site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I genuinely think this kind of activity is the way to increase Trump's popularity. There's no way he should be running for a second term, but right now he barely has to campaign because the media is doing it all for him and the actual party debates are being reduced to "this is only to decide who is gonna be his VP".

Ridiculous, but the mania over 'Orange Man Bad' really has led to this. He didn't put the gays in concentration camps, so why is he seen as such a threat to American democracy? And don't "Jan 6th!" at me, this kind of hysteria was in full flow before ever that happened. I have had to come to the conclusion that the rage was all over It's Her Turn Now - how dare anyone take the right, proper, and just transition of power away from the woman and the party destined to possess it in perpetuity? How dare some grubby populist overturn all the pundits who knew it could never, ever happen? And the fearmongering just got stoked higher and higher over the years.

And don't "Jan 6th!" at me, this kind of hysteria was in full flow before ever that happened.

There were warning signs before the 2016 election. At the time I didn't take them seriously, but someone who was better calibrated than me could have done, as could someone who was looking for excuses to hate on Trump. But with hindsight, I think it should have been obvious that Trump was more likely than most other Republicans to do January 6th.

  1. Trump jump-started his political career by being one of the most prominent people to stick with birtherism after Obama's birth certificate was authenticated by the State of Hawaii - and he didn't finally concede that Obama was born in the US until after he had the 2016 primary sewn up. Falsely claiming that the President is ineligible is an attack on US democracy.
  2. Trump engaged in mild brownshirt behaviour during the campaign, like leading chants of "Lock Her Up" and encouraging supporters to beat up protesters. This isn't anti-democratic in itself, but empirically brownshirt behaviour is correlated with someone being a threat to democracy.
  3. Trump either joked about or actively solicited (the GRU didn't get the joke) Russian help in hacking his opponent's e-mails. I don't want to rehash the argument about whether this is collusion or not, but even if it isn't, thinking that attacks on American democracy by a hostile foreign power are a joking matter says something about Trump.
  4. Trump said in the 3rd 2016 debate that he would "keep you in suspense" about whether he would concede defeat if he lost.
  5. Even after winning, Trump falsely claimed that millions of people had voted illegally in the 2016 election and that he was the legitimate popular vote winner.
  6. As President, Trump continues to transgress various norms in a way which constitutes weak circumstantial evidence that he is the sort of person who would transgress the norm that defeated Presidential candidates concede. Notably, he tries to strongarm Zelezny into launching a (probably bullshit) criminal investigation of the Bidens, and to share nonpublic information about said investigation with the Trump campaign.
  7. Before the 2020 election, Trump again refuses to commit to accepting the results.

Trump was a transgressive candidate - for many of his supporters, that was the whole point. The people who said that this transgressiveness was a threat to American democracy were right, for the right reasons - as confirmed by the events leading up to Jan 6th, even more so than by Jan 6th itself.

Immediately after the 2016 election, everyone knows that Trump is publically badmouthing America's democratic institutions. The Orange Man really is saying Bad things. The question is whether he means them, or whether this is just his schtik. "Orange Man Bad" and "Trump Derangement Syndrome" are memes used by the right (and by the centrist punditocracy which is on its last legs before finally being booted out after George Floyd ODs near a cop) to imply that taking him seriously is cringe. But Trump was serious.

  • -11

And don't "Jan 6th!" at me, this kind of hysteria was in full flow before ever that happened

His contempt for democracy was already pretty evident before Jan 6th. Pre-Jan 6th anti-Trump feeling wasn't unjustified because Jan 6 hadn't happened yet; Jan 6 was Trump 'hysteria' being proven right! To embrace Godwin's law, this is the equivalent of saying that anti-Hitler sentiment was baseless before 1933 because it was only then that he was able to make any effective attack on democracy. People warned that Trump had no respect for democracy, and they were right. This was 2016;

First of all, it’s rigged and I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, to be honest

I have had to come to the conclusion that the rage was all over It's Her Turn Now

This is trivially disproved by the number of people who hate Trump who also dislike Clinton, from the Democratic left to the Never Trump Republicans. The former is obvious but it's also true in the case of the latter; McMullin called Hillary 'terrible' in 2016, French wrote a piece in July 2016 harshly critical of Clinton on the emails and saying Comey should charge her etc. etc.

  • -14