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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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The surge of normie family women and Moral Foundation Theory

A lot has been written on how marriage and long term relationships, at least in the Anglo-saxon contest, move women right from the left. While I think this assessment is generally correct, anecdotic evidence that I gathered around tell me that is not exactly right.

Context: Every month I begin to see some of my female friends and acquaintances, generally middle-upper class women, getting married and having children (age=27 - 32). After the birth their social profiles become typical of a mother with a child; continuous social media posts of their children, mom's initiatives, kindergardens, lovely picture with their newly wed husbands etc But it was very curious to see that this sudden change of social media posting have not changed their past habit of "left-wing posting" about Palestine, gay marriage, feminism etc. Instead, it accelerated a lot.

Sometimes ago, someone here was talking about Moral Foundation Theory and how left and right (and men and women) are different from each other, and how mainstream marriage culture follows more the conservative moral framework than the leftists framework.

But I would like to add that, in my opinion, we are seeing a shift of moral mainstream and normie society going from following the Authority/Sanctity/Loyalty to the Care/Fairness framework. If this happen, the consequence is that people following the rightists moral framework will never find refuge in mainstream family-making society, because this society is becoming morally Leftists. I do not think that we have ever seen, in the history of humanity, a shift like this.

But I would like to add that, in my opinion, we are seeing a shift of moral mainstream and normie society going from following the Authority/Sanctity/Loyalty to the Care/Fairness framework.

I don't think that's true at all. Haidt's research is outdated. SJ, the successor ideology, is not really a three-foundation morality. It's what happens when a conservative-by-temperament with six foundations is raised in 90s liberalism (which was a three-foundation morality), sees it as the "standard", and attempts to "conserve" it. It has Authority (trust ScienceTM) and Sanctity (hate-speech-as-blasphemy); I'm not 100% sure about Loyalty since SJ is hostile enough to its "normal" foes that it's hard to spot any additional hostility for traitors, but callouts are to some degree an anti-traitor mechanism.

What you're seeing is a paradigm shift in "what is conserved", and while it's taken a long time to fruit this tree was planted in the 1960s. I don't think that it's new in history; the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire is an obvious example. It definitely is very hard to reverse at this stage absent some sort of large shock* because the next generation's temperamental-conservatives are now your enemies - they're trying to conserve the new ideology. Without such a shock, your best bet is to try to nucleate a new counterculture based on some of the old principles but with the vibrant and consistent ideology needed to attract the next generation's temperamental-rebels (which is the alt-right in a nutshell), but even then it won't be the same and could be terrible in its own way (to take the low-hanging fruit, Nazi Germany was not the Kaiserreich, and even if it had counterfactually lasted long enough to stabilise, it would still not quite have been).

*The most plausible shock I can imagine is if the most-affected areas - i.e. the cities - are literally and specifically depopulated for some reason, be that nuclear war, a plague, civil war causing food disruption, or economic collapse again causing food disruption. There may be other possibilities I do not see.

NB: This post discusses what Is and Will be, not what Ought be. That which works is not necessarily good.