The Gaping Maw of the Culture War

or, don't let your brain rot; or, to those who once had friends and family at holidays

I might try to slip this picture into everything

Your Politics are Dumb

There are many reasons to believe that politics have always been stupid, but I do think we’re in the stupidest time of the stupidest kind of politics.

The worst thing about this particularly stupid political moment is that it doesn’t have to be this way. In every conceivable way, we really don’t have time for it to be stupid. The planet is on track to become uninhabitable by the human animal in a few generations and instead of doing much of anything about it, our national and global debate seems to be specifically focused on manners, defined broadly, and whether or not humans should care about other humans.

Now, before we get too far here, I should maybe clear some things up. I do think many cultural questions are very important. I even think some are crucial. But I also think most of them are secondary to addressing the material needs of everyone.

• Every adult should be able to vote

• Everyone should have healthcare

• Everyone should have access to clean water and air and land

• Everyone should have access to enough economic assistance to live on

• Everyone should be able to live their lives without systemic disenfranchisement, discrimination, and surveillance

I mean, there are a lot more things I’d like to be built into legislation, but I think this would be a decent enough start. I’d love to see our economy become democratized in hundreds or thousands of ways. I’d love to see actual antitrust legislation and public funding for local economies, schools, arts, and on and on.

But I find that our national debates never reach the foundational problems relating to the material circumstances of society that can be solved through legislation. Instead, we stay in the world of abstraction, where pundits can spend 24 hours of every day wringing their hands over a teenager in Alberta using pronouns that match their gender identity rather than their genitals.

I’m sure someone has done the work to track this back in time to something, like, New Gingrich’s term as Speaker of the House or maybe the moment Rush Limbaugh was born. Whatever sparked all this, whenever this happened, we all began to diminish. Not only as individuals, but as a species.

We are so much less than we could be because of our obsessions with other people’s pronouns or with the diversity of our drone pilots committing war crimes. We spend more time discussing whether we should call people without shelter homeless or unhoused, yet discuss exactly zero policy proposals that could make this particular terminological debate disappear.

And, honestly, this applies to almost every topic of the broadly defined Culture War. There are policies that could eliminate the debates entirely, but that would mean doing something. And doing something is sometimes unpopular. And doing unpopular things may cause elections to be lost. And doing things that may eventually prove to be unpopular is so anathema to the gentry that they’d rather have you fixated on whether or not Louis CK has been sufficiently canceled.

The US has only two parties. Both of them so disinterested in governing that it’s a wonder we even debate this.

Republicans seem primarily interested in dismantling government. As insane as that is, at least they follow through on their stated positions¹.

Democrats seem primarily interested in explaining why, actually, they can’t do anything that they promised, including rebuilding the agencies Republicans dismantled.

And so US politics have largely become language games and Culture War, where nothing can be systemically or structurally implemented because of some ill-defined slope we might all slip down, because, before we get to economic and human realities of a private industrialized prison system or a private industrialized national agriculture, we need to talk about whether or not Ricky Gervais is acceptably funny². And, yes, in this hellscape, we still have to even talk about Ricky Gervais, because it will never stop being 2015 until we all collectively kill ourselves in atonement to whatever Demiurge hated us so much that it made us real, made the world real, locked us on this stupid planet with each other.

While there are Democrats genuinely interested in legislation and governance, even they can’t escape the culture warriors.

While I do think AOC is an undeniably positive presence in US government and discourse³, even she can’t escape it. While blaming misogyny is probably the easiest thing to attribute this to (for the record, I think that’s a generally accurate assessment), it also locks us in this cultural divide. It may be accurate that most Republicans are misogynists, but saying so isn’t really going to change their minds⁴. And if you don’t change anyone’s mind, then the divide becomes a chasm that can’t be bridged.

But back to AOC: she is just a person. She’s going to sometimes make mistakes or say kooky shit, but it literally helps no one when she and her supporters dive into the culture war. Yes, she’s often dragged there by people on the right and left, but I think she is both best and most useful when she’s discussing the material conditions of people’s lives, when she’s focused on policy to alleviate the suffering of all people, whether they’re closeted Nazis or indigenous trans activists.

I don’t know what happened before my lifetime because I wasn’t here before, but I think that politics has changed a lot while I’ve been wandering the world.

I’ve talked elsewhere about how everyone on the internet suddenly aspired to be a low level political pundit parroting the party lines you’d expect, depending on the aesthetics of their politics. But I’ think something stranger is happening up at the real pundit class and the political class.

President Barack Obama was probably the high point of politicians as celebrity. He was friends with Jay Z and Beyonce, he went on Jerry Seinfeld and Zach Galifianakis’ internet shows. Which, I mean, when we lived through those moments it didn’t seem so strange. But I do think it’s the endpoint of a decades long march to the celebritification (and commodification) of politics.

But something stranger has happened since the end of his presidency. Or, possibly, it began in the middle of his presidency with the pervasive rise of future President Donald Trump.

Trump was maybe the first celebrity who primarily became a social media influencer. The fact that he became president seemed like the apotheosis of celebrity culture and the final gasps of a dying empire⁵ (more on this some other day). But I think he was more the apotheosis of the Paris Hilton style of celebrity, where celebrity isn’t really related to a specific skill or talent or cultural contribution deemed aesthetically or even commercially important. Rather, Trump was famous for being (in)famous and he used this celebrity mostly to feed his followers terrible products and ponzi schemes.

The fact that he became the most influential social media influencer in the world—big enough to win an election!—maybe wasn’t a surprise, but that he was able to turn politics into a new arena for influencers has been the opposite of ideal.

Because I do think, since then, many politicians primarily aspire to be social media influencers. Even former politicians are hungry to get in on the game⁶. And so we began with turning our celebrities into politicians⁷, our politicians into celebrities, our celebrities into influencers, and, now, we’ve reached the point where our politicians are mostly social media influencers⁸, so disinterested in politics that they don’t even bother to debate policy or make policy proposals⁹.

But let’s take a closer look at why the Culture War resonates so much with people. Most of the politicians engaging in this kind of thing are either doing it because they’re unscrupulous hyenas trying to feast on the corpse of a rotting empire, while some of them are True Believers¹⁰ in the Culture War. But I’m going to speculate wildly, instead, about the rest of us.

i wish Hawley’s brand as an influencer translated into actual antitrust policy, but he’d prefer to go viral than actual govern. Though probably he wishes this picture had not gone so viral.

Culture Warriors

If you’re looking for me to do a deep dive into, like, Qanon or something like that, you should know that I will never hate myself enough to spend hours thinking and reading and writing about Qanon.

I just…I may be an idiot, but I do respect myself.

The question of why the Culture War is such a powerful anchor dragging us all into a collective nightmare is much simpler than you might expect. It really has to do with everything written up above.

Because politicians refuse to address the material conditions of people’s lives in favor of ranting about the dangers of cultural marxism¹¹ and because this version of political discourse is easily commodified¹² it becomes the one thing pundits across the political spectrum¹³ are willing to talk about.

This leads to most people believing that politics is actually very stupid and narrowly focused on manners, language games, and whatever the shit someone believes when they hear the term cultural postmodern marxism¹⁴. And so because political discourse seems to exclude anything that has to do with governance and legislation, many people don’t even think of these things when they talk about politics. Maybe they consider taxes and the deficit whenever someone discusses infrastructure or the salaries of nurses and teachers.

When we combine this with the memeification of politics happening on the single largest forum for human communication and interaction¹⁵, we end up with a politics divorced from, well, politics.

Being progressive or conservative, for many people, is a matter of lifestyle branding, and so it’s the aesthetics of the presentation of the Culture War that appeals to people. Whether you think Lauren Boebert taking pictures of her guns is extremely cringey or extremely badass has everything to do with aesthetics and nothing to do with politics.

This is why politicians prefer to be influencers. Lauren Boebert will probably spend the next four decades in Congress until she ends up as a Supreme Court Justice¹⁶, not because she has any political talent, interest in governance, or ability to whip a vote, but because the people who love her will love her for as long as her primary form of activism and political action is triggering the libs.

If you think this only exists on the Right, consider the response to Nancy Pelosi mockingly clapping for Trump while doing absolutely nothing to slow down any political project his administration came up with¹⁷. It wasn’t good politics, but the aesthetics of the behavior sure did go viral and she will likely remain the leader of the Democrats in the House until she dies.

It’s really no wonder that the Culture War matters so much to people that it causes them to literally fight with people on the internet and these fights become so serious that they no longer talk to their siblings or children or parents or even their former best friends.

Remember when Democrats were accurately describing the concentration camps at the Mexican border? Consider what has happened at that same border since the Democrats took the White House, House, and Senate.

My point isn’t simply that it’s tragic that people think of politics only within the frame of the Culture War.

My point is: Why should they think of politics any other way?

What about politics over the last thirty years would lead people to believe that politicians or political discourse matters to their lives?

The economy has collapsed twice since I’ve graduated college and instead of restructuring and addressing the systemic catastrophes that caused that, we’ve rewarded the worst criminals of the first collapse and rewarded the worst monopolists of the second collapse. There’s reason to believe that the current housing market may cause a third collapse before I turn forty.

So why does the Culture War resonate with people?

Buddy, I wish you could see me shrug right now.

The simple answer is that people like to feel part of a group. The Culture War organizes society into nice, big teams. It turns politics into professional wrestling or football.

The Culture Warriors have monetized and gamified the spectacle of politics in such a way that most people relate to politics abstractly. Afghan refugees aren’t really people to the Cultural Warriors. They’re an abstract argument to be won at all costs.

All of politics becomes an abstract argument where all that matters is signaling to your team that you are fighting the good fight, that you’re winning. The arguments and tactics you use are largely defined by the aesthetics of your brand of political influencers.

I don’t mean for this to collapse into nihilism or inaction. There are so many things that could be done to improve this aspect of modern US life, but we really need people in government willing to govern¹⁸.

What should we do?

Buddy, if I had an answer, this post would’ve been three sentences long and had zero footnotes¹⁹.

But probably we should do a better job of talking to one another.

1. I actually think this is why the ones that are popular are popular: they promise to destroy government and then they do everything they can to make that happen.

2. I mean, can we even just debate whether or not he’s funny (he’s not)? Regardless of how you feel about trans people, I find it hard to believe that anyone ever wanted Ricky Gervais riffing on that for 20 minutes.

3. She's one of the few who seems even slightly interested in actual policy, and she has the rare gift of being able to communicate policy in a simple and clear way that is digestible to everyone, regardless of their age or education level (though…sometimes she’s definitely a bit locked in the branch of activism that derives from academics who don’t actual do activism).

4. I know there’s a whole class of social media pundits who believe that we actually should just give up on trying to change people’s minds if they’re on the otherside of the political and cultural divide, but this is lunacy. Like, you know these people live on your street? They drop their kids off at the same school as your kids. If you don’t reach these people in your actual local community, you are ensuring that we’ll have a national collapse. The severity could be catastrophic, especially when you look at systemic biases built into the mechanics of our government, the systemic biases in our government as it exists, and just the fact that of the two branches of US political parties, the weaponry is distributed densely in only one direction. Think about what a Civil War 2.0 means when the split isn’t between North and South, but between Urban and Rural in every single state. Think about what the implications are for Civil War 2.0 when the minority of citizens have the vast majority of weapons. Consider, for a moment, which side the police, soldiers, and others trained in combat are going to fall into. So maybe cool it on just washing your hands of millions of people who live on your literal street. And besides, for the most part, many of them are relatively normal with regard to how they behave every day in society.

5. Here I thought these Friday posts would be light and fluffy!

6. The fact that Hilary Clinton has a podcast or that Barack Obama has a podcast is…probably someone smarter and more insightful than me could write a whole book about this. But I honestly just find it embarrassing. Embarrassing for them, for their subscribers, and for me as a citizen of a country where some of the most powerful politicians of my life have become podcast peddlers. Nothing against podcasters, mind (they’re cool!), but I think this is just kind of a slowmoving disaster for a country already collapsing.

7. Maybe this predates Reagan, but I think Reagan is definitely the most successful example of someone turning their celebrity into a long political career.

8. This exists on the Right and Left, but I do think it’s easier to point out on the Right because they don’t engage with governance or legislation. Their goal is to block all legislation, to dismantle or privatize any government program that even remotely functions, and then try to make a viral moment happen through triggering the libs. I think Marjorie Taylor Green’s interest in policy goes about as far as the edges of her iphone, for example. But I’ll also say that people like Ted Liu seem far more interested in a viral moment than in addressing the material needs of his constituents.

9. I can’t think of anyone on the Right who seems genuinely interested in governance or legislation. I may be wrong, so feel free to correct me. There are a small minority of Democrats who believe in governance. Fortunately, they have bold visions for what needs to be done. Sadly, their minority position makes it difficult for them to enact these proposals, and their party is far more invested in stopping them than they are in stopping GOP legislation to dismantle government or make it even more corrupt.

10. Is anyone on earth dumber than Jim Jordan?

11. lol

12. It’s a serious problem that the news most people ingest on TV exists primarily to sell advertising.

13. In the US, our political spectrum on TV barely includes anyone to the left of Henry Kissinger. And if we’re talking just economically to the left, you will rarely hear anyone to the left of Jeff Bezos (if you do, the conversation is framed in such a way that the audience is meant to believe this person arguing for even the mildest social safety net is literally an insane person trying to light money on fire in front of your dumb eyes).

14. I cannot emphasize this enough: lol

15. Seriously: breakup facebook.

16. The world is dumber than we imagine.

17. Who’s on the Supreme Court?

18. Also, for the record, as much as I may not believe in humanity, I remain a political optimist. Maybe I’ll write more about this someday, but I think that if you’re not a political optimist, you really should not discuss politics. If your whole political project is to describe how nothing can be better than it is right now, maybe you should sit on the sidelines for the rest of your life.

19. The Black Panthers probably had the right idea. If I had to make any changes to that manifesto, I would make those demands universal. But more specific things you can do, regardless of political affiliation: organize, knock on doors, pressure politicians, and organize some more.