going to keep doing it even though it has a negative political outcome for their own team!
So what if people realize this, so long as they still need the credential Academia issues to get hired?
So what if the ordinary people no longer trust or listen to “experts” — so long as the elites continue to listen, they can in turn use their power to force ordinary people to obey “expert opinion” whether they “trust” it or not.
Except, how are they actually hurting it?
I don’t see how people can look at how these folks keep doing things that hurt their electoral position, and not see that as evidence that elections don’t matter. These people aren’t (all) blind or stupid. Why assume that they’re missing what’s obvious to you, rather than taking it as evidence that they know something you don’t?
I have a pet analogy I like to use. Suppose I see a nice black car with tinted windows run a red light… right past a cop car. I then think “how blind must that driver have been, to have missed that obvious cop car.” Only, as the cop car first turns to pursue, then drops that pursuit, it becomes clear that the driver probably knew about the cop, and that I’m the one who missed something, the very thing the cop came to see: the diplomatic license plates, indicating the vehicle is covered by the Vienna Protocols and diplomatic immunity, and the cop can’t ticket its driver no matter how he violated the traffic laws.
Again, if these people don’t care about hurting their electoral chances, maybe they have a reason not to care.
This is actually a problem the right needs to work on and I wish them all the best in their efforts to do so. Credentialism is bad for society no matter the political valence in my view.
There's a very real way in which losing legitimacy and perceived respect damages the authority of a governing elite, and that authority is required for the elites to maintain power. Have you read up on any of the historical analogues to the current system? Elites that lose the respect of the governed don't usually get good endings.
Decreasing their own credibility and increasing support for opposition figures, as well as supporting and encouraging ineffective and counterproductive forms of political activism.
I don't believe they're blind or stupid at all - they're stuck in a massive coordination problem, and some of the more lucid ones actually put up blog posts or articles talking about it. A lot of them are aware of the issue, they just can't do anything about it without destroying all their social relationships, employment prospects and ability to live a quiet life. You can be an expert poll forecaster that had a perfect track record working for the Obama campaign, but even posting your extremely well justified advice on winning elections and protesting effectively will get you harassed out of polite society! Current left wing political activism exists largely to fulfil social and personal needs rather than to actually effect change in the world, and those goals are more highly prioritised than actually achieving anything.
I'm totally open to the possibility that I'm missing something, and I also don't think this is an exclusive reason. But it is convincing enough for me and I've spoken to people in academia (off the record) who agree with me here.
How so? All you need to maintain power is sufficient ability to punish disobedience, so as to sufficiently incentivize compliance. How did feudal nobles maintain power over vastly more numerous serfs? (See the German Peasants' War.) How much "perceived respect" did beaten-down eastern European serfs really have for their overlords?
Which historical incidents do you think are analogous to our current situation? Because I think the historical analogies are things like the Stellinga, late 10th century Norman peasants —
— the Jacquerie, the Merfold brothers, Carinthian peasants, the Bundschuh movement(s), the "Poor Conrad" leagues, Turkish Celali, or any number of other situations on Wikipedia's "List of peasant revolts" where the result box is red and reads "Suppression of the rebellion."
When some 300,000 or so angry German peasants rose up in "Europe's largest and most widespread popular uprising before the French Revolution of 1789," did the aristocracy attempt to win back the peasants' "trust" and "respect"? No, they sent out 6,000–8,500 knights and mercenaries to suppress the peasants, killing a third of them (while themselves taking "minimal" losses), and after the rebellion was crushed, they "restored the old order in a frequently harsher form" and cracked down on the peasants even harder, leading to "a reduction of rights and freedoms of the peasant class, pushing them out of political life."
Again, the only "credibility" they need is the ability to credibly threaten punishment for those who disobey them.
What opposition figures are there that they need possibly worry about?
They don't need political activism, and as various people (including Curtis Yarvin) have pointed out, modern "political activism" is a sham that only "works" when it serves to provide the elites a pretext to do something they already wanted to do anyway.
Again, I see them not caring about winning elections, and take this as evidence that they don't need to win elections, that losing elections does little-to-nothing to their power, and that elections don't matter. Why don't you?
They don't need elections or "activism." They have all the power they need via their control of the institutions, first and foremost the massive Permanent Bureaucracy in DC, which is now fully insulated from any mechanism of "democratic" control.
They act like they don't have to worry about losing their power because they can't lose their power. They are so powerful, nobody on Earth can stop them.
Yet check out the comments under the latest army recruitment videos that stopped targeting liberals, but went back to targeting the traditional red regions. Many parents from military families state that don't want their children to join the army anymore.
The current elite is not Prussian. They don't see honor in soldiering and their culture rejects guns and law & order. They can't hire mercenaries anymore like in the olden days. So who is going to suppress the peasants, when police and the soldiers are peasants? Why would be elite be able to count on them when the peasants truly lose faith in the system?
More options
Context Copy link
So your position is that the ancien régime is still in power in France? All hail the Sun King! I'm not sure if you've noticed, but there aren't any more peasants in the world and the regimes you're describing have in fact fallen over and collapsed. That form of social organisation just isn't viable in a world with guns and explosives, and it was put in great danger from the existence of the crossbow.
Pre-revolution France.
Elites hold less power than you think, and the ability to threaten that punishment very rapidly goes away when they lose legitimacy in the eyes of the military. If the Deep State revealed itself publicly tomorrow and then announced they were taking over the country to save it from Trump, they wouldn't get their way - they'd engender too much resistance. They are forced to act conspiratorially because of the resistance their goals would generate if made public.
Donald Trump.
A lot of modern forms of political activism are indeed worthless and don't do anything. But that doesn't mean political activism is useless - the Stern Gang and Lehi managed to achieve their goals despite not being part of the elite.
Not only do they not act like this at all (ever read the Strzok texts or any of the classified material/emails wikileaks put out?) they are currently trying to prosecute Trump to take him out of the race because they know that they'll lose if the election was held right now, and their strategies to neuter his political effectiveness won't work a second time. How long did the Roman republic last after they were forced to assassinate Caesar?
That was because of those collapses were all in the Age of the Gun. Many writers have noted the correlation between whether a society, at a given time, is more "aristocratic" or "democratic," and whether its methods of war-fighting are more capital-intensive or labor-intensive, respectively.
I remember once reading a legal paper on the 2nd Amendment, specifically the debate as to whether it's about a right of the people to own civilian weapons for hunting/personal defense, or a right of the people to have the means to overthrow a tyrannical government, with both views finding support in the writings of the Founders. The author's position was that the Founders clearly meant for it to do both, because they lived in a time when the means of meeting both goals pretty much overlapped — "civilian" guns were also useful as weapons of war, the weapons of war were broadly affordable, and it did not take much time or money to turn a "militia" of ordinary civilian riflemen into an effective war-fighting force. Hence, why they thought we could do without a standing military, relying entirely upon the general citizenry for national defense. But, the author then noted, changes in military technology over the centuries mean that no longer holds. The modern "tip of the spear" soldier is an expensive, well-equipped, highly-trained elite. Our jurisprudence has, in practice, favored the "personal defense" goal/interpretation of 2Am over the other… because it's the only one that's remotely practical in our present world. The Age of the Gun was already on its way out during the First World War. (Hence, why you get people arguing that we're now entering the Age of the Drone, with drone operators as the "new knights.") It's been slow, and papered over by various illusions, but over the last century, we've all been becoming peasants again.
What makes you think they would?
What form do you picture this "resistance" taking, and why wouldn't those who engage in it not end up arrested for said crimes (or, at the extreme, meeting a Waco/Ruby Ridge fate)?
Even if he somehow gets elected, Donald Trump will be even less effective in his second term than his first, because they're not being taken by surprise this time, and they've been preparing to more effectively #Resist him — or any other GOP president.
The "powers" of the president are all dependent on having large numbers of people in DC enforce his decisions and orders. If they all simply don't…
They might not have been elite, but they had people who were part of the elite in agreement with those goals — if they didn't, they'd never have won. This is a point Boot makes about guerrilla warfare in Invisible Armies; one of the necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for a guerrilla force to win is for some portion of the "elites" on the other side to sympathize with them. I'd argue that the only reason the American Revolution succeeded is because too many on the British side, like Burke (and, I would argue, the Howe brothers) were sympathetic to the American side.
Again, it only works when it provides some portion of the elite an excuse to do what they want anyway.
Why not?
Trump is not our Julius Caesar. At best, he's the Gracchi brothers. And just who is our Augustus, then?
Caesar was Lincoln. Augustus was FDR. The first destroyed the Republic by choosing civil war, winning the war he started, and then getting assassinated for his trouble. The second consolidated power into an imperial executive, ruled for decades, and left the empire shaped in his image.
More options
Context Copy link
Agreed.
But if history is any indication our Augustus is still a good generation or two away.
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
Back in the commie days you had to join the Party, if you wanted to be anything above a grunt, and plenty of people did for precisely that reason. Plenty more regarded Party membership the same way one would regard a confession of enjoying some good kiddie-diddling.
Now, I believe that this can actually continue in perpetuity, if the people on top stay on top of their game, but it doesn't strike me that the Western elites are capable / have the means to do that. They've made several bets that didn't pan out, with AI being the latest one they're putting their hopes on, which might explain all the doomerism / utopianism around the subject.
Yes and no. Insisting on a top-down view of society will leave you as half-blind as insisting on a bottom-up one. Even an absolute monarch's power is limited, no matter what his law says.
On the other hand, this is a point I wholeheartedly agree with. There's limits to this as well, but currently it's people insisting that Western democracies are meaningful that are closer to being wrong.
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