“Because the horror of Communism [and] Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great."
Slavoj Zizek
The point is, in the culture war, whatever term your opponent uses to describe themselves, it has to be turned into an insult, epithet, or vulgarity. Consequently, often one side’s insult is the other side’s badge of honour. For example, my only exposure to Fox News was through Weekend Update or Stephen Colbert ridiculing them. The Daily Show could watch a few hours of Bill O’Reilly being earnest and could find enough material to fuel an entire monologue. I thought it just went one way but that’s only because those programs chose not to make fun of left wing news. Youtube has opened the door for comedians like Steven Crowder, Andrew Schulz, Andrew Doyle or even Bill Maher recently to roast the left’s ridiculousness as ruthlessly as Stewart would to the right. One side’s genuine beliefs and concerns are sources of laughter and derision to the other, but being insulted by “the bad guys” becomes an indication that one is doing something right. It’s like there are two alternate universes that overlap and interact occasionally online.
To demonstrate how batty both extremes of the political spectrum have become, Sam Harris dubbed them MAGAstan and WOKEistan, illustrating how in every sense except the literal, they live in different countries. This distinction is different from just Republicans versus Democrats; it is more cultural than political. Douglas Murray noted that, before the turn of the century, it was expected that we might have different opinions. Now we have different facts, as both sides of this culture war will routinely ignore reality to score public image points over the other.
President Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” became a clarion call for many patriots who are tired of being quiet and letting powerful liberals tell them what to do. To them it is a movement of progress and hope. To those who live in most urban areas or virtually anywhere else in the world, “Make America Great Again '' is associated with hate, as its underlying assumption, according to its detractors, is that America was “great” when it was mostly white and straight, so making it great again is code for getting back to 1950s’ social norms. For many, MAGA is a stand-in for an uneducated, low-class hick or privileged, out of touch white lady. To call someone MAGA could be an insult or a compliment depending on who it is.
Similarly, there are many people who could be called a social justice warrior or woke, and while recognizing that it was an intended insult, would proudly admit that they are fighting for social justice. What could be wrong with that? They believe in such generally unpopular ideas like defunding the police and using the gender neutral ethnic descriptor “Latinx”, and it is their right to do so, but it does set them up as an easy target of ridicule. They might think that the only reason someone would disagree with those opinions would be due to racism or transphobia, so they don’t ever have to reconcile with the radicalness of their ideas.
MAGA and wokeness are both movements that have infiltrated the Republican and Democratic parties respectively but do not represent them fully. There are still a lot of Republicans who aren’t MAGA and a lot of Democrats who aren’t woke. Leading into 2024, as everyone prays that we don’t have a Trump vs. Biden rematch, it is looking like the MAGA side is still dominant, although have lost some steam after the 2022 midterm elections. Polls suggest that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would be more likely to win a general election than the former President. On the Democratic side, the “squad” of woke progressives have failed to take hold of the party which is still run by relatively centrist elites. As pervasive as woke ideologies seem to be, they are not the majority in the Democratic Party, at least not yet. In California there has been somewhat of a revolt against the identitarian left, as soft on crime San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Beaudin and many so-called progressive school board members have all been recently recalled, and this was not by conservatives since we’re talking about San Francisco which has all of 15 conservatives living there. Legacy liberals Bill Clinton and Tony Blair recently warned Democrats that they are focused too much on feeling good about themselves and not enough on actually winning and in the United States, it seems the Democratic establishment believes that going ‘woke’ is a bad strategy.
As mentioned previously, the “based” camp is another ideological force besides MAGA that does battle with the “woke” in the culture wars. There are few public thinkers that are more zealously battling on the ‘based’ side of the culture wars than sword wielding hoaxter James Lindsay. Lindsay made a name for himself when he and fellow rebel academics Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian took a page out of Alan Sokal’s playbook and cleverly wrote a string of 40 hoax studies that highlighted the ridiculousness of postmodernism and the prestigious journals that publish “grievance studies”. They successfully published such hits as “Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon.” Despite their clever psyop, it’s hard to tell whether they convinced any far left postmodernists of their folly. As we’ve covered, logic doesn’t change people’s minds, so instead Lindsay was embraced by the right of centre intelligentsia as a hero and branded as a right-wing operative by the left. While all three of them once defined themselves as liberals, Lindsay now has found his camp and embraced his position as Supreme General. He and Boghossian wrote an incredible book called “How to Have Impossible Conversations” where they outlined how to discuss contentious topics without making an enemy out of your conversation mate, but if you observed his twitter you would assume he hasn’t yet read his own book. His full time job now is owning the libs, and doing so in such an aggressive fashion that he’s losing a lot of the so-called sensible liberals from whom he came.
This illustrates the double-agent nature of certain culture war figures. Lindsay originally would publish atheist, leftist writings to a largely conservative audience. His leftism was challenged when he was rebuffed for his critiques of postmodernism and joined team “politically homeless” only to then become a favourite thinker of the right. But then his online behaviour drew negative attention to the causes of the right, turning off a lot of centrists and potential recruits. Notorious centrist and editor of Quillette Claire Lehmann was not afraid to denounce James with her tweet, “You’ve done more harm to the “anti-woke movement” with the excrement that is your twitter feed than Antifa could dream of in 5 Portland summers.” I’m not saying James is conducting some kind of false flag operation with a hidden agenda to make conservatives look extreme, my guess is that James Lindsay has more converts than detractors, he’s a very intelligent and persuasive thinker, but I also think his particular approach has cut off support from a large section of people who would have been sympathetic otherwise.
There are other figures that are often so ridiculously stereotypical of their side you wonder if they are acting as an agent provocateur. Republican senator, Marjorie Taylor Greene has established herself as a potent culture warrior but it would be hard for anyone left of George W. Bush to take her seriously, and one wonders if she is doing more damage to her side than good. Then there is GOP senate candidate Eric Greitens who launched an ad in which he was hunting “RINO’s (Republicans only in name). Like, actually pretending to shoot people with guns in his own self-promotion material. It’s hard not to view these ads as parodies written by a team of Saturday Night Live writers but we have to remember that Greitens is appealing to a large population who is deeply concerned with the purity of their political and ideological movement. Donald Trump is the ultimate example of a double agent, even if inadvertently, as he transformed the Republican party completely in his own image and now heading into 2024 he still has such a hold on the party that they may not be able to move on to another more viable candidate, ultimately benefiting the Democrats in the long run.
On the Democrat side, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has often shown great political talent and promise but there are sound bites that make it sound like she was participating in a J.P. Sears bit. She stepped in it when she compared detention centers on the border to concentration camps, which at least in 2019 was a taboo that most kept sacred, but she really embraced her inner parody when she proclaimed that getting a manicure was her act of rebellion for the day. This is all just fodder for conservative political comedy shows and Republican attack ads.
Politicians might fight for a specific cause but end up benefiting a completely different one, which might be the ultimate point. Liz Cheney is a peculiar figure who is conservative in every sense of the word except for the fact that she believes Trump lost 2020 fair and square. As Cheney eyes a potential presidential run the media is licking their lips that a true Republican would run as an independent and take votes away from Trump if he runs in 2024. Meanwhile, polls show that if she were to run she would actually draw support away from President Biden, which makes you wonder who is really wanting her to run in the first place.
Sometimes it’s hard to figure out who is on which side. Values that used to be championed by the left have been picked up by the right and vice versa. Believing blacks and whites are equal would have made you a radical in the 1950’s, a liberal in the 1990’s, and a conservative in the 2020’s. The political realignment in which we find ourselves today has shifted large swaths of working class people with pro-labour stances and who voted for Obama twice, towards voting for Donald Trump and the Republicans. Each political side has their own narrative to understand the world and more importantly which dragon they are fighting to justify their existence to the masses. Will Storr argues that the new right wing operates within the narrative that wealthy, educated urbanites are dominating the cultural and political spheres. The new left, who are more likely to be educated and wealthy, believe that straight, white men are the ones dominating and who need to be kept in check. The narrative that has convinced you will then determine who the villains are and what should be done with them.
Groups have different sets of virtues to signal and status games to play. The culture war is played out as groups compete to establish their status game as the universal one. Like in Space Jam when the Looney Tunes challenged the tiny little aliens to a basketball game because they thought it was a competition they would win. If my team can force everyone else to play the game that we are good at, we will win. Different political tribes, and even the warring factions within those tribes battle to establish which game is going to be played. If conservatives can sway the conversation towards the economy or crime they tend to do better, whereas liberals tend to succeed when the debate is about climate change or social justice.
When, and if, the rules of the game are set in a culture war, ideas become weapons. They are the apparatus with which the game is played instead of simply being concepts that you would evaluate and consider independently. These days, opinions are evaluated on who said them and what side they represent instead of on their own merits. This leads to what Yascha Mounk calls 180ism which is when a position is taken by my ideological adversary and I immediately call it out or establish myself as a critical voice even though I haven’t yet critically examined the idea itself. I might be quick to think my opponents are all brainwashed because they believe something AOC said but aren’t I equally brainwashed if I immediately and uncritically disbelieve everything AOC says? Surely she can’t be wrong all of the time. If your main unconscious goal in relation to an ideology is to telegraph your identity rather than search for the truth, you are at high risk of succumbing to a psyop, in fact, you probably already have.