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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.)
Why will the culture war ‘eventually end’? This culture war has been happening, in some form or another, since the enlightenment. Certainly it’s been happening since America’s founding. It may wax and wane (the latter if there’s some larger unrelated international or domestic crisis for a prolonged period), but it would be ahistorical to expect it to end. I suppose AI may change things, but since it is likely only to increase the reliance of the people on the state (due to mass unemployment etc), probably not in any direction I’d consider positive.
... I'd be interested to see what sort of 'wane' would fit your expectations, even if the culture war would still remain in a form, that's anywhere short of modern conservativism (and anything drawn as close to it) being smothered out completely.
One of my big frustrations is that for all people might say that this stuff isn't as bad or is 'only' as bad as McCarthyism, McCarthyism lasted less than a decade, and it very much had the seeds of its own destruction within it. We're coming up on fifteen for the most obvious start date of this particular cycle.
But McCarthyism won!
'Communist' is still an insult in like 90% of American contexts and none are tolerated anywhere near positions of real power, capitalist realism is so pervasive that it's treated as a fundamental facet of reality rather than an ideology, and the US is still explicitly hostile towards communist and formerly-communist regimes around the world to this day!
It's hard to imagine McCarthyism succeeding much more strongly than it actually has. The fact that he's remembered as a jerk in some textbooks is pretty immaterial.
You are conflating McCarthyism with anti-communism. Anti-communism won, but not because of McCarthyism, and the distinctively McCarthyite features (trying to root out communist subversives in government, anti-communist loyalty tests, blacklisting communists) are completely outside the mainstream of US politics. For example, the House Un-American Activities Committee is gone and would be regarded as an intolerable infringement on American values if it was restored, at least as an anti-communist institution.
You also say "some textbooks." Don't you think that "almost all" would be more accurate?
I mean, sure, but isn't that sort of like me saying 'you're confusing cancel culture with progressivism, all bad things proceed from the former and all good things proceed from the latter'?
I'm ok with movements disavowing their idiot extremists, or being held accountable for them, as long as that standard is applied consistently.
I meant 'some' as in 'a small overall amount' rather than 'a small percent of the total'. My point is that we don't talk about him much in day to day life, compared to how much we praise capitalism and vilify communism.
That said, I literally haven't read a history textbook since highschool, so... sure, I would guess it's at least most, but I honestly have no idea. I occasionally read claims about red-state textbooks being different but I have no idea how true that is, haven't investigated it.
That could be a perfectly legitimate claim, if you can independently distinguish the two, as people can distinguish anti-communism and McCarthyism. If you conflate the two, you end up jarring with usage, e.g. George Orwell, Sidney Hook, and other anti-communist socialists become "McCarthyites."
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McCarthyism took ground, but that's the other reason I'm using it as an example. I'm neither expecting nor asking 2rafa to come up with hypotheticals where 'racist' or 'sexist' stops being an insult in 90% of contexts and clear examples are tolerated anywhere near positions of real power, where the assumptions of social justice aren't treated as a fundamental facet of reality, or where the US stops being explicitly hostile towards racist and formerly-racist regimes.
((Hell, I don't even want a lot of that by its strict definition. And, of course, 'racist' is only useful as a description for what the SJW movement targets as a caconym, in the triple sense that the net is wider to catch entire other 'sins', that it's narrower in excluding a lot of SJW racism, and that it's fine-enough mesh to catch a lot of things that aren't actually in any of those categories by any reasonable definition.))
I'm just wondering when people stop getting fired for minor acts, or being to slow to report those suspected; where we don't see criminal investigation or massive civil liability coincidentally pointed at the politically unacceptable; where the FBI does not take con membership as cause for investigation. Where one-in-two people don't undergo
loyalty review'sensitivity training', where we don't see weaponization of the IRS, of the Veteran's Affairs office, of Social Security benefits, where no rando is highlighted by national politicians by name and by photograph for public humiliation.((And, again, a lot of what's targeted today has less in common with actual-racism or sexism or homophobia or whatever as McCarthy's Army hearings did with communism.))
These aren't goals, they're just weapons, and they're weapons that were placed fully out of McCarthyist hands by people who told us they were too dangerous for anyone to access.
Win/lose might be meaningful for discussing movements in terms of their longer-term impact, and far more important than who's remembered as a jerk, but it doesn't really say as much for the conditions of the war itself. Yet those conditions matter in their own rights: a recurring claim is that since we've seen those weapons set down in the past, they'll be set down here.
Those weapons will not disappear. They just aren't used in times of peace when dominion over the culture is unquestioned.
The 90s were not peaceful because people had grown weary of the quarrels of yore, they were peaceful because only one side was powerful and they didn't feel threatened.
I don't think that's a terribly good model -- McCarthyism's weapons were put down in the late-1950s/early-1960s, which is not exactly where I'd say conservatives felt unthreatened by communists -- but even supposing it's true, what does the equivalent look like today? When, if ever, does the modern social justice movement not feel threatened? When will they feel as their dominion over the culture is unquestioned?
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The later 90's were peaceful because one side had just made a run at power ("Political Correctness") and been repulsed. As it turns out, they were regrouping, and now they have achieved victory and are in the "mop-up and occupation" phase.
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I think you're right that top-level people (senators/congress people, equivalents in the UK) don't feel comfortable being called communists in public, and it's detrimental to them. See the reaction to Corbyn or 'Red Ed' in the UK. I think it is also true that quite a lot of people on that level, and a LOT of people lower down in the PMC are communists. I knew a lot of communists at university, half the politics PhDs were doing their thesis on Marx or Marxist thinkers.
I would say that people's hostility to communism comes from the increasing awareness of what went on in the USSR, and in particular from its very public collapse. (Other communist countries like NK or Cuba don't exactly offer appealing prospects either). It has very little to do with McCarthyism - when I was younger it was common wisdom that communism had failed AND that McCarthyism was a blot on the history of the US, and there was no tension between those two things.
If McCarthyism had won, communist philosophy would not be taught, it would be difficult to buy or publish related books, and any trace of communism in someone's past would get them fired. I don't think we're anywhere close to that. As it is, people just prefer not to have open communists in charge of government, and even that caution is fading IMO.
EDIT: @Harlequin5942 put it better and more briefly.
Well, I guess we are probably going to disagree about what 'being communist' is here.
A lot of people study heterodox things in college and maybe even post about them on social media later in life, but if they produce like a capitalist, consume like a capitalist, vote for neoliberal politicians and invest their retirement fund in capitalist organizations, what do we actually call them?
And yeah, certain liberal arts colleges have a lot more of those people than the general population, and then they go on to teach at other liberal arts schools, and that's a thing. Not many of them write their dissertations praising Marx and then go on to hole serious political or economic power, though, and the vast majority of the populace still disagrees with them strongly (or rather, has blind contempt for them without understanding their ideas in teh first place).
Sure, but I would say that growing trans acceptance comes from increasing awareness and understanding of trans people and the trans experience, and has very little to do with social contagion and SJWs getting people banned fro social media.
I think it's pretty normal when a movement succeeds for the parts of it that look inconvenient in hindsight to get disavowed or forgotten. That doesn't mean that they're not all part of the same movement at the time.
(If they were, I could just 'no true scotsman' any SJW that does something annoying and insist that the movement itself is never wrong)
That's a pretty stiff standard for victory. I'm not sure we've beaten anyone except literal Nazis and slaveowners that badly in US history.
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I'd say this particular 'cycle' started with gamergate, so it's been about ten years. The 'wane' depends, but I'd say it would look a lot like the early-1990s Jim Goad punk era backlash to '80s and late '70s political correctness that lasted through the early 2000s when 9/11 and Patriot Act conspiracy discourse kind of took over the public imagination until towards the end of Obama's first term.
You can already see the seeds of that kind of discourse being sowed in popular media, I think. But of course, that doesn't mean a 'reversal', it just means the most extreme average-LibsOfTikTok-post type stuff will be mocked for a while and mainstream politicians will call it ridiculous without anything actually changing much.
I profoundly disagree on the dating. Gamergate isn't a cause of the culture war, it is a reaction to the fact that video game journalism had already been taken over by SJWs, or at least by unethical weasels who successfully resorted to acting like SJWs when called out.
I was still hanging out in left-wing spaces at the time, and I see the key point is around the failure of Occupy in late 2011 - that is when the activist energy on the left switches from economic issues to social issues. Steve Sailer puts it slightly later with the death of Trayvon Martin in summer 2012 and Obama's decision to take advantage of it to run a more racialised re-election campaign. Exiting the Vampire Castle is published in 2013, and takes for granted that left-wing activist spaces are already dominated by wokestupid.
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Nah I'd say it started with Atheism+ and possibly even before that with LiveJournal sjws vs fiction fail
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August 2014 is a weird starting point, even from the progressive view. That post-dates Atheism +, Racefail, Zimmerman, It Gets Better, the first and second Scott Walker John Doe investigations, so on. In particular, discussing the modern social justice movement without the Affordable Care Act -- both its effects, and also the discussions it depended on to get public legitimacy -- is missing a lot.
2014 contained two of the biggest flashpoints for what we call "wokeness". If wokeness is principally designed by a political fixation on racial and gender identity politics, Gamergate was the "gender" catalyst and the Ferguson riots were the "race" catalyst. I was working in a hotel for the last four months of 2014 and first four of 2015, and remember discussing with a colleague the edit wars on the Gamergate Wikipedia page and also watching a report on the Ferguson riots on a TV in the hotel restaurant. August 2014 was a busy month.
While you're correct to point out that Atheism+ and Elevatorgate was a big precursor to this kind of thing, I think 2014 was the moment when "wokeness" went mainstream: unlike Gamergate, I don't think Elevatorgate made the front page of the New York Times.
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I don’t think so. The modern online culture war can be traced directly back to Gamergate, which is what got millions of previously apolitical young men interested in politics.
Previously there was /pol/ (which had only been remade from /new/ a few years previously, and hadn’t yet fully taken over the site) and the generic stormfront type neonazi sphere. And on the more ‘intellectual’ dissident right there was the Taylor & MacDonald sphere, which was much smaller, and a handful of publications like TakiMag and to some extent Moldbug and his sphere, which initially had a lot of overlap with the more political side of TRP, derived from more generic PUA stuff. But it’s almost hard to overstate how niche and esoteric these things were, and how many of them (eg. AmRen conference attendees) had a primarily older audience. On the ‘mainstream right’ it was all old men, the ‘classic’ Christian right, and a few nerdy libertarians. It was Gamergate and now almost forgotten figures like Sargon who were responsible for the political investment of millions of young men in conservative politics. The ‘new right’ that emerged post-2014 was completely different to the right of McCain etc that opposed the ACA. Young millennial (white) men in 2008 didn’t give a shit about conservative politics. It’s unclear whether Trump wouldn’t have won without Gamergate because the Facebook boomer MAGAverse was largely unrelated to it, but the success of the entire millennial online movement around ‘The Donald’ on the subreddit, on /pol/ and so on was a product of it.
On the left you’re correct that the chain of causation extends a little further back because it can be drawn more directly from SomethingAwful in the late 00s and the emergence of tumblr, which saw ideas that had largely been confined to the philosophy departments of European universities reach a mainstream audience of young women. But still, the explosion of support around eg trans issues does date to around 2014. That was when Amazon’s Transparent debuted to extreme critical and media praise and extensive commentary on its sympathetic portrayal of a transwoman, Dragon Age had the first positively-portrayed trans character in a major game, Caitlyn Jenner came out towards the end of the year and, as the US came out of a long period of economic pain, progressive attention focused more wholly on social issues again as Occupy receded into memory.
So yes, I think 2014 is critical.
I would say the events of 2012 are a crucial inflection point leading to your basic normiecons being willing to support harder edged, less sensitive right wing movements. The DR is twitter weirdos but it does crosspollinate with the republican grassroots leading to some(overstated) actual influence; I don't think that would happen if it wasn't for things like the Trayvon Martin case or a lot of the 2012 election behavior.
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I agree that it's crucial and maybe a turning point (though I'm not sure that, in a world where Gjoni got distracted before posting, some other thing wouldn't have taken the same role). I just don't think it makes sense as a starting point.
My post to FCfromSSC goes over the left side, but while I think the impact was bigger on the right, I think you're overlooking the extent a lot of pre-Gamergate groups were less 'apolitical' or not 'interested in politics', and more just hadn't yet been shoved out of mainstream groups.
In 2009, I could write at length on rpgnet on political topics, if at the risk of (even boring) threads getting locked. A couple years before gamergate, conservative-leaning positions had stopped being zebras and started being understood as unacceptable on their own premises; by the Trump era support of a Republican President was verborten; today, "support or apologism for the use of AI generation in commercial projects" is outside of the bounds of acceptable discussion. My politics didn't change, but the extent I would be visible from the outside and especially the extent I could be seen-as-a-state-sees did, and while my pathway was unusual, I don't think the direction was.
A lot of those groups that these people motions around collapsed, either when the broader Tea Party movement did or with the collapse of web culture into social media and doxxing, and they were never as large, but they existed and in many ways were the very things that the early SJW movement were reacting to.
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The thing that made me a conservative as a young man wasn’t gamergate, it was this. I distinctly remember the day a friend said, “hey come look at this,” and he was showing me tumblrinaction. The intense “KILL ALL MEN ALL MEN ARE RAPISTS EVERY ADVANCEMENT TOWARDS ARTIFICIAL CONCEPTION GETS US CLOSER TO ELIMINATING MEN” stuff that was du jour on tumblr back during this time shocked the shit out of me. And the racial and trans (and it’s almost forgotten now, but otherkin) stuff too.
Then I started to see women I knew in real life saying those things explicitly. And then I saw people in institutions saying it. And then it seemed to take over. At each stage, of course, the rough edges were sanded off. The radfems who truly hated men were very quickly marginalized. But the animating spirit remained the same.
So I remember when it wasn’t “crazy kids on college campuses.” I remember when it was crazy girls on tumblr. And I saw the crazy tumblr girls’ ideas take over the world.
That certainly does for making one a conservative.
I discovered Scott's blog in the comments of a post on TumblrInAction in 2014.
I believe I did the same. Crazy to think he was the most insightful anti-SJ voice at the time. But he was.
When people wonder why there are so many non-rationalist types here, the origin story is Scott writing about feminism in 2014.
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Interesting.
Gamergate is roughly where I put the starting point as well, and it's the date I feel like I see people citing the most often. Notably, Gamergate (and the several other concurrent Feminist pushes, Jackie's story, #TeamHarpies, Listen and Believe, etc) was the point at which the Rip hit me personally, a heretofore more-or-less doctrinaire progressive and a true believer in what I then understood Social Justice ideology to be. I think it's possible that it's the same for a lot of other people; previous to that point, people saw this stuff playing out in their individual subcultural niches, but 2014 was the point at which Social Justice cohered into an acute movement and began seriously pushing for society-wide solutions. Gamergate figures were invited to speak at the UN. Listen and Believe's efforts had what seemed to be a continual media presence from that point on, and there were no more lulls, only compounding acceleration as we transitioned into the 2016 election.
I generally think of it in terms of policy starvation. Progressives had a theory of how things should be fixed; the Bush wars and the recessions convinced them that the time of action was at hand. Obama's presidency was supposed to be the turning point, but nothing significant actually changed. 2014, halfway through Obama's second term, is the point where those who'd run out of patience hit critical mass, and the whole culture started tipping toward radical ideology.
I could see it as a point of heightened visibility or 'crucial', but it feels too much like calling the start of McCarthyism at the Communist Control Act in '54. Dickwolves was 2010, and it wasn't like that was a battle specific to the people pissed off at Penny Arcade. RailFail '09 wasn't just about writing native voices, but heavily balanced around the extent the wrong people got to talk at all, or that tone mattered.
Even other contemporaneous-feeling things end up coming first, like Brendan Eich (April 2014) and arguably TeamHarpy (first posts in May 2014, lawsuit filed in July 2014). NotAllMen and YesAllWomen were promoted and popularized through the first half of 2014, too.
That's not to call it any less of a turning point, but it's hard to call a starting point.
In my perspective, the major difference between gamergate and dickwolves or racefail or elevatorgate or Eich's ouster is that it was with gamergate that the online journalists stopped even trying to understand the other side. Previously articles would include a sentence or two explaining roughly the other side's position (this is stupid and hysterical usually) but with gamergate it was just mouth breathing chodes impotently raging at Quinn the whole way down. And when the publications started doing that, so did the rank and file - you could sit an agg down and walk them through your perspective and at the end of it they'd bsod, shake their head and call you a mouth breathing chode impotently raging at Quinn*. Everyone acted like Arthur Chu was a lone spark of extra insanity after he talked about mind killing himself, but that's because he was actually giving the game away.
*Note I am not saying they would bsod because they knew I was right about gamergate, I am saying they would bsod because they could feel themselves empathising with me.
What is this about Arthur Chu?
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First time?
I get what you're motioning around, but that's what it felt like for a lot of other people a lot earlier. Any opposition to the Affordable Care Act deriving solely from the President's race was a mainstay from 2009-2012. The only possible motivation for a specific anti-gay policy being thoughtless homophobia is gold-standard SCOTUS law, recognized at three different major cases, and with far broader academic and institutional support. Gun owners as wanting more Trayvon Martin shootings was absolutely a thing.
Journolist was revealed in 2010: it wasn't just that it happened, but even the why and how was common knowledge for a set.
It matters that a bunch of people suddenly got to see it first-hand! But it's why I'm skeptical of it as a starting point.
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Agreed, seeing multiple major online publishers run near-identical stories with near-identical headlines at the same time was a gigantic redpill.
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Which means it's not eternal. We'll move on to something else yet.
Or that it requires at least a printing press and efficient enough farming that you can support an idle intellectual class.
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