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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Did the alt-right ever even exist? I remember when Trump first came on the scene and people were freaking out, there were articles everywhere and people making tons of YouTube videos about the alt-right and how they were recruiting people. Nobody ever asked the question recruiting them to what? Could you even join the alt-right?
Seriously, from what I can gather, the alt-right was basically some podcast networks (TRS) and then Richard Spencer's tiny organization. His NPI conferences had maybe 500 people. Other so called members of the alt-right like Jared Taylor had already been around for decades with American Renaissance. Even when they got together at their biggest event with Unite the Right in Charlottesville, there were barely 1,000 of them and they were vastly outnumbered by counter-protesters. And a bunch of these were old school white nationalists like David Duke who came on the scene over 30 years before that.
As far as I can tell, nobody has ever seen or heard of a gathering of more than 1,000 of them together at one time. There is no alt-right to join or be recruited to and is not an organization. It has no leader or leaders. It basically doesn't exist. The mainstream media and Democrats basically made it up either as a psyop or just convinced themselves that it exists. It's probably a mix of both. This wasn't like recruiters online targeting vulnerable Muslim kids to go fight for ISIS where you could go literally join ISIS which was an organization that actually controlled land and had an army. You join the alt-right and do what exactly? Shitpost on 4chan and post edgy memes on Twitter?
Their strongest argument probably is that there were some lone wold terrorist attacks. But there were already lone wolf white nationalist attacks before Trump like the OKC bombing. And none of the closest things to leaders of the alt-right had ever committed and violence as far as I can tell. And I would argue that the mainstream media's reporting on this issue did much more to create lone wolf shooters who they gaslit into thinking we were on the cusp of a race war and gassing the Jews than any alt-right "recruiters" did.
Am I crazy here? My theory is that the Hillary Clinton campaign saw they were a good boogeyman to scare people about Trump and then the media ran with it and people convinced themselves of something on a societal level that never even existed. It's actually insane if you really think about it.
Hradzka has a good bit on what he expected Richard Spencer was trying to do with the term to start with, and what a lot of progressives were doing as well. Or see this New York Times piece (by Singal, of course) that separated the 'alt-right' from the 'alt-light' -- and contrast, even contemporaneously, other pieces.
There's a lot of if-by-whiskey, where sometimes the alt-right was just the nutty white nationalists when defining their ideology, others where it was people who hadn't denounced them heavily enough, and then other times the alt-right was pretty much everyone to the right of Mitt Romney. And to a lot of the progressive and leftist movements, the difference was kinda marginal : if you think Mitt Romney was a white supremacist, you're worried about all of them.
I'm glad that some posters mentioned Romney in all of this. The unbelievable leftist smear campaign against him in the 2012 campaign season, which was clearly motivated by nothing else but the sense of urgency to prevent the nation's first glorious African-American leader from going down in history as a one-term disappointment, was an obvious wake-up call to many otherwise moderate rightists, and convinced them that, unlike in 2008 and 2012, the GOP should actually try running a candidate who stands a chance and isn't a cuck. This had an obvious galvanizing effect on dissident right-wing politics, I think.
To be fair to the Democrats, they had no moral reason to fight fair after Kerry got swiftboated in 2004. Not that either side cared much about morality to begin with when it comes to campaigning, but my point is that this is a long story and both sides have been pulling dirty campaign tricks since the parties came into existence. There is nothing new about what they did to Romney, and that kind of dirty campaigning is not at all unique to the Democrats.
I used to generally agree with this in 2012, but I changed my mind since. From a moral standpoint, dishonestly smearing someone is wrong, even as part of a tit-for-tat response.
But more strongly, I've come to realize that, for purely selfish reasons, Democrats should have fought fair then and should always fight fair. This applies to the Republicans just as much, of course. This is because the reason that I am a Democrat, and the reason I believe most Democrats are Democrats, is that I honestly believe that there's something morally/ethically/economically/etc. better about the Democrats than the Republicans. Which means I have a selfish motivation to make sure that the Democrats really are better, so that I don't suffer the shame of having backed the wrong side.
Now, a minor implication of this is that Democrats being dishonest is, in itself, something that calls into doubt their moral superiority. But Republicans are arguably (evidently?) just as dishonest just as often, so that's not that big a difference maker*. The bigger implication is that if Democrats are using dishonesty to win people over to them now, then that calls into question how I was won over to them in the past. So out of purely selfish reasons, I want the Democrats to prove to me that they have a commitment to honesty, so that I can be more confident that when I was won over, then I was won over honestly rather than being duped.
One argument I used to buy into was that the Democrats had a moral duty to win. I've since come to believe that that was motivated reasoning on my part. Given that I prefer the Democrats, my belief that the moral disaster of Democrats losing is so high as to justify underhanded tactics to prevent it is not just suspect, it's meaningless. And if winning requires such underhanded tactics such that I lose confidence that our side really is the better side, then that removes any satisfaction from winning; I want the correct side to win, not my side to win - I try to align those by changing what "my side" is to be the "correct side." And I can't get those aligned properly if the side I want to support is dishonest.
* There's a small issue here that I can't be trusted to have an unbiased view of the situation. I like Democrats and dislike Republicans, so if I perceive Republicans as being more dishonest, then that tells us nothing about if they really are more dishonest. And if I perceive a similar level of dishonesty, then almost certainly the Democrats are being more dishonest, since I'm far more likely to unconsciously gloss over their immoralities than Republicans'. I've just given up and decided to be aggressively agnostic on their relative dishonesty.
"All is fair in love or war."
Especially when both parties believe the future of the country is at stake, conscience and fairness are a nuisance that only gets in the way of seeing the "big picture." If playing by moral and ethical rules always puts you at the disadvantage of losing, it's it's always unreasonable and inconsistent to prefer the righteous team/candidate.
This gets into what I'd consider to be a more fundamental question underlying this, which is something like, if winning requires that you throw away any meaningful confidence you have that the world isn't, by your own standards, made a worse place because you won, then is that tradeoff worth it? I could see the argument for either, but push come to shove, I'd say it isn't. I believe there's actually something better about supporting something with some level of confidence about the goodness of that thing compared to supporting something just because it's my team. I'm sympathetic to the former choice, since winning feels good, and it often translates to direct, tangible positive consequences to someone's well-being, and that can be worth making the rest of the world a worse place for everyone else. But I'm completely unsympathetic to anyone making the former choice while claiming that it's a necessary evil to give us the better future that we deserve; that evil act corrupts our very ability to judge that us winning would make the future better than the counterfactual. If more people just baldly stated, "I don't care if politicians on my side actually make society/our lives/the world/etc. better; what matters is that it's my side, and I want my side to win," that would be worthy of respecting.
Plenty of people will say the ends justify the means. Or to adopt the position of some leftists a number of years ago who used to say, "there are no bad tactics, only bad targets." After all, why even waste your time being in the game if honest actors have no hope of winning it? Darwinism applies just as much to the political sphere, and it's survival of the fittest, win at all costs, because that's our system. We don't have proportional representation here, only the winner walks away with the keys to the kingdom.
For better or worse, no matter who gets into power, getting 'anything' done in politics is actually very difficult. It's a worthwhile debate to ask if it even really matters who becomes President. I'm undecided on the issue, but I agree with Andrew Breitbart entirely when he said politics is downstream from culture. You start locally and expand your sphere of influence.
But is it downstream from the culture of the people or the culture of the elites? These are two very different things.
Arguably, democracy is merely a way for people to have some influence on which elites are in power.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link