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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25859 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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Much of the core messaging on the right is explicitly 'anti-agency,' for lack of a better word. You're unemployed because the government shipped your jobs overseas, you're addicted to fentanyl because of corrupt doctors and politicians in bed with Chinese companies flooding the country, men are depressed and committing suicide because of feminism/hostile society/subversion of traditional gender roles, you're poor because immigrants are driving down your wages.

When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs? I can accept that even if they did believe that, saying so publicly would be political suicide...but do you think that they believe it? Do you yourself believe that, or do you agree with most of the statements I made above?

I'd also point to pro-police, anti-privacy, and anti-drug policy positions adopted by the political right. Really the entire Law and Order branch of right wing policies is totally antithetical to a politics that supposedly centers on personal agency.

Maybe a better way to rephrase is with the old line about racists: Not all Right wingers have an internal locus of control, but most people with an internal locus of control are right wingers?

I'm not a fan of the law-n-order branch, but it's not antithetical to personal agency at all. Do the crime, go to jail; it's your choice whether to do the crime.

It seems very incompatible with the idea that a right winger is high in personal efficacy to say that tax dollars need to be spent, and civil rights abrogated, in order to pay people to "protect" you from scary things.

We are happy to abolish the police and handle their functions ourselves, individually and as a group. The police are a peace treaty with the rest of you, who prefer to avoid the realities of that arrangement.

I disagree, I don't think this is an accurate description of what most right wingers believe. IMO Rightists tend to recognize the necessity/benefit of the Leviathan, so long as the state is fulfilling its half of the bargain. You're right that an average RW, high agency person is more likely to be capable of solving problems with violence, but I think they also tend to be more aware of the what the costs of doing so are (especially on a societal scale) and therefore are more likely to prefer the existence of the state/police.

IMO Rightists tend to recognize the necessity/benefit of the Leviathan, so long as the state is fulfilling its half of the bargain.

That's not the Leviathan. With the Leviathan, once you (or your forebears) have made the deal to surrender your sovereignty (whether voluntarily or at swordpoint), you're bound to it forever. Hobbes's second "OF THE RIGHTS OF SOVERAIGNES BY INSTITUTION" is "Soveraigne Power Cannot Be Forfeited".

Secondly, Because the Right of bearing the Person of them all, is given to him they make Soveraigne, by Covenant onely of one to another, and not of him to any of them; there can happen no breach of Covenant on the part of the Soveraigne; and consequently none of his Subjects, by any pretence of forfeiture, can be freed from his Subjection.

Full disclosure: I haven't read Hobbes, I just know the lingo, so I can't speak to what Leviathan actually says or not. So if you're trying to argue "what you mean is the state in general, not The Leviathan, that's something different" then I must decline to argue.

However, it seems obviously true that nobody is bound to a sovereign permanently and without recourse; history is replete with successful revolutions against governments.

However, it seems obviously true that nobody is bound to a sovereign permanently and without recourse; history is replete with successful revolutions against governments.

Sure, but Hobbes would argue that these were all morally illegitimate. The Hobbesian social contract is openly one-sided (as opposed to later social contract theories which were more covertly one-sided).

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