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 -
An obscure figure from the old Alt Right takes the Hanania Pill.
The main reason I am posting this is not that, but to highlight his insider's history of the 2015-2017 era Alt Right which makes up much of an accompanying article.
1: Hanania's apparent survival of cancellation for past extremism via telling his story and disavowing his most extreme past views may have been quietly influential. This is the 2nd guy I've seen do it without even being forced to by exposure.
2: This guy claims to have been a quietly very influential figure and tells a story where his actions had a very outsized effect on the world. Maybe truly, maybe not. But his general account of events besides his own part in them is an insider's history of that much-mythologized period of the Alt Right, which was very influential and did have have a very outsized effect on the world, and his account seems to be a reasonably well-calibrated explanation of how their influence rippled into events.
The Hanania pill seems to consist of arrogant shitstirrers realising that they loathe most white people just like they loathe everyone else.
God forbid.
This thing sounds like something that could be written by a leftist, with just a few words changed. I mean, imagine something like this:
Actually, this sounds more believable than the original text. It's certainly more likely to be somewhere in ChatGPT's training corpus.
It's no wonder this man hates the Midwest -- he's basically a progressive activist, just with one or two ideas swapped around! The actual conservatism (and the pragmatism and realism he labels as "smallmindedness") he found there is as alien to him as it is to the woke moralist, and he rejects them for the same reason. They, in turn, reject his utopian vision -- because they're stupid and reactionary and the world is going to leave them behind. They're not on the right side of history. Don't they realize how much work there's been in
academiaright-wing internet forums about the systemic racism againstBlack peopleWhite people deeply ingrained in American society? Just do another search-and-replace of "smallminded" and put in "prejudiced."@FiveHourMarathon and I have gotten into arguments in the past about the nature of conservatism, but regardless of where one draws the line between conservative and reactionary, this guy is on the other side of it. This is not the writing of a conservative, desiring to hold on to the lasting traditions that have been gifted to him by his upbringing. This is an ideologue, a radical, someone animated by the same spirit of the age that motivates the Communist revolutionary or the social justice activist. And he has the same smug self-assurance that, if empowered, would drown his neighbors in a lake and call it baptism.
Everything this guy writes is just a massive argument for Hlynka's position -- the strong form, not the way-too-far version he started saying later on -- that white identitarians are schismatic progressives, not really conservatives. I know he made some very strong and silly claims that extrapolated too far from the connection he saw. But guys, this right here is exhibit A.
He's a Cecil Rhodes Imperialist, and the problem with Cecil Rhodes Imperialism is that it's all about the Empire and nothing about the homeland. It very easily devolves into this guy's brand of "I don't care about the Whiteness as such anymore, I care about the money and success" version of Empire, jeering at attachment to a local plot of land. Chesterton mocked such sentiments a lot, as in pointing out how Empire Day was the brainchild of Canadians, and it has since been watered down to Commonwealth Day as the Empire has fallen apart.
(Warning for what may be perceived as anti-Semitism)
From "Songs of Education":
II. GEOGRAPHY
Form 17955301, Sub-Section Z
The earth is a place on which England is found,
And you find it however you twirl the globe round;
For the spots are all red and the rest is all grey,
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
Gibraltar's a rock that you see very plain,
And attached to its base is the district of Spain.
And the island of Malta is marked further on,
Where some natives were known as the Knights of St. John.
Then Cyprus, and east to the Suez Canal,
That was conquered by Dizzy and Rothschild his pal
With the Sword of the Lord in the old English way:
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
Our principal imports come far as Cape Horn;
For necessities, cocoa; for luxuries, corn;
Thus Brahmins are born for the rice-field, and thus,
The Gods made the Greeks to grow currants for us;
Of earth's other tributes are plenty to choose,
Tobacco and petrol and Jazzing and Jews:
The Jazzing will pass but the Jews they will stay;
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
Our principle exports, all labelled and packed,
At the ends of the earth are delivered intact:
Our soap or our salmon can travel in tins
Between the two poles and as like as two pins;
So that Lancashire merchants whenever they like
Can water the beer of a man in Klondike
Or poison the meat of a man in Bombay;
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
The day of St. George is a musty affair
Which Russians and Greeks are permitted to share;
The day of Trafalgar is Spanish in name
And the Spaniards refuse to pronounce it the same;
But the day of the Empire from Canada came
With Morden and Borden and Beaverbrook's fame
And saintly seraphical souls such as they:
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
Chesterton was bitter because he saw that a certain traditional Englishness was subsumed by Empire. But the joke was always on him; most of that ‘traditional Englishness’ was itself less than a century old and the product of the first age of mass media in the early 19th century, before which much of rural Britain practiced an ancient, barely-ritualized, quasi-pagan kind of Christianity about as far as its possible to get from the orthodox Roman Catholicism Chesterton ultimately adopted. The Canadians who invented Empire Day were, in large part, ethnic Britons. It was conceived by one Thomas Robinson, likely of British extraction, in Winnipeg. The Lancashire merchants were ethnic English. Chesterton’s distaste for Jews like Disraeli and the Rothschilds obscured how profitable the Suez Canal was for Britain; it was India alone that was the whetstone around the empire’s neck, and if India had been jettisoned after the mutiny the entire enterprise would have been largely self-sustaining moving forward.
A century on, we can see that his distaste for empire was flawed. In truth, Britain is no worse off than those other Northern European countries that never pursued far flung imperialism, like Sweden. England’s cultural and civilizational decline is therefore likely unrelated to empire.
Cecil Rhodes was prescient. The only hope for Britain’s economy in the long is ultimately full economic union with the United States, and this has been clear since the 1890s. Of course, the less Anglo America gets, the harder it will be to convince them to let the British in.
I assume you're referring to the mutiny of 1857-58. Why exactly would jettisoning India have been a good idea in your view? I'd guess that anything that can reasonably be called a problem stemming from holding onto India could have been averted simply by turning it into a dominion, as the independence movement leaders wanted.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A reactionary is just a conservative after the society they want to preserve has been destroyed.
A (constitutional) monarchist in Britain may be a conservative. A monarchist in France is a reactionary.
There are (a few)monarchists in France, but my understanding is that they’re basically all neoabsolutist fringe groups- which would also be quite reactionary in Britain or Spain or other countries where monarchism is a normal part of the center right.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think that "there's two camps: people who want to change the world, and people who want to hold onto tradition" is a good criteria for classifying political ideologies, because that would cause our judgements about which ideologies are really "the same" to become too relativized to the contingent circumstances that an individual person happens to find themselves in.
Suppose that Hlynka, a classic American liberal, finds himself transported to a Marxist-Leninist/Stalinist regime that has existed for around say, 100 years. I stipulate the timeline only so that we can see that this regime has existed long enough that its principles have become ossified as "traditional".
The question is: in this situation, is Hlynka a Red (wants to preserve tradition) or a Blue (wants to change the world)?
If Hlynka would change his ideological commitments and become a communist because "Reds uphold the social order, that's what Reds do" then I think that's simply a contingent personality trait of Hlynka's; it's not an inherent property of any particular ideology. If you just change your mind based on what everyone around you thinks, then that doesn't reveal any deep ideological commitments on your part. That's just a non-ideology.
If you try to bite the bullet and say "yes, Hlynka wants to change his society now, so he's now a Blue", then that seems to lead to a lot of problems. Is Hlynka now "the same" as the progressives and white identitarians that he spent so much time lambasting? We can also imagine that Hlynka is magically transported back and forth on a weekly basis between actual 2024 America and our hypothetical Communistan - is he "the same" as a progressive when he's in Communistan, and "not the same" as a progressive when he's in America? It's an absurd conclusion.
You could also try something like "yes, Hlynka now disagrees with the prevailing ideology of his society, but he won't actually try that hard to change it, because he knows how to make peace with the social order, and therefore he's still a Red". But again, this seems to me to be a personality trait, rather than an actual ideological principle. If you have two classical liberals, and one is really proactive about trying to take society in a more classically liberal direction and the other takes a more guarded "wait and see, everything in its time" approach, do they really have "different" ideologies now? I think we should just do the obvious thing and classify ideologies based on their stated principles, rather than the degree of ferocity with which their adherents are willing to fight for them.
TL;DR your ability to support "tradition" depends on the degree to which that tradition supports you. You could just be the kind of person who's happy anywhere. But that says more about you than it does about systems of governance.
I think this ignores the big gap between utopia and tradition. If you can point to a time when things were good, and say that you want to recreate those conditions as closely as you can, that might require considerable social change but I would still count it as 'traditional'. You can use 'reactionary' if you prefer.
Alternatively, if you have a vision for humanity that has never yet been properly realised, I think of that as being 'progressive' or 'utopian'. Utopia, of course, famously means 'nowhere'.
If you look at it like this, you have two axes: complacency vs revolutionary; and traditional vs utopian.
So I would be a revolutionary traditionalist; @2rafa's political friends would be complacent traditionalists, and Walt is a revolutionary utopian.
Conservative is non fiction, Reactionary is historical fantasy, Progressive is Science Fiction. At some level of remove, we don't really know what went on historically.
More options
Context Copy link
Now add the traditional left/right division as a Z-axis and you've got a cube. We can call it the Corvos Cube and develop an insular and baffling lingo surrounding it.
Entirely too legible. I'd rather say that someone is "in the upper lefthand back corner of the purple sector of the Corvos Cube."
More options
Context Copy link
That could certainly be an interesting thing to know about a political ideology - whether there are any actually existing historical examples of it being implemented. I'm not discounting that. But I don't think that property is relevant to establishing the identity of two ideologies (or their identity modulo one or two specific principles - the core claim I'm concerned with is "progressivism and white nationalism are just the same thing with the races switched").
One person's utopia could be fully automated luxury gay space communism with full dive VR available to everyone. Another person's utopia could be enslaving all of humanity in the service of building statues of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and outlawing anything that isn't directly relevant to achieving that goal. The fact that neither of their utopias have actually existed before is irrelevant in this case. There's no meaningful sense in which they have the same ideology. They're different.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Right. I've got into arguments with people that I considered to be too conservative, on the basis that the world is changing without their permission and if they actually liked World State A then they may need to do something new in order to prevent us from moving further and further away from it. But this guy has exactly the same "the new world requires new people" energy as any Stalinist.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link