January 24, 2019

The crisis phase of the culture war, when disasters lead to defections

After the latest battle in the culture war has blown up so horribly in the faces of the liberal media warmongers, it feels safe to declare a turning point. I don't mean that there couldn't be other similar battles in the short term -- with equal or greater catastrophes suffered by the liberals -- but that we are in a new phase of the culture war, in which many who were formerly in favor of the war begin to defect, publicly and vehemently.

The losses have piled up so much that the war is seen as illegitimate even by many former sympathizers. In the medium term, this means not only a fall-off in the intensity of this particular war, but an enduring sense among the defectors that we ought to never wage similar wars in the future.

As usual, the facts of the "MAGA teen vs. Native American" episode do not matter. With all of these hate hoaxes -- from Tawana Brawley to Matthew Shepard to the Duke lacrosse team to the UVA fraternity in Rolling Stone to the Access Hollywood tape to the Kavanaugh pile-on -- the central elements of the liberal narrative are unsubstantiated or proven false.

Yet again, the key facts of the narrative were proven false in the MAGA teen episode -- the Native American approached the white kids, he beat a drum with a stick right in the kid's face without provocation, all while Black Hebrew Israelites (left out of the original draft) chanted bigotries against the white kids. So much for the take-away message that the white teenagers were the instigators, that they acted out of proportion, etc.

Indeed, the facts of some incident during a war climate are only framed in such a way as to motivate a concrete set of actions that the warriors had already wanted to achieve. It's like the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, was involved in 9/11, etc. -- plainly lies from the very outset, but that didn't matter. That narrative was just a rationalization for the pre-existing plan to invade and occupy Iraq, dethrone Hussein, and put the nation under the US military's sphere of influence.

So the total collapse of the narrative is not what is noteworthy this time around -- that always happens with these hoaxes. What's new is the level of response demanded by the culture warriors -- ranging from ruining these teenagers' lives to exterminating conservative white males as a group. At earlier stages of the war, they would have demanded something less extreme, like merely staining their reputations, making them apologize for nothing, or suspending them from school. Now they're calling for them to be completely unpersonned or even killed off.

This marks an escalation in the risk-reward calculation that the culture warriors are making -- increasingly high-risk / high-reward for their cause. But most high-risk attempts fail, by definition. And when they blow up, the losses are far greater than with a loss under a low-risk / low-reward scenario.

Returning to the Iraq War analogy, this is like the stage beyond the Pentagon and CIA's support for both sides in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, or the brief safe battle of the Gulf "War" in the early '90s, or the economic sanctions of the Clinton years. Those were all relatively low-risk and low-reward. Outright invasion and occupation on the order of hundreds of thousands of troops, plus eliminating the governing coalition and its leader, was a far higher risk -- and not surprisingly, it blew up in their faces. The geopolitical goal was to keep Iraq out of the Russian and Iranian spheres of influence, and under the US sphere, but they achieved precisely the opposite.

Whereas many Republicans and conservatives -- and a good deal of liberals and Democrats -- had supported US antagonism against Iraq during the earlier stages, they could no longer defend the war. Supporters turned into skeptics, and skeptics turned into opponents, not just on this war but any other like it in the future.

Indeed, we can see the beginning of this crisis phase in the culture war already with the media campaign against Trump's sexism during the 2016 election. The facts don't matter -- how many of the accusers retracted their stories, didn't pursue their allegations after the election season, or the clear intent of Trump's words on the Access Hollywood tape (i.e., that when you're a big star, women will let you do all sorts of things sexually because women are star-fuckers who fall under the spell of your celebrity). That was high-risk -- a continual campaign against one of the major-party candidates -- and it blew up in their faces. They lost the election, even more decisively than when they were more reserved against George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.

The same thing happened during the Kavanaugh confirmation in 2018. They escalated from "Kavanaugh drunkenly groped a girl in high school" to "Kavanaugh's entire social circle were perpetrating a serial gang rape epidemic in the affluent DC suburbs." And what reward did they get out of this high-risk campaign? Not only failure to block his confirmation, but leaving such a bitter taste in his mouth that he will only be more vindictive against their pet causes during his long tenure.

With the MAGA teen episode, the culture warriors were not just demanding the withdrawal of a presidential candidate or Supreme Court nominee -- they were calling for the banishment, impoverishment, assault, and murder of white adolescents who don't back down when antagonized by non-whites. If you respond like a pussy-ass little bitch, then fine, you don't have to be banished from society. But if you stand your ground -- like the average, normal, majority would do -- then you should be genocided.

And what did the warriors achieve? Not a single scalp! None of the kids are going to get disciplined, none are groveling or apologizing for nothing, presumably none will be shut out from gainful employment, and none are going to get assaulted or murdered as punishment for their supposed crime. If anything, they have only hardened their targets into greater vindictiveness after the warriors lost.

And unlike the earlier incidents, this time the media had to almost immediately retract their narrative and issue mealymouthed apologies. This makes all future battles even more risky on the warriors' part, since they've already admitted their own guilt. If they were not forced into admitting guilt, they could enlist their troops into another high-risk battle. But after having to admit guilt, and cut their losses so swiftly, there will be far fewer troops willing to enlist in the next battle, and they will not fight with the same zeal.

To reiterate, this is not necessarily because those would-be warriors have had a change of beliefs -- they may still believe the narrative to some degree, but given how catastrophically their leaders have fucked up, they would not expect glorious victory but humiliating defeat. Thanks, but no thanks. These are akin to former Iraq War supporters who may still believe that Hussein was a threat that needed to be contained, but on pragmatic grounds simply do not want to keep losing wars.

Of course, some would-be warriors have gone the extra step and now no longer believe the narrative that there are widespread roving gangs of white supremacist preppies who must be eliminated before they inflict further trauma on society. These are akin to the former Iraq War supporters who will never forget being lied to so blatantly about WMDs, 9/11, etc. They might hypothetically accept a military role for the US if such claims were proven to be true, but after such a stinging betrayal, they can no longer trust the claims from the US military. In the culture war, these types will dismiss future narratives as the same old fear-mongering that they lied about last time.

A tiny minority have been principled anti-culture-war pacifists the whole time, but then they do not represent a change during this new phase. Pacifists don't end wars -- defectors do. This has nothing to do with value judgments of who has been on the right side of history, but a descriptive statement of when we can evaluate the conditions to have qualitatively shifted out of one phase and into another.

Below is a sample of these defections. They are on the socialist Left, and although I don't know for sure, probably bought into the basic narrative of the Duke lacrosse case in the last decade. Maybe even saw white preppy dudes as a bad social force needing to be contained somehow. And at least some of them bought into the initial reporting on the MAGA teen episode, before the whole picture disproved it.

But their initial reaction was that even if we accept your framing of the events, what do you want us to do? You're calling for teenagers to be doxxed, banished, assaulted, and mass murdered -- that's psychotic and disgusting on its own, and will only make it more impossible for the class-oriented Left to build a coalition to achieve a better standard of living for everyone.

That's the key distinction -- it doesn't matter if some on the Left still believe parts of a specific narrative (e.g., the MAGA teen), or the greater ongoing narrative about "shitty white males". Beliefs don't matter, only actions. If they're unwilling to enlist in the culture war, and might outright sabotage it in the future, that's what matters, not their conception of events.

This will be lost on the identitarian Right, who as idealists will not consider the culture war over until one side changes its beliefs. But to the materialist / realist Right, this clearly portends the winding down of the culture war, as liberal media generals increasingly find it harder and harder to sign up new zealous troops.












The last one is the start of a thread too long to embed here. I'm leaving Michael Tracey aside since he's been reliably against this culture war crap for awhile, and not as notable of a defection.

Here is a recent episode of the Red Scare podcast that discusses the issue, and places them within the same defector camp as the Twitter people above. Two of those quoted, Adam Proctor and Aimee Terese, host the Dead Pundits Society podcast, and will be live-streaming on their YouTube channel at 8pm ET tonight -- I'd be surprised if they didn't touch on the issue. Here are two lengthy threads, first and second, at a Reddit group dedicated to destroying identity politics in favor of class-first Leftism.

A separate defection comes from the Black identitarian part of the Left, exemplified by Tariq Nasheed. He takes the media narrative at face value -- since, again, the facts are not relevant -- but asks what the liberal Establishment wants him to do about it? Blacks have been fighting other groups' fights for too long, with no reciprocation to help out blacks specifically, so it's time to let non-black groups like Native Americans fight their own fights. (HYON means "hold your own nuts".) He emphasizes the antagonism between non-white groups, such as Native American tribes trying to keep their membership purified of black people with some Native ancestry.


Presumably, Nasheed would enlist in a culture war hysteria that involved blacks as the victims, but those have become increasingly rare. As he goes on at length about in a livestream on this issue, the mainstream now considers the narratives about blacks as victims to belong to the past, during the 1960s Civil Rights movement. They are old news. The new culture war narratives are all about women of various races, including wealthy white women, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, immigrants (including African immigrants, who slavery-descended Nasheed does not identify with), homosexuals, trannies, and so on and so forth.

So while he and his fellow travelers are potential culture warriors, they will not be so in practice since the generals are no longer waging war on the "black victims" battlefield. If the only battlefields that the generals choose are about defending wealthy Ivy-educated white women, gay Hollywood child molesters, and black-hating immigrant groups, they will not be volunteering for the culture war.

Political independents and realist conservatives should be doing whatever they can to amplify these fractures within the Left, so that identity politics and culture warring can be eliminated for good. Not because Leftists will convert their belief system to that of right-wingers, but because they won't want to keep investing so much into such increasingly risky ventures that only keep delivering greater and greater losses.

6 comments:

  1. Not sure what the proper term is here. "Defector" suggests joining the opposite side, and it's not as though the anti-culture-war Leftists are joining the conservative side.

    At the same time, there is not just one opposing side in a sprawling multi-battlefield war. The side that is opposed to intersectionality is just that -- an opposing side, even if not opposing intersectionality in the same ways or in the same degrees as the conservative opposing side is.

    Class-oriented Leftists may have started out on the intersectional bandwagon, but are now abandoning it in favor of class-first / universal approaches. That would still be a defection -- just to a minor opposing side rather than the major opposing side (conservatives).

    ReplyDelete
  2. In any case, the culture war generals are smearing the deserters / defectors as though they were defecting to the major opposing side, i.e. conservatives, Republicans, racists, Nazis, white supremacists, etc.

    That's no different from the head cheerleaders of the Iraq War smearing former supporters turned skeptics / opponents as Saddam-loving, defending Saddam, converts to Baathism, or whatever other retarded shit they pulled out of their ass. That's how Tucker gets treated when he debates with neo-cons on his show -- they all trot out "Putin-lover," "Assadist," etc. Ditto Tulsi Gabbard, or anyone who was formerly semi-on-board with the war, who is now skeptical or outright opposed to similar wars in the future.

    It's a losing tactic to get them to repent and re-enlist, or to discredit their actions in the eyes of the spectators. It happens when the war is already increasingly perceived as illegitimate, doomed, counterproductive, wasteful, harmful, etc. So it's not really meant to alter the behavior of the defectors, but purely as a punitive measure.

    That may sting, but at least it shows that the warmongers' cause is dying out. The defectors will form the core of a growing camp that will counteract the culture-war machine. This is the start of a realignment process, when a former minority grows into the new dominant group.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Both camps of defectors have had an epiphany of serving as cannon fodder or bullet-stoppers for the culture-war machine. The promise of intersectionality was that all the myriad forms of oppressions, on all the various dimensions of oppression, would be fought against by all who were oppressed.

    Then they find out that they've been sacrificing so much time, energy, effort, and money -- only to see major work being done only on the other issues, not their own. They're being parasitized. "Race and class" in practice has meant "Race only".

    Even within "Race," the intersectional promise was "Race 1, and race 2, and race 3, and... race N." In reality, it's Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, and immigrants -- not blacks / African-Americans descended from slaves.

    The class/labor camp, and the black camp, have been two of the most reliable bases of the Left, unlike the flakey yuppies who often vote Republican or right-wing, and unlike flakey Asians and Hispanics who hardly vote at all, and even then a decent amount vote Republican.

    So the two most solid bedrock camps of the Left coalition have been chewed up and spit out by the generals. It's no wonder there is such a mutiny in the ranks, and now outright fragging against their commanding officers.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I followed those links and was struck at how even more stridently mocking of the ID politics guys they are now. They're approaching Ricky Vaughn levels. They're really starting to zero in on their looks and examining that as a driver for their neoliberal views. Man, these people have it in for the Abolish Ice guy! Has he become the avatar of neoliberalism to the Cool Left?

    -It might mean something, but the person who probably did the most for that boy from Kentucky was Cassandra Fairbanks, a former Bernie supporter. Gateway Pundit, whom she writes for, much mocked and maligned by Respected Journalism, absolutely wiped the floor with the NY Times, WaPo, National Review, etc. over that story. That's something new that the other hoaxes didn't have. I think these guys are still in shock over it and is an interesting story in and of itself. Much more of a David and Goliath/populist fight.

    ReplyDelete
  5. "The class/labor camp, and the black camp, have been two of the most reliable bases of the Left, unlike the flakey yuppies who often vote Republican or right-wing, and unlike flakey Asians and Hispanics who hardly vote at all, and even then a decent amount vote Republican."

    Ron Unz said that Trump did "poorly" in the suburban Sun Belt that's been the base of the GOP since Reagan. But I myself posted that Trump won the election with his heroic performance among Eastern small towners and prole whites of the inland Northeast and Upper Midwest. But Ronnie (Unz) seemed embarrassed by how Trump won. Of course, in Trump's actual presidency he's pivoted toward economic positions generally favored by Sunbelt and Ski-belt yuppies, and he's only intermittently tapped into his original Buchananite base. Bill Kristol said recently that Nixon and Buchanan in the late 60's and early 70's flagrantly trespassed against TrueCon positions on financial, labor, and environmental regulations. Buchanan in particular was always trying to bend Nixon further toward the mores of white labor, to the horror of the GOP donor class. Irony here is that many early Boomers soured on the GOP because of Nixon.....Who flanked to the Left on most issues in order to gain electoral traction.

    The views of Northern prole whites, who have always been the biggest resisters of "free trade" mania, have of course been consistently suppressed in the globalist era.

    Subsequent to Carter and Reagan, it's been generally believed by elites that what "the people" really want is "conservatism" in the form of China made crap dumped on our shores while the borders are de-regulated. How soon it's forgotten that Eisenhower and Nixon, in their wildest dreams, would never even suggest, let alone implement, trade and immigration policies that would threaten America's sovereignty, self-respect, and stability.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Defectors marching from defecators; the side with more bullshit loses the long-term stance... until the other side gets too poisoned.

    ReplyDelete

You MUST enter a nickname with the "Name/URL" option if you're not signed in. We can't follow who is saying what if everyone is "Anonymous."