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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25699 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.

To whom?

Maybe my brain is just melted by exposure to political compass memes, but I don’t see people contesting the existence of an authleft.

I suspect the main point of divergence is who you think the authleft is and how influential they are. Do you the representative authoritarian leftist is some tankie academic or Joe Biden and the Regime? (And, just as relevantly, what priority to do you assign to them?)

The big issues that I’d frame as authright-vs-libleft are

  1. War on drugs
  2. War on Terror
  3. Voter registration
  4. Immigration
  5. Abortion (when framed as supremacy of old white dudes)

But there are some other really salient ones that don’t fit the mold:

  1. Health insurance
  2. COVID measures
  3. 2nd Amendment
  4. 1st Amendment (in recent years)
  5. Subsidizing college
  6. National debt
  7. Abortion (when framed as supremacy of the federal govt)

To me, this suggests two parties with comparable support for authoritarianism. Neocons and neoliberals represent the equilibrium level. Because “Policy Debates Shouldn’t Be One Sided,” they’ve split on cultural issues instead.

So I guess I’d say most everyone in national politics is, like, between 60 and 80 percent on the authoritarian axis. Even the open socialists or populists. To get on the national stage, you just have to bite the bullet and accept the concept of driver’s licenses.

I think it's important to draw the distinction between paternalism (by which I primarily mean laws that curtail individual autonomy for the subject's own good and/or pro-social causes) and authoritarianism. While one shades into the other in places and there tends to be strong correlation (authoritarian governments are not known for their laissez faire attitudes except when it comes to accountability), you can, e.g. have a politically free country that bans drugs or gun or sodomy. Likewise, you could have a politically unfree country that permits all of the above.

Even the open socialists or populists.

Political radicals are the most prone to authoritarianism because they tend to assume ordinary politically processes are hopelessly corrupted/subverted and thus extreme measures are justified.

Is that paternalism not already captured in the compass? Economic/structural paternalism is pretty much the normal statist-vs.-laissez-faire axis. The other ought to cover moral paternalism.

political radicals are the most prone

Yes, and I think in American politics, they’re still only partway up that axis. Or Axis, as it were.

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