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What does the light at the end of the tunnel look like?
Look, every now and then I stop watching my footfalls and get pensive. And one of the things I've gotten pensive about the past few days is this: the Western culture war is not going to last forever, which means it's going to end. And when it does, how will we look back on this mad time?
Two of the answers are obvious:
But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable. Frankly, the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born, so it's hard for me to even picture it. And that troubles me; it's the scenario I think is most likely, and the one I'm to at least some extent trying to bring about, so if I don't have a good idea of what it even looks like that's kind of an HCF. "It is not enough to say that you do not like the way things are. You must say how you will change them, and to what."
So, how will the people in that scenario think of this time? What story will they tell?
(To the SJers here: feel free to answer, if you think you understand your opposition, or feel free to correct me if you think my #2 is uncharitable.)
They won't. Soon enough all of it will be forgotten, and all that remains will be a giant gaping hole where mobs whipping themselves into frenzies on Twitter used to be, terse Wikipedia pages that may mention the more memorable incidents, but will be very cryptic about the who, how, and why, and a bunch of mainstream media articles that should, in theory be indicting, but mysteriously people will care about it as much as they do about the NYT Holodomor denial article that won the Pulitzer. If you still manage to make enough stink about it, someone will dig out some statistics showing that you're blowing everything out of proportion, the problem was tiny, and no one was really taking it seriously.
There's a lot of historical precedent for that. How much are common people aware of eugenics' popularity with progressives? How many know Sweden had an active eugenics program until the 70's? You may have heard about lobotomies, but have you heard about their sequel? Did you know the Cultural Marxism was/is an actual intellectual movement, and not a crazy Nazi conspiracy theory?
The rule is pretty simple - excesses of traditionalism must never be forgotten, excesses of progressivism must never be remembered.
P.S.: This ended up sounding a lot more pessimistic than I actually feel about it. The point is that historical memory requires active maintenance. If Reds / Greys / whoever manage to set up parallel institutions that will maintain their version of the story, it will survive, and the Blues will be forced to take it into account.
The reds are increasingly getting better at doing this.
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There is a true need for an alternate Wikipedia at this point. Future generations will see Wikipedia like we see Herodotus's "Histories" - flawed but ultimately the core upon which historical knowledge is built.
Most of what we know about the Persians comes from what the Greeks wrote about them. Most of what future generations will know about Ronald Reagan will be the words of his enemies.
This slams into Neutral vs. Conservative problem. Much ink has been spilt trying to model the core value that splits progressives from conservatives, but I'll piggyback on Richard Hanania and say the central difference is pretty banal — the left has causes they really care about advancing, while the right would mildly prefer to not be pushed off their spot, please. Any time a new faction has fervent ideas for changing the social fabric, they get automatically slotted into the left coalition, and the political theory bloggers have to do midnight brainstorming on how this group's ideas are a logical extension of progressivism.
The conservative right definitionally cannot summon the passion to create a rival Wikipedia. Arguably, the conservative right cannot even summon the passion to have its own political party. Here in the US, the GOP has repeatedly been parasitized by some passionate heretic progressive faction, like libertarians or then neocons or most recently the NRx inspired alt-right. These groups do not reflect the values of the baptist truck driver or stodgy civil engineer dad who wants lower taxes, but they have passion, so they out-ground-game mere conservatives.
You have an unintentional bait-and-switch in your comment, I think. Very clearly the latter "has fervent ideas for changing the social fabric" but they are not treated as "a logical extension of progressivism". In other words, if you a going to define conservatism purely as a "do nothing" philosophy then obviously it's going to do nothing, but I think you lose a lot of understanding about how political movements relate to each other by doing so.
The Neutral vs. Conservative problem, as I understand it, has an entirely different genesis. It arises from the fact that creating a specifically right-leaning version of something that already exists is a project that is only going to attract rightists, and the result will be much more obviously skewed than the original. It will therefore put off leftists or even moderate rightists and so grow ever more unbalanced and untrusted by the majority. The same problem exists if you want to make a left version of something that already exists - for a slightly cheeky example, look at TheSchism. This is why entryism is usually preferred by both sides when they can pull it off.
I'm aware of the seeming contradiction, and considered including a "What about the Nazis, why don't they get considered progressive?" paragraph, but I thought it would be going too much into the weeds of political taxonomy.
To summarize, I view people like Mencius Moldbug as progressive heretics rather than conservatives. Their ideas for changing society are such that they cannot be integrated into the progressive gestalt, so they try to pitch their platform under the only other tent instead. Progressives are more than happy to generalize everyone under that tent as the same. And the progressive heretics (like libertarians, neoreactionaries, or neocon New American Century types) will structure their radical message to play to the base of conservative voters. Said voters will of course be aghast when a libertarian pretending to be a conservative tries to implement open borders, or when a neoreactionary pretending to be a conservative lets slip he thinks the constitution is stupid and the US should be reconfigured into a no-voice only-exit-rights monarchy. Or posts something like this, revealing he has absolutely no reverence for tradition and an Openness factor that is off-the-charts for a "conservative".
Certainly you can disagree. But I think the average Democrat voter is much closer to the platform of their party than the average Republican voter. Because, again, conservatives don't care enough to take command of their own party.
I think it's because, when the left takes over an institution, conservatives don't care enough to stop them. Then, when an alternate new institution is created, normal conservatives don't care enough to join, leaving only the extreme fringe of people who say, think the Holocaust is fake, which is not a typical US conservative position.
Thank you for writing this detailed reply. I get where you're coming from, I think. This worldview stands on its own merits perfectly well but my criticism of it is that it defines mainstream conservatism to be almost exclusively the group of people who want nothing to change, or at most want some stuff they dislike from the last few years rolled back. But in practice this means that conservatives are just progressives from five years ago. You can't write your own history if you have no ideology or motivating principle beyond 'old new thing good, new new thing bad, also stop putting up taxes'. That sounds condescending, it's not, I've been that guy. It's just that ten years later you look back and you realise that the status quo you wanted to defend was actually a rock rolling downhill, and at some point you have to decide where you want that rock to be and start pushing it there.
To put it another way, I think that any conservative with a brain sooner or later has to start asking themselves what they want to conserve; what kind of country they want to live in and what they need to do to get it back there. If you want to conserve Britain's ethnic makeup from the 90s, you are going to have to rip up huge chunks of the economy and undo a bunch of international treaties. Not very conservative! OTOH, if you want to conserve the welfare state, you may end up making decisions on the economy that produce huge societal changes, like taking on even more debt or lots of immigration.
I think that libertarians, neoreactionaries and neocons are conservative to the extent that they say, 'You know, the country used to be good because of XYZ, let's try to move back in that direction'. Whereas progressives say, 'Things have always been bad, but they will be good once we XYZ.' This isn't just a taxonomy, it has big consequences for how each group behaves, what it values and what it appeals to.
In my limited political experience, the left has a lot of institutional knowledge about how to play dirty that the right lacks, as well as the whip hand in polite society. Conservatives who care quickly find out that your life can be made absolutely miserable in various ways. A lot of the 'not caring' is pre-emptive self defence and an unwillingness to expose oneself to humiliation. A lot of it is also the lack of ideology - normie conservatives like some of my family have a political philosophy that's a mismash of mostly leftist memes from 10 years ago and aren't able to defend them against the more developed version, so they avoid politics to prevent their worldview from damage. I don't think not caring is the problem, the problem is pre-emptive cringe and an inability to translate caring into useful action.
Consider a case of entryism from the right: Musk's takeover of twitter. It's top-down entryism rather than bottom-up entryism, but a heavily left-leaning institution was taken over by a more right-leaning person and remodelled. The result is still fairly moderate: now much more supportive of conservatives but still with a lot of centrists and leftists. The left wasn't keen on this and tried to move to a more friendly alternative (Threads, Mastodon) but couldn't manage the switch because the moderates didn't move and the new alternatives were consequently niche and offputting.
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"But I think the average Democrat voter is much closer to the platform of their party than the average Republican voter. Because, again, conservatives don't care enough to take command of their own party."
So, speaking from the left, I agree with you on the first part, even if my fellow lefties don't.
On the latter part, the difference in the GOP makes sense, even if that is currently changing, thanks to Citizen's United (ironic that's largely been a negative for the GOP & a positive for the DNC), because there isn't much split between what college and non-college educated Democrat's want. Sure, the non-college educated may not be as woke, but they're not opposed. They just don't really care, but both college & non-college educated Dem's want higher taxes on rich people, a larger welfare state, left-leaning social policies, and so on.
OTOH, the college and non-college educated parts of the GOP want distinctly different things. The issue is, and I'm trying to be nice to the conservatives here, is that an actual fervent conservative loses 36 to 40 states, against even a fairly liberal Democrat, because most people like most of the things Democrat's have done, even if they don't like the Democratic party. The ACA currently has it's highest approval ever, because it's now part of society, and those that disliked it have forgotten the Muslim Kenyan passed it, they just know their sister can get Medicaid now, when she used to not be able too, or their kids can stay on their insurance through college.
Note, I'm not saying a Republican can never win. I think Trump has a 1 in 3 shot next year. But, Trump either talks a lot about the stuff where he disagrees with the unpopular stuff Republican's want to pass, or he says such insane stuff nobody believes he'll do it. Plus, most famous person since Eisenhower to run for POTUS. There's a reason why Trump can win in places, that Trump-adjacent candidates underperform, while 'normie' GOP politicians actually overperform - see Arizona.
I'm relatively plugged in to American politics, but probably not as much as an American, so I'll happily concede if you're sure about this, but aren't you getting this precisely backwards? Wasn't the entire point of Trumpism to ditch the free trade / free market parts of the platform pushed by establishment Republicans, in favor of economic interventionism?
Typically when progressives wanted to make the "Trumpists are disconnected from common voters" argument, they use all the anti-woke stuff as an example. Debatable of the sentiment is correct, but at least the example is in line with what is animating Trump supporters.
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Ask and you shall receive.
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