Various thoughts, probably won't be too cohesive...
On the first point, I'm not a parent but I do feel like the healthiest attitude to hope to pass on something true, useful and right while also recognising that they're going to be their own person, shaped by the world and culture around them and not just by their parents. I really can't relate to the attitude of wanting or expecting your children to be the same as you, although at the same time I can understand a certain protectiveness over what children are exposed to, since it's obviously true that children are more easily influenced than adults are. Probably this attitude comes from me having a good relationship with my parents.
I feel like the best defence of disgust is that it often points to something more important beneath it, maybe the average person can't philosophically justify all of their disgust-based taboos (against excrement, incest and cannibalism, for example) but it's probably not a good idea to disregard them entirely based on the word of the first convincing sophist you encounter. Still, I think the best argument in favor of paying attention to disgust is that it may point to a more profound insight or justification, obviously abandoning that attempt at justification entirely is not a great idea for a convincing or reflective movement.
I really don't think that characterising the driving forces of "the right" as nihilists and opportunists is accurate - not because they're not present, as they must be in any movement, but because in my opinion taking people at their word that they really do believe the things they say is usually the best approach. Inconsistencies are more likely to be the result of hypocrisy than some elaborate 4D chess game.
I'm honestly never sure how seriously to take comparisons of things to the demonic, because sometimes it's metaphorical, sometimes its an honest conviction in evil spirits, and sometimes it a combination of the two that makes sense from a certain spiritual understanding of the world. It's a useful rhetorical move to the right audience but only if you can at least justify the comparison with Satan.
Specifically on the last point, I doubt that the "centrists" complaining about cancel culture are the same as the ones to blame for it. Totally depends on what you consider as "centrism" obviously, since both "right" and "left" are subjective the borders of what is considered "centrist" are even more nebulous.
I guess my main concern with the direction politics is heading in is that there seems to be less of a focus on principles and more of a focus on which side is winning. It's occurring on both sides of the spectrum in my opinion, but it really doesn't matter which side it more to blame because it's self-reinforcing - once the other side basically admits that they're going to use any tactic that works to win, it's unclear what the appropriate response is other than to do the same.
I find “some disgust is justified” a problematic defense of disgust, because figuring out which disgusts are justified requires setting disgust aside — at least temporarily — in order to examine what you’re disgusted about. You have to consider the possibility that life comes from genes instead of by magic, even if that idea is disgusting. Or look at poop under a microscope. Etc. If you don’t do that, you get phrenology.
I think it’s also worth carefully separating the rightwing masses from their leaders. I have no problem believing an average person believes exactly what they say they believe. A TV personality or YouTube “influencer” on the other hand, I’m pretty sure pretends to have one set of values in order to defend another set of values. This is true regardless of political affiliation, but consider how the simple question “what do you want to do about it” once put an end to the public’s alignment with an influencer. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/william-shockley
The point about “cancel culture” was similarly not about the masses — it’s specifically centrist news outlets that distribute hit pieces on people that lead to them getting “canceled” in a real sense; word-of-mouth and internet gossip can diminish some figures’ popularity, but most of the prominent figures who’ve been “canceled” only by rabble on Twitter still have about the same or larger audience today. See: https://twitter.com/dailyjulianne/status/1528144498496311298?s=21&t=6qDR3vVY8zFG6jfjXOnkFQ
If you really want somebody to lose their job and their friends, you get the New York Times to write about them, as long as they’re not too famous.
As a general rule, natural conservatives – not always republicans, but conservative in outlook – tend to fear change because they’re always close to the margin and a bad year, or even a small disaster, could ruin them. If they are farmers, for example, and they switch from corn to soy or whatever and it turns out the crops fail they’re screwed. A person who has a degree – a lawyer, for example – can afford to be liberal when it comes to immigration because he’s not directly threatened. He’s not going to lose his job to an illegal immigrant. A person who works a menial job, on the other hand, is going to regard immigrants as a threat. And he’ll be right.
The lawyer’s attitudes would change in a heartbeat if there really was a threat, like white upper-class suburbs proclaiming their support for BLM while doing everything in their power to keep black people out of their schools.
To paraphrase the old saying, a liberal is a conservative who thinks change will either benefit him or have a neutral effect. A conservative is a liberal who thinks change will have a very negative effect on him personally.
I read a fair amount online, but hardly anything that offers this level of integration between what the writer believes and the writer's model of what motivates the outgroup to believe/behave differently. I hope to read more posts like this from various perspectives. (For a specific example, I would quite like to know what NIMBYs think motivates YIMBYs.)
>... psychological evidence that conservatives have always been more prone to feelings of disgust than the left is not hard to find.
> The right is perpetually getting caught doing this or that hypocritical thing about criminal justice. Endorsing harsh punishments for others, but not when their own friends or kin, metaphorical or literal kin, get caught.
I find 'all of this' to be exceedingly tedious because "left" and "right" always seem so idiosyncratic. _Maybe_ you and, perhaps, Freddie deBoer might mostly/somewhat agree on what 'the left' is? Or maybe not! Sometimes the nastiest disagreements are between people that others would judge are much more similar than almost anyone else.
Given the 'generational drift' you mention, it seems reasonable to think that what you consider 'centrist', e.g. 'wokeness' or 'cancel culture', might still be meaningfully 'leftist' (or leftist imports) from previous generations. It is of course true that 'the right' has and does engage in the same basic behavior and to a large, if not greater, extent. It does seem to me that the right has been pretty ineffective for a long time – but maybe that's only because of the places I've lived, the social circles of which I've been a member, and the specific things I've paid attention to.
You're a leftist I respect and follow; there are some others, tho I strongly expect that none of you would agree on who of you are 'real leftists'. I don't follow any people on 'the right' – or at least none that I think even somewhat match the examples in this post. It seems unfair to me to even consider your examples as 'political', tho I admit they're some non-zero, and maybe even significant fraction, of 'politics' in practice. I feel the same way about most political 'rhetoric' tho – approximately none of it is about ideas, or reality, and almost all of it is some genre of 'venting'.
I (try to) feel for everyone tho – it seems obvious that almost everyone is very afraid, and many are _terrified_. That's particularly sad, to me, because, as bad as things are (and they are), they are in many important ways _amazingly_ good. It is something like a 'miracle' that everything isn't much worse.
I didn't like this post. It felt excessively cruel and nasty and pointless. I hope there was some benefit to you at least in having written it. (My overall estimation of the value to me of continuing to follow you hasn't budged much tho. I do appreciate your perspective still generally.)
1) I think this was a really interesting post. I don't know how much I think is true, but I think it's interesting.
2) I'm sorry to nitpick as this was just a small part of the post, but it's clearly false to say that the post neo-liberal consensus is that no one redistributes and everything it privatised. In most rich countries, healthcare and education and almost all government expenditures. Even the US government spends more on healthcare as a percentage of GDP than the UK. Because these services are free at the point of use and finnaced by proggressive taxation they're also redistrutibve.
The biggest item in most rich country budgets is pensions. What is this if not redistribution! And obviously the core funcutions of the state - courts, army, police, prisons, core civil servants - and almost exclusively in public hands. This is ideological depolitisation in a pure form - most people don't even notice that not providing pensions or free primary and secondary education isn't anywhere near public debate.
It's informal hyperbolic language yes, but you need to think about it at the margin- because it is more or less true at the margin, and at the margin is where politics happens. There is rough unamity among the political class that we need to reduce redistribution and reduce public ownership- or there was until very recently. Real terms increases to benefits are very rare and usually forced by the public in some way. Publicisation is even rarer (it's no accident we don't really even have a word for it in common use). Even now, there is very little debate about this at the margin, though fresh shoots are perhaps starting to show.
For example, until relatively recently it was just taken for granted that there had to be some kind of "social security reform" in the US for example, understood as whole or partial privatisation. The only question was how to make the medicine go down sweeter, and debates about how to structure it.
Grand projects like "The democratic socialisation of industry to the extent necessary to correct those injustices present under capitalism" previously mentioned in the constitution of the Labour party of GB and still technically in the constitution of the Australian Labor Party have been abandoned. Same with transfers of ownership to workers under initiatives like the Meidner plan.
Literally nothing you attribute to the right is characteristic of, much less exclusive to the right. (At least the right as you define it, drawing a distinction between it and liberals/centrists. You are, of course, correct that the current political discourse is establishment-driven and attempts to blame the left for it are disingenuous, but realizing that should act as a discouragement from basing your argument on any establishment-defined categories, including "the right".) It's impossible to claim that establishment "liberals" don't want to mold children, or aren't driven by disgust ("upset fearfulness at the cruelty of the world" is a Russel's conjugation, a distinction without a difference), or don't have a hypocritical double standard (one for itself, the other for unwashed masses they're afraid of), or that they aren't full of opportunists striving to join the established elite (who do, in fact, often join left-wing orgs in the process; then invariably drive them to the ground because they're incapable of not just organizing, but any kind of cooperation). In fact, liberals would be the ones to come to mind were I to read about, e.g., "a revolt against reality from people whose sense of disgust has become so hypersensitized that the real world makes them naseous" without additional context. It's a (young, SM-addicted) liberal stereotype now, and for a good reason.
And the few real distinctions you're using aren't political, but cultural, and paint a consistent picture of class, rather than ideological, divide. Compare Harry Potter's tale of joining and excelling at elite institution with the affirmation of mundane everyday life that drives much of Japanese escapist pop-culture. What you're (following liberals in) doing is pretty much pathologizing commoners' desires to live a happy fulfilling life, a life that is increasingly not available to them. Them turning to "the right" is a symptom, first of their desires being tautologically stigmatized as "right-wing", second of the right actually addressing their concerns (it does not matter how honest or plausible or grounded in reality its vision is, it will win by default against the liberal alternative of "join the bourgeois/PMC hivemind, and no, we're not giving you the resources required to thrive in it").
Upset fearfulness at the cruelty of the world is *very* different emotional flavour to disgust. It's the difference between "eww, a homeless person, what a horrible world that they're in it" and "Ohh! A homeless person, what a horrible world to do that to them". Yes there are parallels- both are aversive and lead to fictionalist escapism- but that's about it.
Now some liberals have the former reaction to homeless people- the eww reaction. I'd say this is a great indicator someone is, in the truest sense, a conservative, no matter how they vote.
I will admit liberals are even more of a mystery to me than conservatives. It seems to me though that relatively few liberal helicopter parents match the degree of angst conservatives manage about contamination of their children.
I'm not sure why you think that I'm stigmatizing people's desire to live a happy life. It's great! In fact I want to setup the conditions where everyone can do it more easily. I'm no ascetic.
I don't deny the conceptual difference, I'm claiming that the two are indistinguishable in practice for the outside observer. Or, to be more specific, that liberals in particular are clearly operating on the level of disgust with the commoners, and even though their cultural mores may allow (force) them to suppress that feeling for particular classes of people, it makes no difference in practice. (A liberal who'd feel compelled to feel disgust with a homeless man will know better than to be disgusted about him being homeless, but will easily find some other flaw in him that's acceptable to hate. Now that I think about it, a conservative who'd feel compelled to feel disgust with a homeless man would not target his homelessness either. Both would project some other bad qualities on him to justify their reaction, each a different one, but the exact choice, laziness or sexism or whatever, would be purely contingent.)
Obviously, I can't prove any particular person is guilty of this. The only evidence I can offer is a bird eye view of the entire society, with liberal purity spirals coinciding with increasing inequality, and the conjecture that one is related to the other. (And in the way inverse to what the liberals would like to claim.) (In particular, I would not dare to claim that you, personally, aim to stigmatize people's desire for happiness. In fact, me following and regularly reading your writing comes with an assumption that you're a intelligent, thoughtful individual who'd never do such a thing. But I can recognize the patterns. In particular, one of describing escapism as a cause, rather than effect, of misery and loneliness. That's not to deny that they can often form a feedback loop that does cause further misery and loneliness in return, in the same way that laziness can in fact cause homelessness; or sexism can, if someone records you saying something wrong and turns you into a minor internet celebrity. It's just a particularly unhelpful thing to focus on when talking to people pining for a positive, constructive vision of the future, and it makes the fakest of the fake ad worlds win by default.)
For the record, I do agree that all this makes liberals conservative in a strict, "platonic" sense. (Which is exactly what a materialist take would assume about the ideology of a currently ruling elite.)
I feel I understand liberalism far less than I understand conservatism and leftism. You could be right that, at core, they embody all the trends I describe here of conservatives. I suspect though that even if they do arrive at the same place, the dance takes a slightly different route, hence why I've narrowly focused on conservatives here. Perhaps, when I feel I've understood liberals better, I'll tackle them at the same time as conservatives in a unified project.
My project here is to describe the disgust trap as it effects conservatives. Nowhere do I say that the disgust trap is the prime move of what's wrong with our world. I assume, I think as you do, that the disgust trap is gaining in popularity precisely because the world is going to shit, rather than vice versa.
I whole heartedly agree that there's a lot out there to want to escape from, though ultimately, of course, I think the conservative form of escapism will make more pain than it prevents.
In general, these points are off, and the skew isn't only out of hostility to your subject: I would characterize it as a blindness to human nature, which is apparent to varying degrees.
You don't seem to understand the human urge to reproduce, or the emotion of disgust. "...Connection with family gets coded as altruistic in our society," as if it could be coded differently. "The kids are getting alternative attitudes," as if the concern is over an alternate as such, and not the specific alternate.
The left is not convinced they're losing; this is affectation, to maintain the illusion that the right has not been getting stomped on for three centuries.
Calling an appreciation for the true, the good, and the beautiful an "ideological movement towards fascism" is calling a deer a horse; please stop rubbing it in.
I'm not familiar with anime culture, but I suspect the "revolt against reality" comment is much more projection than it is truth about your subject. It evokes the "struggle against reality" skit from Life of Brian.
"On the scale of politics, [cancel culture] is a relatively minor problem." This is just regular politically-self-serving blindness. I wouldn't expect you to forthrightly admit this in your post, but for clarity's sake: obviously, cancellation is perpetrated by the liberal left, on the right, and the exceptions prove the rule.
It seems that in exchange for admitting that cancel culture exists, you have decided to call it bad, because it's mean. You are afraid of being cancelled, and of its effect on your mental health; I truly do wish you the best, despite any disagreements.
Have you considered that you are in disproportionately dense company being on the left, with a mental disorder? Maybe you've seen the studies to that effect, or the one which demonstrates that testosterone can turn male Democrats red.
Here's a miscellaneous thought: the difference between left and right is far more biological than most moderns, and especially leftists, being generally deniers of biology, believe.
There's nothing wrong with the special concern that people have about their children, in fact I've argued elsewhere that we'd be poorer without special bonds between people of all sorts. I certainly feel that bond to my parents and siblings. But it would be a mistake to think of these bonds as altruistic in the proper sense- they're more like a selective extension of self. Altruism proper is an impartial concern for all sapient life, it's apotheosis is valuing another person's welfare as much as your own just because they're a person.
It's interesting that Jesus is both the main propounder of the golden rule in the western tradition, and also the guy who said that anyone who wants to follow him must hate their family, he grasped, I think, the tension between impartial and partial beneficence.
I do believe it is about an alternate cultures in general. The right would be panicking just as hard if their children were converting to Islam or Judaism en masse, or any kind of genuinely distinct culture.
The thing about truth, beauty and goodness is that they're all wonderful things, but terrible things happen when we equate them with each other. Keats really fucked it up when he said truth is beauty and beauty is truth. We must never mistake beauty for goodness, beauty for truth or assume something is good because it's true. Hence why the aestheticization of politics and ethics is so dangerous, if you don't like the fascism line from Walter Benjamin, look at what a mess the ancient Greeks made of politics and ethics by not properly separating goodness and beauty.
The question of whether the left is losing is an unedifying semantic argument. It's like debating whether crime is going up or going down, with one person looking at a graph of centuries and the other a graph of years. The left is winning on the scale of the last three hundred years undeniably. The picture in the last fifty years is more mixed, with cultural victories, but going backwards in redistribution and incarceration rates, arguably the two metrics that really materially matter. The cultural victories that there are are strangely hollow to, often it seems that it is not so much that society has grown in loving toleration, as that it became too lazy to punish other ways of life.
""On the scale of politics, [cancel culture] is a relatively minor problem." This is just regular politically-self-serving blindness. "
I'm honestly confused by how anyone could disagree with me about cancel culture here, in fact I had kidded myself into think that perhaps even my critics would reluctantly admit I was right on this. Politics is about the lives and deaths of millions. Cancel culture is worth an odd chat here there, sure, but the scale of attention devoted to it, versus its material consequences... I've talked about it many times in the past, always to condemn it, but that was in the context of seeing it as a block to the development of the left.
I think you're just flat out wrong about who is perpetuating cancellation. The left do plenty of it, but the right do it all the time to. The right are just better at crying foul on it. Libs of Tik Tok is a pretty good example in this regard. They regularly called for many individual teachers to be fired, yet cried cancel culture very succesfully when they were doxxed. The left would be wise learn from the right here- it's important to play the ref and complain loudly every time you are censored. I remember when the Chapo Trap House Subreddit was shutdown and the left just shrugged. Wrong, they should have been making memes about his proves right-wing bias at Reddit- that's what conservatives would do. Similarly with cancelled figures like Steven Salaita.
I'm unsurprised at the mental illness results you allude to. I signed up with the team that wants to change the world, I'm not surprised they're unhappy in that world, else why would they want to change it? If anything, I find the seeming growing angst on the right odd, I'm almost surprised they're not healthier than they are.
I'm sure a lot of the difference between right and left is biological- there's plenty of research to back this up (although how much can one trust psychology these days?). Equally though, I wouldn't be surprised if the very same biological factors that lead people towards the left or right in one context, might not do the reverse in the other.
> I do believe it is about an alternate cultures in general. The right would be panicking just as hard if their children were converting to Islam or Judaism en masse, or any kind of genuinely distinct culture.
This seems to be true of most members of any culture!
Are leftists particularly open to their children growing up to be 'liberals', let alone 'conservatives'?
Even the 'deaf community' seems 'crazy' in what lengths they're willing to go to preserve their culture!
To me, this aspect seems almost like a necessary condition of culture at all. Any culture that isn't willing to preserve it itself ceases to exist, if only due to entropy.
What "context" could cause the healthy and strong to support the cause of the weak? Or is leftism not the cause of 'justice' for those at the bottom of a natural hierarchy?
Is egalitarianism left, or right? Is anti-fat-shaming left, or right? Isn't fat-positivity an attempt to stigmatize inegalitarian instincts, which manifest as disgust at fat people? What means?
If you don't see that your instincts equate beauty, truth, and good, I encourage you to meditate on evolution and what your DNA wants you to want. But again, we veer into the fraught territory of biology - can boys be girls, should we cut off their parts, what even is a woman et cetera.
By your definition of the Left as anyone who "supports the cause of the weak", I have to assume you agree with Nietzsche that Christianity is inherently left-wing?
Not to mention other pre-modern religious traditions like Buddhism, Islam, and even infamously-inegalitarian Hinduism, all of which explicitly glorify compassion and charity toward the weak.
Pure, unadulterated "the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must" is actually mercifully rare (in principle at least, although sadly not in practice) in human societies throughout history.
The Christian sexual revolution was to Rome as perimenopausal leftists' Handmaid's Tale rape fantasies are to America.
Buddhism is not left, unless you refer to the version which was torturously mutilated by Western hippies who got bored of acid.
But 'left' and 'right' only gained meaning in the world of the enlightenment, and whether they remain meaningful today is dubious.
Nature is still meaningful today, even as leftists assail the final barrier to Universal Basic Dysgenia; or have you not heard of the struggle against 'lookism?'
This writing is helpful. I think I'm watching myself decide what I care about. Maybe I'll make my own blog.
There's a legitimate argument that Christianity was in some ways more patriarchal than existing Roman culture, and it was definitely much more sex-negative (which, however, didn't inherently entail greater patriarchy--a lot of novel Christian sex-negativity consisted in denying *men* their previous freedom to sexually abuse enslaved and other lower-class women).
But when I said Christianity was essentially left-wing, I wasn't thinking about gender, where I agree that the Christian record was mixed. I was thinking about class--rich and poor--where early Christianity consistently claimed that the poor were the spiritually-privileged favorites of God and the rich the objects of His wrath unless they gave their wealth generously to the former.
And when I said that Buddhism was 'left-wing' in the sense you appeared to be using the term , I meant that it, in your words, "supported the cause of the weak" when it preached universal compassion. It was definitely 'slave morality' in Nietzsche's sense just as much as Christianity was.
As for Buddhism, you're confusing historical circumstance with the effects of the belief system itself. The Indians have historically proved themselves to be slaves, under Mughal and Briton, be they Hindu or Buddhist or Jain - it's in the water, or in their blood. They maintain a caste system, which Buddhism permits. Compassion does not exclude natural hierarchy, or vice versa.
Christianity is also, ultimately, not left or right - surely knowledge of Protestantism would relieve you of that specific delusion about wealth and piety. Catholics might disagree. I have no clue what the orthodox think. Isn't this complicated!
Neither of these make good targets for your leftism label.
This is a very silly discussion.
Maybe we should instead contemplate whether wasting one's time writing comments on a blog is left, or right. Maybe I'm secretly a leftist: let me know if you figure it out.
Various thoughts, probably won't be too cohesive...
On the first point, I'm not a parent but I do feel like the healthiest attitude to hope to pass on something true, useful and right while also recognising that they're going to be their own person, shaped by the world and culture around them and not just by their parents. I really can't relate to the attitude of wanting or expecting your children to be the same as you, although at the same time I can understand a certain protectiveness over what children are exposed to, since it's obviously true that children are more easily influenced than adults are. Probably this attitude comes from me having a good relationship with my parents.
I feel like the best defence of disgust is that it often points to something more important beneath it, maybe the average person can't philosophically justify all of their disgust-based taboos (against excrement, incest and cannibalism, for example) but it's probably not a good idea to disregard them entirely based on the word of the first convincing sophist you encounter. Still, I think the best argument in favor of paying attention to disgust is that it may point to a more profound insight or justification, obviously abandoning that attempt at justification entirely is not a great idea for a convincing or reflective movement.
I really don't think that characterising the driving forces of "the right" as nihilists and opportunists is accurate - not because they're not present, as they must be in any movement, but because in my opinion taking people at their word that they really do believe the things they say is usually the best approach. Inconsistencies are more likely to be the result of hypocrisy than some elaborate 4D chess game.
I'm honestly never sure how seriously to take comparisons of things to the demonic, because sometimes it's metaphorical, sometimes its an honest conviction in evil spirits, and sometimes it a combination of the two that makes sense from a certain spiritual understanding of the world. It's a useful rhetorical move to the right audience but only if you can at least justify the comparison with Satan.
Specifically on the last point, I doubt that the "centrists" complaining about cancel culture are the same as the ones to blame for it. Totally depends on what you consider as "centrism" obviously, since both "right" and "left" are subjective the borders of what is considered "centrist" are even more nebulous.
I guess my main concern with the direction politics is heading in is that there seems to be less of a focus on principles and more of a focus on which side is winning. It's occurring on both sides of the spectrum in my opinion, but it really doesn't matter which side it more to blame because it's self-reinforcing - once the other side basically admits that they're going to use any tactic that works to win, it's unclear what the appropriate response is other than to do the same.
I find “some disgust is justified” a problematic defense of disgust, because figuring out which disgusts are justified requires setting disgust aside — at least temporarily — in order to examine what you’re disgusted about. You have to consider the possibility that life comes from genes instead of by magic, even if that idea is disgusting. Or look at poop under a microscope. Etc. If you don’t do that, you get phrenology.
I think it’s also worth carefully separating the rightwing masses from their leaders. I have no problem believing an average person believes exactly what they say they believe. A TV personality or YouTube “influencer” on the other hand, I’m pretty sure pretends to have one set of values in order to defend another set of values. This is true regardless of political affiliation, but consider how the simple question “what do you want to do about it” once put an end to the public’s alignment with an influencer. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/william-shockley
The point about “cancel culture” was similarly not about the masses — it’s specifically centrist news outlets that distribute hit pieces on people that lead to them getting “canceled” in a real sense; word-of-mouth and internet gossip can diminish some figures’ popularity, but most of the prominent figures who’ve been “canceled” only by rabble on Twitter still have about the same or larger audience today. See: https://twitter.com/dailyjulianne/status/1528144498496311298?s=21&t=6qDR3vVY8zFG6jfjXOnkFQ
If you really want somebody to lose their job and their friends, you get the New York Times to write about them, as long as they’re not too famous.
As a general rule, natural conservatives – not always republicans, but conservative in outlook – tend to fear change because they’re always close to the margin and a bad year, or even a small disaster, could ruin them. If they are farmers, for example, and they switch from corn to soy or whatever and it turns out the crops fail they’re screwed. A person who has a degree – a lawyer, for example – can afford to be liberal when it comes to immigration because he’s not directly threatened. He’s not going to lose his job to an illegal immigrant. A person who works a menial job, on the other hand, is going to regard immigrants as a threat. And he’ll be right.
The lawyer’s attitudes would change in a heartbeat if there really was a threat, like white upper-class suburbs proclaiming their support for BLM while doing everything in their power to keep black people out of their schools.
To paraphrase the old saying, a liberal is a conservative who thinks change will either benefit him or have a neutral effect. A conservative is a liberal who thinks change will have a very negative effect on him personally.
I read a fair amount online, but hardly anything that offers this level of integration between what the writer believes and the writer's model of what motivates the outgroup to believe/behave differently. I hope to read more posts like this from various perspectives. (For a specific example, I would quite like to know what NIMBYs think motivates YIMBYs.)
>... psychological evidence that conservatives have always been more prone to feelings of disgust than the left is not hard to find.
There is also recent research which does not find this association (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167219880191). I wonder if there any politically charged issues in psychology where there aren't contrary findings.
> The right is perpetually getting caught doing this or that hypocritical thing about criminal justice. Endorsing harsh punishments for others, but not when their own friends or kin, metaphorical or literal kin, get caught.
Am I correct that in your model, left-wingers would be more likely to admire Guzman El Bueno than right-wingers? See here for the legend for which he's known: (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/yonge/deeds/guzman.html).
I find 'all of this' to be exceedingly tedious because "left" and "right" always seem so idiosyncratic. _Maybe_ you and, perhaps, Freddie deBoer might mostly/somewhat agree on what 'the left' is? Or maybe not! Sometimes the nastiest disagreements are between people that others would judge are much more similar than almost anyone else.
Given the 'generational drift' you mention, it seems reasonable to think that what you consider 'centrist', e.g. 'wokeness' or 'cancel culture', might still be meaningfully 'leftist' (or leftist imports) from previous generations. It is of course true that 'the right' has and does engage in the same basic behavior and to a large, if not greater, extent. It does seem to me that the right has been pretty ineffective for a long time – but maybe that's only because of the places I've lived, the social circles of which I've been a member, and the specific things I've paid attention to.
You're a leftist I respect and follow; there are some others, tho I strongly expect that none of you would agree on who of you are 'real leftists'. I don't follow any people on 'the right' – or at least none that I think even somewhat match the examples in this post. It seems unfair to me to even consider your examples as 'political', tho I admit they're some non-zero, and maybe even significant fraction, of 'politics' in practice. I feel the same way about most political 'rhetoric' tho – approximately none of it is about ideas, or reality, and almost all of it is some genre of 'venting'.
I (try to) feel for everyone tho – it seems obvious that almost everyone is very afraid, and many are _terrified_. That's particularly sad, to me, because, as bad as things are (and they are), they are in many important ways _amazingly_ good. It is something like a 'miracle' that everything isn't much worse.
I didn't like this post. It felt excessively cruel and nasty and pointless. I hope there was some benefit to you at least in having written it. (My overall estimation of the value to me of continuing to follow you hasn't budged much tho. I do appreciate your perspective still generally.)
1) I think this was a really interesting post. I don't know how much I think is true, but I think it's interesting.
2) I'm sorry to nitpick as this was just a small part of the post, but it's clearly false to say that the post neo-liberal consensus is that no one redistributes and everything it privatised. In most rich countries, healthcare and education and almost all government expenditures. Even the US government spends more on healthcare as a percentage of GDP than the UK. Because these services are free at the point of use and finnaced by proggressive taxation they're also redistrutibve.
The biggest item in most rich country budgets is pensions. What is this if not redistribution! And obviously the core funcutions of the state - courts, army, police, prisons, core civil servants - and almost exclusively in public hands. This is ideological depolitisation in a pure form - most people don't even notice that not providing pensions or free primary and secondary education isn't anywhere near public debate.
It's informal hyperbolic language yes, but you need to think about it at the margin- because it is more or less true at the margin, and at the margin is where politics happens. There is rough unamity among the political class that we need to reduce redistribution and reduce public ownership- or there was until very recently. Real terms increases to benefits are very rare and usually forced by the public in some way. Publicisation is even rarer (it's no accident we don't really even have a word for it in common use). Even now, there is very little debate about this at the margin, though fresh shoots are perhaps starting to show.
For example, until relatively recently it was just taken for granted that there had to be some kind of "social security reform" in the US for example, understood as whole or partial privatisation. The only question was how to make the medicine go down sweeter, and debates about how to structure it.
Grand projects like "The democratic socialisation of industry to the extent necessary to correct those injustices present under capitalism" previously mentioned in the constitution of the Labour party of GB and still technically in the constitution of the Australian Labor Party have been abandoned. Same with transfers of ownership to workers under initiatives like the Meidner plan.
Literally nothing you attribute to the right is characteristic of, much less exclusive to the right. (At least the right as you define it, drawing a distinction between it and liberals/centrists. You are, of course, correct that the current political discourse is establishment-driven and attempts to blame the left for it are disingenuous, but realizing that should act as a discouragement from basing your argument on any establishment-defined categories, including "the right".) It's impossible to claim that establishment "liberals" don't want to mold children, or aren't driven by disgust ("upset fearfulness at the cruelty of the world" is a Russel's conjugation, a distinction without a difference), or don't have a hypocritical double standard (one for itself, the other for unwashed masses they're afraid of), or that they aren't full of opportunists striving to join the established elite (who do, in fact, often join left-wing orgs in the process; then invariably drive them to the ground because they're incapable of not just organizing, but any kind of cooperation). In fact, liberals would be the ones to come to mind were I to read about, e.g., "a revolt against reality from people whose sense of disgust has become so hypersensitized that the real world makes them naseous" without additional context. It's a (young, SM-addicted) liberal stereotype now, and for a good reason.
And the few real distinctions you're using aren't political, but cultural, and paint a consistent picture of class, rather than ideological, divide. Compare Harry Potter's tale of joining and excelling at elite institution with the affirmation of mundane everyday life that drives much of Japanese escapist pop-culture. What you're (following liberals in) doing is pretty much pathologizing commoners' desires to live a happy fulfilling life, a life that is increasingly not available to them. Them turning to "the right" is a symptom, first of their desires being tautologically stigmatized as "right-wing", second of the right actually addressing their concerns (it does not matter how honest or plausible or grounded in reality its vision is, it will win by default against the liberal alternative of "join the bourgeois/PMC hivemind, and no, we're not giving you the resources required to thrive in it").
Upset fearfulness at the cruelty of the world is *very* different emotional flavour to disgust. It's the difference between "eww, a homeless person, what a horrible world that they're in it" and "Ohh! A homeless person, what a horrible world to do that to them". Yes there are parallels- both are aversive and lead to fictionalist escapism- but that's about it.
Now some liberals have the former reaction to homeless people- the eww reaction. I'd say this is a great indicator someone is, in the truest sense, a conservative, no matter how they vote.
I will admit liberals are even more of a mystery to me than conservatives. It seems to me though that relatively few liberal helicopter parents match the degree of angst conservatives manage about contamination of their children.
I'm not sure why you think that I'm stigmatizing people's desire to live a happy life. It's great! In fact I want to setup the conditions where everyone can do it more easily. I'm no ascetic.
I don't deny the conceptual difference, I'm claiming that the two are indistinguishable in practice for the outside observer. Or, to be more specific, that liberals in particular are clearly operating on the level of disgust with the commoners, and even though their cultural mores may allow (force) them to suppress that feeling for particular classes of people, it makes no difference in practice. (A liberal who'd feel compelled to feel disgust with a homeless man will know better than to be disgusted about him being homeless, but will easily find some other flaw in him that's acceptable to hate. Now that I think about it, a conservative who'd feel compelled to feel disgust with a homeless man would not target his homelessness either. Both would project some other bad qualities on him to justify their reaction, each a different one, but the exact choice, laziness or sexism or whatever, would be purely contingent.)
Obviously, I can't prove any particular person is guilty of this. The only evidence I can offer is a bird eye view of the entire society, with liberal purity spirals coinciding with increasing inequality, and the conjecture that one is related to the other. (And in the way inverse to what the liberals would like to claim.) (In particular, I would not dare to claim that you, personally, aim to stigmatize people's desire for happiness. In fact, me following and regularly reading your writing comes with an assumption that you're a intelligent, thoughtful individual who'd never do such a thing. But I can recognize the patterns. In particular, one of describing escapism as a cause, rather than effect, of misery and loneliness. That's not to deny that they can often form a feedback loop that does cause further misery and loneliness in return, in the same way that laziness can in fact cause homelessness; or sexism can, if someone records you saying something wrong and turns you into a minor internet celebrity. It's just a particularly unhelpful thing to focus on when talking to people pining for a positive, constructive vision of the future, and it makes the fakest of the fake ad worlds win by default.)
For the record, I do agree that all this makes liberals conservative in a strict, "platonic" sense. (Which is exactly what a materialist take would assume about the ideology of a currently ruling elite.)
I feel I understand liberalism far less than I understand conservatism and leftism. You could be right that, at core, they embody all the trends I describe here of conservatives. I suspect though that even if they do arrive at the same place, the dance takes a slightly different route, hence why I've narrowly focused on conservatives here. Perhaps, when I feel I've understood liberals better, I'll tackle them at the same time as conservatives in a unified project.
My project here is to describe the disgust trap as it effects conservatives. Nowhere do I say that the disgust trap is the prime move of what's wrong with our world. I assume, I think as you do, that the disgust trap is gaining in popularity precisely because the world is going to shit, rather than vice versa.
I whole heartedly agree that there's a lot out there to want to escape from, though ultimately, of course, I think the conservative form of escapism will make more pain than it prevents.
In general, these points are off, and the skew isn't only out of hostility to your subject: I would characterize it as a blindness to human nature, which is apparent to varying degrees.
You don't seem to understand the human urge to reproduce, or the emotion of disgust. "...Connection with family gets coded as altruistic in our society," as if it could be coded differently. "The kids are getting alternative attitudes," as if the concern is over an alternate as such, and not the specific alternate.
The left is not convinced they're losing; this is affectation, to maintain the illusion that the right has not been getting stomped on for three centuries.
Calling an appreciation for the true, the good, and the beautiful an "ideological movement towards fascism" is calling a deer a horse; please stop rubbing it in.
I'm not familiar with anime culture, but I suspect the "revolt against reality" comment is much more projection than it is truth about your subject. It evokes the "struggle against reality" skit from Life of Brian.
"On the scale of politics, [cancel culture] is a relatively minor problem." This is just regular politically-self-serving blindness. I wouldn't expect you to forthrightly admit this in your post, but for clarity's sake: obviously, cancellation is perpetrated by the liberal left, on the right, and the exceptions prove the rule.
It seems that in exchange for admitting that cancel culture exists, you have decided to call it bad, because it's mean. You are afraid of being cancelled, and of its effect on your mental health; I truly do wish you the best, despite any disagreements.
Have you considered that you are in disproportionately dense company being on the left, with a mental disorder? Maybe you've seen the studies to that effect, or the one which demonstrates that testosterone can turn male Democrats red.
Here's a miscellaneous thought: the difference between left and right is far more biological than most moderns, and especially leftists, being generally deniers of biology, believe.
There's nothing wrong with the special concern that people have about their children, in fact I've argued elsewhere that we'd be poorer without special bonds between people of all sorts. I certainly feel that bond to my parents and siblings. But it would be a mistake to think of these bonds as altruistic in the proper sense- they're more like a selective extension of self. Altruism proper is an impartial concern for all sapient life, it's apotheosis is valuing another person's welfare as much as your own just because they're a person.
It's interesting that Jesus is both the main propounder of the golden rule in the western tradition, and also the guy who said that anyone who wants to follow him must hate their family, he grasped, I think, the tension between impartial and partial beneficence.
I do believe it is about an alternate cultures in general. The right would be panicking just as hard if their children were converting to Islam or Judaism en masse, or any kind of genuinely distinct culture.
The thing about truth, beauty and goodness is that they're all wonderful things, but terrible things happen when we equate them with each other. Keats really fucked it up when he said truth is beauty and beauty is truth. We must never mistake beauty for goodness, beauty for truth or assume something is good because it's true. Hence why the aestheticization of politics and ethics is so dangerous, if you don't like the fascism line from Walter Benjamin, look at what a mess the ancient Greeks made of politics and ethics by not properly separating goodness and beauty.
The question of whether the left is losing is an unedifying semantic argument. It's like debating whether crime is going up or going down, with one person looking at a graph of centuries and the other a graph of years. The left is winning on the scale of the last three hundred years undeniably. The picture in the last fifty years is more mixed, with cultural victories, but going backwards in redistribution and incarceration rates, arguably the two metrics that really materially matter. The cultural victories that there are are strangely hollow to, often it seems that it is not so much that society has grown in loving toleration, as that it became too lazy to punish other ways of life.
""On the scale of politics, [cancel culture] is a relatively minor problem." This is just regular politically-self-serving blindness. "
I'm honestly confused by how anyone could disagree with me about cancel culture here, in fact I had kidded myself into think that perhaps even my critics would reluctantly admit I was right on this. Politics is about the lives and deaths of millions. Cancel culture is worth an odd chat here there, sure, but the scale of attention devoted to it, versus its material consequences... I've talked about it many times in the past, always to condemn it, but that was in the context of seeing it as a block to the development of the left.
I think you're just flat out wrong about who is perpetuating cancellation. The left do plenty of it, but the right do it all the time to. The right are just better at crying foul on it. Libs of Tik Tok is a pretty good example in this regard. They regularly called for many individual teachers to be fired, yet cried cancel culture very succesfully when they were doxxed. The left would be wise learn from the right here- it's important to play the ref and complain loudly every time you are censored. I remember when the Chapo Trap House Subreddit was shutdown and the left just shrugged. Wrong, they should have been making memes about his proves right-wing bias at Reddit- that's what conservatives would do. Similarly with cancelled figures like Steven Salaita.
I'm unsurprised at the mental illness results you allude to. I signed up with the team that wants to change the world, I'm not surprised they're unhappy in that world, else why would they want to change it? If anything, I find the seeming growing angst on the right odd, I'm almost surprised they're not healthier than they are.
I'm sure a lot of the difference between right and left is biological- there's plenty of research to back this up (although how much can one trust psychology these days?). Equally though, I wouldn't be surprised if the very same biological factors that lead people towards the left or right in one context, might not do the reverse in the other.
> I do believe it is about an alternate cultures in general. The right would be panicking just as hard if their children were converting to Islam or Judaism en masse, or any kind of genuinely distinct culture.
This seems to be true of most members of any culture!
Are leftists particularly open to their children growing up to be 'liberals', let alone 'conservatives'?
Even the 'deaf community' seems 'crazy' in what lengths they're willing to go to preserve their culture!
To me, this aspect seems almost like a necessary condition of culture at all. Any culture that isn't willing to preserve it itself ceases to exist, if only due to entropy.
What "context" could cause the healthy and strong to support the cause of the weak? Or is leftism not the cause of 'justice' for those at the bottom of a natural hierarchy?
Is egalitarianism left, or right? Is anti-fat-shaming left, or right? Isn't fat-positivity an attempt to stigmatize inegalitarian instincts, which manifest as disgust at fat people? What means?
If you don't see that your instincts equate beauty, truth, and good, I encourage you to meditate on evolution and what your DNA wants you to want. But again, we veer into the fraught territory of biology - can boys be girls, should we cut off their parts, what even is a woman et cetera.
By your definition of the Left as anyone who "supports the cause of the weak", I have to assume you agree with Nietzsche that Christianity is inherently left-wing?
Not to mention other pre-modern religious traditions like Buddhism, Islam, and even infamously-inegalitarian Hinduism, all of which explicitly glorify compassion and charity toward the weak.
Pure, unadulterated "the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must" is actually mercifully rare (in principle at least, although sadly not in practice) in human societies throughout history.
I don't know a lot about Buddhism, but I have always regarded Christianity as a fundamentally left wing religion, and admired it for that reason.
The Christian sexual revolution was to Rome as perimenopausal leftists' Handmaid's Tale rape fantasies are to America.
Buddhism is not left, unless you refer to the version which was torturously mutilated by Western hippies who got bored of acid.
But 'left' and 'right' only gained meaning in the world of the enlightenment, and whether they remain meaningful today is dubious.
Nature is still meaningful today, even as leftists assail the final barrier to Universal Basic Dysgenia; or have you not heard of the struggle against 'lookism?'
This writing is helpful. I think I'm watching myself decide what I care about. Maybe I'll make my own blog.
There's a legitimate argument that Christianity was in some ways more patriarchal than existing Roman culture, and it was definitely much more sex-negative (which, however, didn't inherently entail greater patriarchy--a lot of novel Christian sex-negativity consisted in denying *men* their previous freedom to sexually abuse enslaved and other lower-class women).
But when I said Christianity was essentially left-wing, I wasn't thinking about gender, where I agree that the Christian record was mixed. I was thinking about class--rich and poor--where early Christianity consistently claimed that the poor were the spiritually-privileged favorites of God and the rich the objects of His wrath unless they gave their wealth generously to the former.
And when I said that Buddhism was 'left-wing' in the sense you appeared to be using the term , I meant that it, in your words, "supported the cause of the weak" when it preached universal compassion. It was definitely 'slave morality' in Nietzsche's sense just as much as Christianity was.
As for Buddhism, you're confusing historical circumstance with the effects of the belief system itself. The Indians have historically proved themselves to be slaves, under Mughal and Briton, be they Hindu or Buddhist or Jain - it's in the water, or in their blood. They maintain a caste system, which Buddhism permits. Compassion does not exclude natural hierarchy, or vice versa.
Christianity is also, ultimately, not left or right - surely knowledge of Protestantism would relieve you of that specific delusion about wealth and piety. Catholics might disagree. I have no clue what the orthodox think. Isn't this complicated!
Neither of these make good targets for your leftism label.
This is a very silly discussion.
Maybe we should instead contemplate whether wasting one's time writing comments on a blog is left, or right. Maybe I'm secretly a leftist: let me know if you figure it out.