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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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