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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25665 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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I have a new post up on my Substack today, which is expanded from a comment I wrote replying to @FarNearEverywhere's comment (for which they won one of their whopping five AAQCs for December - congrats!).

Why do I find the premise of this novel so risible? It’s not just that the possibility of the Irish far-right seizing power and transforming the country into a fascist dystopia is so laughably remote as to be almost fantastical - if it’s a “warning”, then it’s of about as much use as a warning about a Dáil made up of a coalition of pixies and unicorns. It’s not just that, like most successful Irish writers of the last decade, [Paul] Lynch is clearly something of an East Yank whose political concerns were imported wholesale from across the pond - I would find this novel’s premise exactly as contrived and indigestible were it set in the US or Canada (for reasons I’ll get into shortly). No - it’s that Lynch is writing about a hypothetical authoritarian Ireland brought into being by a far-right administration, while ignoring the warning signs of actual democratic backsliding and authoritarianism ringing loudly in his ears every day.

...

“Freezing the bank accounts of anyone even suspected of having donated to a political cause you dislike, without ever arresting them or charging them with a crime” is the kind of behaviour we’d rightly expect from a Central African dictator. But it wasn’t a far-right Canadian prime minister who did such a thing - it was the genocide-apologising, knee-taking Justin Trudeau, who attends Pride parades and offered the smarmy explanation “because it’s 2015” for his decision to appoint a gender-balanced cabinet. Trudeau is living proof, if any were required, that there’s no conflict between a socially progressive worldview and repressive, dictatorial tactics straight out of the Erdoğan playbook - the iron fist in the rainbow glove.

"Leftists are the real authoritarians" plays about as well as "Democrats are the real racists". It is axiomatic that the right is authoritarian and the left is fighting against that.

You don't need the "real" there - it's all auth-on-auth warfare. Any form of actual liberalism can only flourish briefly as the authoritarian supermajority considers it the lesser evil as opposed to having to fight against other types of authoritarians.

I think this sums it up nicely. Liberty only exists when there is a relative balance between two opposing forces.

It's why I'm terrified of the left right now. When one party is so strong they think they can throw the leader of the opposing party in jail and get away with it, that's a bad sign. During the Bush years, I was pretty anti-Republican because it felt like they were winning (although nothing like today).

An ideal situation is a stable equilibrium.

Worse is swinging between two extremes like in Latin America.

Worst is when one party gets permanent victory like Nazi Germany or the USSR and banishes the competition.

I think this sums it up nicely. Liberty only exists when there is a relative balance between two opposing forces.

This seems like setting up a standard liberalism can't possibly meet?

Well yes, absolute liberalism, like absolute freedom, probably can't exist. We can only hope to have some more of it than we currently do (and it seems that in the past, in certain domains, we did), as the sovereign tyrant is forced to compromise.

Much of the current culture war landscape appears to be a consequence of the progressive meme (known at the local scale as "cry-bullying") where they are in power while denying being in power. The rough shape of the game is that the winner takes all, but the earnings are reduced by whatever it takes to keep contenders down. In that game, the second runner is always incenticised to fight more, but it might actually be optimal for the winner to compromise (yield some payoff to the contenders to buy them out of fighting).

And I think it’s worth noting that the progressive establishment is terrified that the mainstream red tribe will have the kind of engrained distrust of institutions that’s common in the Arab world, or exists between the inner city ghetto dwellers and the police, or etc etc. I think that’s what’s really behind the trump arrests and social media censorship and all that. There’s this idea that the flyover will simply stop obeying the institutions because it’ll be led into conspiracy theories by the president, bolstered by social media.

Obviously the progressive establishment would need to have a pretty bad theory of mind of Republican normies to think that trying to jail trump or exclude him from the ballot on dubious grounds will make them less likely to listen to them, or that censorship makes their authorities seem more authoritative. But, uh, we already knew that. And progressive moderate establishment mouthpieces like The Atlantic keep telling us that that’s what their goal is. It’s not some conspiracy to create a one party state, they want a moderate Republican Party that compromises with democrats in exchange for the odd tax cut. Nor are they that interested in oppressing the red tribe; oppressing people is a lot of work and these people know it, and they also know they have a strictly limited number of people who will go kick in doors(almost anyone willing to do that is either a Republican or a minority, and the terms of minority communities’ deals with the DNC do not include that). We already knew these people are extremely neurotic and frequently do counterproductive things because of their unwillingness to question methodology and narrative; it’s worth considering that the stated goals for the censorship and arrests of opponents are more in keeping with the flaws we know they have than the flaws their enemies claim about them.

I’m having trouble buying that they’re terrified of the Red Tribe losing trust in institutions simply because they’ve been doing everything that one would do to create the outcomes that they’re claiming they want.

Taking the moderate Republicans who compromise thing. If that’s what you want, then calling people fascists and liars is going to go the opposite direction. As are executive orders that undo the previous administration’s actions on day one is a terrible way to do it. Executive orders that end run around the Red Tribe is a terrible way to do it for much the same reason. You would have to be absolutely stupid to compromise when anything you actually get is going to be taken away at the nearest opportunity. You would likewise be stupid to try to reason with someone who thinks you have nothing legitimate to say.

A lot of these people are simply in denial about how Obama treated republicans and/or are stuck in a cycle of 'turnabout is fair play', but more to my main point- we already know that even fairly moderate and establishment-y progressive types have a very bad theory of mind of their opponents. Using ineffective and counterproductive tactics is what we would expect them to do in, well, anything addressed to cultural conservatives/red tribers/republicans(they're technically three separate things). As far as I can tell they really do think they're warning Trump supporters about where they're heading, and don't understand why they're not being listened to.

A lot of these people are simply in denial about how Obama treated republicans

I'm honestly not even sure what you're talking about. The story on /r/politics is that Obama's primary failure was working with Republicans too much.

That would be being in denial, yes.

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I might be missing something, but isn't that his point?

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it’s worth considering that the stated goals for the censorship and arrests of opponents are more in keeping with the flaws we know they have than the flaws their enemies claim about them.

  1. When leftists in spaces where they are utterly dominant (e.g. some social science department, blue state) "cancel" an opponent, what are they trying to achieve? To get him or his cadre to listen?
  2. Let's say it starts out as trying to moderate the GOP. When the GOP refuses to moderate, becomes more radical and fights against the good things progressives want...how do they respond? And how is it distinguishable from any political party or righteous crusader looking to destroy its enemies?

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