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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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I think my point is that the median "normie" position is much closer to the "liberal" or "progressive" position than you realize.

I don't think he's arguing that... what he's arguing is that normies have been influenced dramatically over a short period of time by extremely aggressive and disingenous political moves from the left. As others have discussed, basically entryism and underhanded tactics to force public spaces to cater to their norms.

Once you have the norms changed, by definition the "normies" will follow along. They're really just people who default to what the norm is, and don't think too much about it.

What people on the right are complaining about is that there used to be, seemingly, a sort of 'gentleman's agreement' not to use tactics that are too underhanded to change norms. The left recently with all their policing of language, pronouns, media, etc. seem to have thrown that informal agreement out of the window. Which, to be fair, is very explicit in leftist who/whom political philosophy. It's part of why people on the right have been warning about communism for the last century.

If you have a political opponent who will stop at nothing to enact their views, it's hard to impossible to work with them in a liberal democratic setting.

Could you tell me what underhanded tactics the left used and describe this agreement not to use them in more detail? As best I can tell the way the left has effected societal and institutional change is some combination of (1) joining up with an organization to change its culture from the inside and (2) criticizing various aspects of an organization or culture in media (social or legacy) to effect change from the outside. What is "underhanded" about these tactics? Similarly what was disingenuous about these attempts to change the culture? I'm pretty sure leftists believed their own criticisms of these institutions and cultures.

It's hard to pin down exactly - but Venkatesh Rao gives an excellent overview of the types of underhanded, manipulative tactics that 'sociopaths' use to protect themselves and advance their goals at the expense of others in The Gervais Principle.

C.S. Lewis also writes about this sort of maneuvering in his novel The Hideous Strength. There are plenty of other examples of this type of thing.

Of course these tactics aren't limited to leftists exclusively, but leftists and Marxists explicitly embrace the "win at all costs" mentality, while their opponents typically do not. This means that on average more leftists are going to be willing to throw moral scruples to the wind and use whatever manipulative techniques they must to advance their cause.