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 -
WHY is there a culture war?
I think most people around here accept the existence of a red tribe and a blue tribe, and accept that most of what happens in western society and politics, from George Floyd to Taylor Swift, follows from those two tribes trying to weaponize events and ideas in order to dunk on their enemies. As a description of the world, our culture war theory works very well. But as an explanation, maybe not. Yes, yes, there are these two tribes, but WHY do these tribes hate each so much? It seems obvious to me that the red tribe is currently on the defensive, and so fights on out of a spirit of plucky individualism/puerile defiance (you choose). They could just stop, but that would amount to a capitulation. Rightly or wrongly, the red tribe won't accept that, so they continue they culture war.
But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself. Why do they hate the red tribe so much? One could point back to Trump and say "Look at all the damage the red tribe did!" but Trump himself seems to have been the red tribe lashing out at blue tribe condescension/scorn. Do they just want revenge for the 80s? The 50s? In I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, the suggestion is that the tribes are too similar, and so therefore hatred is somehow inevitable. He compares the situation to Germans hating Jews, or Hutus hating Tutsis, but in both of those cases, the party on the offensive accused the other party of a pretty specific set of misdeeds. Those accusations may have been false, but they mobilized a lot of hatred. It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all (barring some attempts that certainly haven't had the hoped-for effect, like mass Residential school graves or Jan 6). One might point back to the legacy of slavery or something, but that is largely absent from other Western histories, and the tribes have sorted themselves out the same way, with even more hostility, as in Canada, where the Blue hatred for Red (using the american color scheme for consistency) takes the form of quite overt punching-down.
So: 1)Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively? 2)If it is naive, why does the red tribe hate the blue tribe? 3) Why does the blue tribe hate the red tribe?
My theory is that the modern culture war in the US stems from gay marriage. Basically, gay marriage did not win democratically in the US, it was imposed from above. Therefore blue tribe is deeply insecure in their victory. And they have responded by trying to crush any and all dissent.
It would have been healthier if blue tribe had to win gay marriage the old-fashioned way, through the formal constitutional amendment process. Win referendums state-by-state. It would have taken longer, but having your fellow citizens vote with you gives confidence in the result, that it's unlikely to be taken from you.
Perhaps the loss in the California referendum spooked blue tribe, and made them think the amendment path was impossible. Personally I do think Americans would have eventually voted for gay marriage. "The pursuit of happiness" is deeply entrenched in the American soul.
A couple analogous situations. Women's suffrage was rejected by the Supreme Court. So it had to be done via amendment. But doing so made it utterly accepted.
Canada passed gay marriage with two free votes in Parliament. One under a Liberal government and one under the subsequent Conservative government. Both votes passed, and thus gay marriage has iron-clad legitimacy in Canada. This is how the process is supposed to work, what Parliament is for.
You’re thinking about this the wrong way.
The battle over gay marriage was won so fast both legally and popularly that progressives think they can repeat that with say trans issues.
I don’t think conservatives think they have a chance of ever reversing gay marriage. Best they can do is fight to have the freedom to not bake cakes for it.
Moreover, they did so by just lying about what is known about reality, enforcing it through pure social power, then freely admitting that they totally lied. There have been, and there will be, zero consequences for this lying, so ISTM that they feel emboldened to repeat the same tactic on any issue of choice.
Leaving aside the whole issue of government involvement in the institution of marriage and the court deciding things, the popularity battle was not won by lying.
I can grant your claims of some lying, but the biggest factor is that what the gays wanted was not that much of an ask, overall. It was about social acceptance, without too much of a real burden. The exceptions, of course, revolve around the trade offs with religious rights, because freedom of association and freedom from association are murky unresolvable problems.
This is not the case with trans issues. There are significant health concerns, as well as the major biological differences between men and women being pretttty difficult to overcome. It’s asymmetric of course; almost all the Culture Warring is over MtF issues.
In comparison to what? There is a reason that the lies were focused on making it, "...compared to having to 'live a lie' and betray your very identity that is as core to your being as your DNA, and as a result, never ever have the chance to live a happy and satisfying life." If you lie enough to make the alternative YUGE, then you can make it sound like what you're wanting is not that much of an ask. It's baked in to your thinking that it's not that much of an ask, and you probably can't extricate it from your mind to look at it any other way.
It’s just literally not much of an ask in concrete terms, relative to say implementing the ADA, or the Civil Rights Act(s), or the various complexities of trans issues.
The gay people I know personally are quite gay, and disproportionately the type who risked/suffered a great deal personally to live as such. They weren’t lying about their reality. Some countries still execute gays. Hell of a preference to satisfy.
I’ve seen a number of instances where religious gay men tried to make a heterosexual marriage work and it didn’t pan out. The “genderqueer/fluid” crowd is a different beast, as is the whole thing with bisexuals, but most of that has emerged in more recent times and among the youths, after the popular perception tide had turned.
Graduating high school in 2006 is utterly different than in 2016 with respect to the gays. The people that can’t remember 9/11 also can’t really remember a lack of societal acceptance of gays. Even if the courts had not ruled in favor of gay marriage when they did, the cultural change was already a foregone conclusion.
I don't know that this happens without the lies, though. That NYT article said that it was "critical" to tell people these lies so that they could effect a cultural change. Again, I think you're so swimming in the result that you really just can't fathom how important it was for the culture to change. How many people felt just utterly bullied into changing their perspective, because they felt they couldn't say anything in response to, "The Science says!" They had to retreat to, "Well, I might not personally like it, but if that's who they are," or some people even said, "...if that's who god made them to be, then..."
Graduating in 2016 meant being most exposed to peak propaganda on precisely this issue. Literally 2015 was Obergefell, when the APA told SCOTUS that a bloody opinion poll settled the science on the issue. The lies were literally more like the water they were swimming through than at any other time.
Frankly, this is just reinforcing my original point. They were sooooo successful with pushing these lies to effect cultural and legal change that you can't even see how important it was. It's no wonder they think they can just boldly do it again on any issue they please. You might personally see through it the next time, but there will be a train of people who graduated in 2026 instead of 2016 or 2006 who will be right there to say, "But you just don't understand that there was a cultural change," and completely not grokking how that cultural change happened.
To put a finer point on it, you have the causation backwards.
Even if I grant you all the lies, the lies happened because there was already critical mass where it was important. The “science lies” were a prop, not a significant load-bearing element of the cultural change machine. Now the Hollywood propaganda was load-bearing I think, but the gays had already long conquered the arts so what can you do.
I was raised in a very religious environment and served under DADT. I personally made the transition to support gay rights, and witnessed that in many others, including the devout. “The science” was an afterthought compared to knowing gay people. (I think I made the shift before actuality personally knowing a real-life homosexual, due to reading a prominent gay intellectual for several years as a teenager.)
The biggest factor for most people was the personal relations bit. Back then, being gay was certainly not a fun preference to indulge if you were from a background like mine or wished to serve in the military.
The same playbook won’t work nearly so well on trans issues because of the complications I already described, as we are witnessing.
More options
Context Copy link
I’m telling you that I lived through that transition and the lies you allege were just not a significant factor.
It’s not like the Red Tribe is convinced by “well if science says so”, and the Blue Tribe accepting it was a foregone conclusion, science or not. What gives this issue a strong majority is similar to the case of abortion: independents and a decent chunk of right-leaning people support the other side.
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