site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 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.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/worried-meta-decision-allowing-2020-election-denial-ads/story?id=104985165

So Meta the parent company of Facebook and instagram is now allowing users and advertisers to post claims about election fraud in the last election but not the soon to be held 2024 elections. I’ll lay my cards out here and say I’m personally a skeptic of the claims that the 2020 elections were stolen. I don’t see why that should prevent other people from making such arguments.

But my question for you guys is whether these claims are going to really erode trust in future elections. To me the issue that erodes that trust is that the official government structures never bothered to look into the claims that such fraud might have happened and instead opted for the COVID style full court press of “nobody should bother to take it seriously, and if you do it’s clear that you’re falling for misinformation.” To me nothing erodes trust faster than an official response of “nothing to see here.”

There’s a kind of incoherence to ‘stolen election’ claims that I dislike, in that they’re almost always made by people who assume that the permanent bureaucracy / deep state / powers that be / white supremacist patriarchy / Russia / etc means that Our Guy can win but still lose anyway.

If the deep state can have its way even when /ourguy/ wins, then why does it also need to rig elections? Either elections don’t matter because the President has no power, or they do matter because the President actually has a lot of power, but Trump just failed to do anything with it.

I’m convinced the stolen election narrative was profoundly damaging to the Trumpist right and GOP more generally in the US. What is more demoralizing than suggesting that ‘they’ will win even if you come out to vote? Or even, if you take the theory further, that they ‘allowed’ Trump to win in 2016 knowing, presumably, that they could control him or prevent him from doing anything they didn’t want him to?

The stolen election narrative was strategically moronic. It exists solely to assuage Trump-the-man’s ego, and spread because the modern US right is in large part a Trump personality cult, so various operatives, media figures etc wanted to do their best to remain on his good side. A single shout out or mockery from the oracle of Mar a Lago can make or break a career, so playing to his ego was so important they forgot strategy to claim that Donald actually did win for real.

(I think all US elections involve some low-level corruption, rigging and machine politics, but that broadly the most popular candidate in the majority of the country - pursuant to minor discrepancies in popular vote subject to the unique dynamics of the EC system obviously - wins).

If the deep state can have its way even when /ourguy/ wins, then why does it also need to rig elections? Either elections don’t matter because the President has no power, or they do matter because the President actually has a lot of power, but Trump just failed to do anything with it.

Because it's easier to promote their agenda with a compliant figurehead than not? Because it expends less resources to get your way without a fight than with one? Because whatever the odds that you'll be able to roll a defiant president, they aren't 100%? Because rigging the election is the first line of defense, followed by bureaucratic defense in depth? Because making sure your ideological enemies appear to be defeated publicly by popular vote is an important aspect in demoralizing them? Because winning is nice, but lapping your opponent is even better?

I've never seen such an incurious or thought terminated argument here before in my life.

So why did they let Trump win in 2016, when a moral victory was much more powerful than simply re-electing him in 2020? If your response is ‘they tried with Comey/Russiagate/leaked tapes, but they failed’, then that invalidates a substantial part of your own argument, since it suggests that their methods do not extend to actual rigging, or that their own internal evaluation of the projected result was so poor that they’re likely too incompetent to do so.

Again, the excuses don’t make sense. Rigging isn’t the first line of defense, it’s the absolute defense. If you can rig, you rig, and you win by default. There need be no backup plan for rigging because if you can manipulate the actual votes themselves all of that stuff is unnecessarily upstream. Putin doesn’t have a backup plan “in case he loses the election” because by definition he has ensured this is an impossibility because that is what ‘rigging’ means. You might reply saying ‘well, even Putin / Sisi / etc still wants to remain popular, so propaganda and ‘campaigning’ is important, even if just to maintain kayfabe’. And sure, that’s true. But they don’t do it ‘to win’.

So the same question for US presidential rigging allegations must always be levied. Do you believe that [faction] has actual control over vote counts? That is what rigging means. Can you declare yourself or your man victor or not on an absolute basis? If you can, you can rig an election; if you can’t, you’re merely capable of playing the kind of dirty tricks that are the norm in the politics of every nation.

I agree with you broadly but you are overstating your case. It is perfectly consistent to state that factions have a limited ability to steal elections.

One dynamic you see in historical studies of stolen elections is that there are typically both honest and stolen locales, and the stolen locales vary in their willingness to lie.

In the famous and well studied cases of LBJ in Texas, rotten boroughs varied. From precincts where voters were handed $5 and a shot of tequila before voting in person, to places where voters were marched in by shotgun wielding ranch foremen and instructed who to vote for, to precincts where the ranch owners dropped off the identical filled ballots of all their employees, to precincts where no one seemed to show up to vote but all the registered voters were recorded as voting, to precincts where votes were filled out in alphabetical order for people who didn't live there or had died years ago.

In LBJ's first Senate campaign, he made use of all these methods as did his opponent, but LBJ announced his results first, and his opponent was able to steal enough extra votes to win. In his second, LBJ did not make that mistake again, and stole more aggressively and at the last minute, but still one by a tiny margin after tapping all his resources.

It's perfectly possible to say that faction can rig an election between a set margin, but not outside it.

The problem is that this isn't claimed by most election truthers, and certainly not consistently.

I agree with you broadly but you are overstating your case. It is perfectly consistent to state that factions have a limited ability to steal elections… It's perfectly possible to say that faction can rig an election between a set margin, but not outside it.

For sure, and I actually say as much in my reply to WalterOdim here.

It’s very likely (and of course historically proven) that low-level functionaries involved in the political process in various counties across the US engage in forms of corruption up to and including Actual Rigging (meaning actually manipulating vote totals). And it is true that, in an incredibly close election, this could serve (and has served) to elect one candidate over the other. I’m very sceptical that the ‘deep state’ or indeed any DC bureaucrat is involved in that kind of action, I think it’s ground-up and low level, and I think supporters of both parties engage in it. But it happens, and I think it’s important to acknowledge it.

But this isn’t the typical claim. The narrative from hardcore Trumpist rigging claimants isn’t typically that Trump almost legitimately lost but that he actually won a tiny number of additional ballots (or local Democrats added extra Biden votes) on a tiny scale in one Georgia county. It’s that a huge conspiracy prevented their candidate, who was supposedly vastly more popular, from winning nationwide by a huge margin. The question ‘do you concede that, even if you’re correct about those ballots, Trump could very easily (and almost did) fully legitimately lose the 2020 election, and if he did actually win, he won by a tiny amount?’ is the telling one here. As is (and this is even more important) ‘did something beyond the low-level hum of corruption that has been a feature of American democracy since 1776 occur specifically to prevent Trump from being re-elected?’.