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I, like the rest of the country, feel like nothing good will come of the election. However, I feel this way for a slightly different reason than your average person, and probably closer to the average Mottezian.
I actually don't really care too much who is president. Either one of them would IMO do a good enough job. I mostly care whether the president impacts my everyday life or causes nuclear war. However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again. It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again. My workplace and all local institutions will start making statements about how they're standing up to Trump and racism. Under Biden, I have truly enjoyed some nice peace and respite from politics.
However, I find this state of affairs to be very irritating. It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic: we better win or we'll whine and complain for 4 years. I don't respect sore losers, and moreover, I don't like the fact that there is no path forward for the right.
Scott said this back in 2016:
Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out. But what option does this leave the non leftists with? If the Democrat wins, then the currents move left. We get leftism enshrined into law over the next 4 years, because to the victor go the spoils. If the Republican wins, then the undercurrents move left, and more and more people get radicalized towards the left.
Is there a way for the currents to move right without the undercurrents moving left? Or is Trump just uniquely bad at making that happen? I'm tempted to say that this is just the fact that Trump is a polarizing figure, but at the same time, all the leftists I know scream bloody murder whenever a Republican is in command. They were infantile under George W Bush. And though I wasn't around then, I know many people who are still salty over Reagan and act like he was the worst.
If you live most of your life surrounded by leftists and consuming leftist media, then of course leftist whining is the type of whining that is most annoying to you.
As someone with Republican relatives and in-laws, I assure you that rightist whining over the last four years has been both intolerable and often scary. I can't imagine what it's like to live in right-leaning communities at a time when most believe the election was stolen and they're living under the equivalent on an anti-pope.
4 years of Biden has not particularly enshrined leftist values into law, as far as I'm aware? Some of the massive infrastructure spending was earmarked towards renewable energy, I guess, but that's not exactly super-radicalized social justice leftism. As far as I can tell, the law has moved to the right significantly during Biden's term, because of Republicans owning the Supreme Court and most state legislatures.
Honestly, I think that the way to make things move right without backlash is to give in on the tiny culture war sticking points while persuading people on the underlying conservative norms.
Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids. Conservatives had to give up on oppressing gay people, but managed to bring them largely into the tent of traditional marriage and neoliberal economics and so forth.
So do it again. Say fine, trans women are women, and they should be modest and wear makeup and stay at home to raise the adopted kids. Say sure, diversity is a strength, so lets hire some black CEOs who align with our mission to crush unions, roll back regulations, and lobby for tax cuts for the rich.
Basically, assimilation. It's actually true that the basic conservative values are appealing to a lot of people, and a comfortable default for a lot more. A lot of people will happily fall back into those values without thinking about it, if you just stop doing things that look explicitly bigoted or unjust or cruel in ways that get them mad and turn them against you.
Is this how you remember the sequencing? As someone that was vigorously in favor of legalizing gay marriage, I recall the path being inverted from this, where the respectability politics had already happened and the big selling point was that our gay and lesbian friends are not degenerate weirdos, they're totally normal and just want the same thing that straight couples have. This was a pretty good selling point! It convinced me handily, and I certainly see couples that live exactly like that now. The problem is that the aftermath of that win was not declaring victory and slapping a Mission Accomplished sticker on the Pride flag, it was moving onto trans politics, leading up to the modern day "trans kids", trans "women" in women's sports, and so on. At this point, I've basically been convinced that I was wrong, the slippery slope people were completely right, and that simply winning on the one cause and then moving on with normalcy was never an option.
I feel like this is a weak sauce slippery slope, if it is one. It's hard to find good numbers, but this article claims around 2% of Gen Z and 1% of Millenials identify as trans. And I would wager a large portion of those are just non-binary with no plans for any medical interventions, but even if we assume that all of those people identifying as trans are all chasing medical interventions like surgery and hormone treatment this is hardly enough to destroy a society.
In pre-revolutionary France, the First Estate of clergy made up 0.5% of the population, and theoretically all of those people were supposed to be celibate. Even acknowledging the hypocrisy and non-compliance of some of those clergy, you're still looking at a social institution that causes large swathes of people to be childless if it is strictly adhered to. And yet the biggest issue people had with that institution were things like the Catholic Church owning 6-10% of the land in France, and having an outsized influence on French politics. It was not a widely feared thing that people's sons or daughters would become priests or nuns and be forced to live a life of celibacy.
I think that 1 or 2% of trans youth is not the main ill our society faces, and if we had other working social institutions, structures and norms, we could easily deal with 1-2% of the population becoming sterilized. Our low birth rates are not because of decisions that 1-2% of people feel emboldened to make because of greater social acceptance. I think general social atomization, and an emphasis of comfort over duty are greater issues facing our society than whether a tiny minority choose to sterilize themselves.
All of the other issues like trans women in sports are minor distractions barely worthy of serious discussion. If professional weight-lifting can self-regulate and have de facto anti-doping and pro-doping leagues, then I'm sure that left to their own devices sports organizations running women's sporting events will figure out ways to deal with trans women without the need for outside intervention or pressure on anyone's part. Far more serious are questions of women's prisons and violent trans offenders, and I feel like that only becomes an issue because it is the tip of the iceberg of suffering in prison. Violent trans women prisoners are a useful prop, but do most people shed tears for prisoners (men or women) and their bad living conditions the rest of the time?
I don't understand how this is supposed to be a counter argument. There weren't that many more gay people than that, and we were asked to rearrenge society for them, and were assured that any claim there will be further demands was a fallacy. We now have further demands just as predicted, therefore the slipperyslope claim was correct.
Also, if the low numbers of trans people mean their demands aren't a big deal, does that mean you'd be ok with rejecting them entirely?
I had a similar intuition to @vorpa-glavo: I don’t think gay-marriage opponents really called it. Even though their slippery-slope argument was pretty broad, no one talked about trans people as a next step, because trans politics weren’t even on the radar. If there’s not much continuity between the LGB and the T agendas, is it accurate to call them “further demands”?
As for your other question, yeah, I guess. It’d be immoral, but not uniquely so.
A collection of positions of religious organizations are obviously going to be focused on theological positions. They don't need slippery slope arguments. This is how you tailor arguments for a religious position piece.
Legal arguments tended toward the most convenient, most obvious legal slippery slope, especially because we have a solid history and case law concerning polygamy that opponents would have to wrestle with. This is how you tailor arguments for a judge.
To build on @ArjinFerman, I think it included, but was even more than "changing the definition of marriage, and if you can do that, what else can you change?" It would be impossible for me to find my old comments on a legal blog from the period, but I had predicted that this general area could continue to be a sore spot, more like abortion and less like interracial marriage. The reason is that it cuts into deep questions of philosophy and science in ways that are difficult to reconcile beyond short-term applications of pure social power.
That is, at the time that interracial marriage rose to prominence, the question was relatively simple (in comparison), and one that was reasonably easily cabined as a purely legal question. Everyone more or less agreed that race was basically a thing. Everyone more or less agreed on what marriage was. They just had to figure out what to do with these things.
On the other hand, gay marriage very much got down to philosophical concepts concerning what is sex, is sexual behavior distinct from an orientation, how is that determined, is it biological or not, etc., as well as questions concerning what marriage is, what its purpose is, why we have it, etc. This is very much like how abortion sparks deep questions about what life is, when it is human, when it has value, etc. Trans questions are likewise in the intersection of very deep and important philosophical questions, and I think they retain the potential to persist as a divide over time.
It is of little surprise to me that as people are getting past the point of peak social power to get a policy outcome, they're realizing that they've actually found themselves in a bit of a philosophical thicket, and some are even wondering whether they let the fervor get the best of them the last time rather than reasoned consideration. We're just digging deeper into the really hard questions. I recall predicting (from my experience taking a queer theory class at the time) that, if anything, we were going to see that the decisions made in the past concerning things like interracial marriage were, not wrong, but woefully shallow, as the philosophical eye would no longer take things like "race" to be more-or-less agreed upon as mostly existing as a thing, and that it might become messier in the future.
I definitely recall arguing (on SSC, even, not just legal blogs) that the philosophical and scientific claims were on dreadful grounds, and that it was going to be a mess, somehow, for them to enshrine, as a matter of Constitutional interpretation, these shaky claims, akin to how Justice Thomas often reminds us that segregation in schools was once justified by social scientists with shaky claims that it would surely enhance learning to be in a cohort of similar looking peers. I don't think those warnings need to be cashed out in ultra-specific predictions of exactly what form the fallout will take. Just a general sense of the "abortion distortion effect" in the legal space, where it seemed to be the case (following Roe/Casey enshrining questionable philosophy buttressed by appeals to science) that the question of abortion precedent mangled far-reaching areas of the law that wouldn't, on their surface, seem to have anything to do with abortion.
Once you walk down the line of enshrining Constitutional interpretation based on lies about science and questionable philosophy, there are going to be bad effects, somewhere, somehow. "Hey, this other claim looks really close to that other lie, and you are absolutely forbidden from acknowledging that it was a lie, so what'r'ya gonna do about it?!" The whole endeavor is built on a rotten premise, and the only question is how many other rotten conclusions will be adopted in service of that rotten premise along the way. It took almost 50 years for Roe to finally be repudiated; will this end up being repudiated at all? Or will it truly be enshrined as complete cultural dogma, irrefutable by science or the lack thereof, free to continue distorting everything that comes close to it? Who knows. No one can predict with any level of granularity. We can't predict which specific offshoots will garner sufficient strained legal analysis and which others will struggle. But I think we can predict that this deep philosophical rift will persist.
Again, to make an analogy to abortion, I think about the fact that Peter Abelard, in the 12th century, has preserved writings on questions that are extremely close to current questions on abortion. That rift is way older than the 50 years from Roe to Dobbs. I can't imagine that fundamental questions about sex, gender, sexuality, identity, nature/nurture, etc., are just going to become suddenly resolved in a stable way super soon. If those fundamental questions are going to stick around, building on a bedrock of questionable philosophy and absolutely horrid "science" seems to almost necessitate some form of weird and bad transient outcomes.
Couldn’t you make up similar deep philosophical questions about race? What counts as a race, is race different from ethnicity? All the same questions about marriage would apply, too.
You’re correct to note they didn’t matter, because the important issue was equal protection under the law. Government guarantees on marriage had to be extended in a race-blind manner. But I’d say the same for gay marriage! The civil right of marriage ought to be extended in a sex-blind manner.
It’s trans issues which are the odd one out. They can get married, can use existing infrastructure. They’re staking claims on social prestige rather than securing some otherwise-inaccessible right.
I mean, I had a whole paragraph immediately before that one:
I even said later:
So sure, nowadays, people are trying to ask more deep philosophical questions about race, along the lines of what you're talking about. But I don't think this was so apparent at the time.
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Right, what I remember from the time was conservatives getting agitated over "changing the definition of marriage". It's an argument I found bewildering at the time, like bro, you can use whatever definition you want, but I recon that "marriage" defined as "a union between a man and a woman" was an important concept to them the same way "woman" defined as "adult human female" is important to a lot of women nowadays. The slippery slope argument applied to that was "if you can change that definition, what else can you change", and while it's true they focused on other ways the definition of marriage could be changed rather than the definition of "man" and "woman", given the reaction to the incremental hypothetical they were actually using, it's hard to blame them they didn't try something more radical.
I'm not sure I agree with the premise. Didn't some of the very same activist orgs that fought for the LGB move directly onto the T?
Right, and I can respect that opinion, but I think it's inconsistent with his "the scale of the issue is so tiny" argument. If he expects the anti-trans side to concede the issue based on it's scale, I don't see why he shouldn't concede it as well based on the same reasoning.
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