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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.
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.
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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