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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.
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.
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.
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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