This Is How America’s Culture War Death Spirals

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Why Disney vs. DeSantis is the future of politics

This is the 'drama', which is the sort of thing that excites and motivates most people, but I still think the economic underpinnings are the real driver. It's unintelligible because it's a collective lashing out in reaction to something else rather than the cause.

We've been on a growing wage v. productivity gap since the early 1970's, people are feeling squeezed, the causes seem complex, and what comes out is (Rene) Girardian memetic madness along with hunts for scapegoats, tribalism, all the fun stuff. It's a bit like a bunch of strangers all getting lowered into a shark tank but having the impulse to go after each other over the stress, and how that breaks down has less to do with whose in what party or who said what, whether a Republican punched a Democrat or a Democrat punched a Libertarian first, it's the getting lowered into a shark tank that's the central issue.

I posted a video Ray Dalio made based on a book he wrote dealing with rise and fall of empires, it's prescient in that it touches on what part of that arc we're on right now and it seems like this happens on repeat largely due to economic incentives during different point on that arc. Effectively you might even be able to say that every empire is a bubble in its own right.

I think our goal is to figure out how we glide through this smoothly, maybe speeding up automation is the ticket. It's really critical that we find some way of dealing with what's hitting the working and lower-middle classes right now so that we can maybe have a drift into something more like European living arrangements rather than massive unrest and possibly civil war as a result.

The fixation on culture wars stems from a few factors. The capitalist media and political class focus on cultural issues to distract from criticism of capitalism. This has become more important than ever as the left (and even some on the right) are more skeptical of capitalism than they have been in a long time.

Republican cultural disempowerment has been a slow process that they have only truly woken up to recently. They lost academia as they collectively decided the humanities were a waste of time. Or they self-segregated into christian schools. Or conservatives who went into the humanities realized that conservatism does not stand up to academic scrutiny from diverse perspectives and ceased to be conservatives. Outside conservative universities, conservatives in the humanities are a contrarian minority.
They lost corporations once the latter realized that you could make more money supporting/pandering to left social causes than you could from staying nominally conservative or even neutral in the social arena. Hell, supporting conservative social causes is a narrow market niche at this point. Realists in the corporate world realized which way the wind was blowing and acted accordingly. To the social conservatives who praised capitalism from the mountaintops, this is an unacceptable betrayal.

Social conservative grievances with "woke" capitalism come across as petty because they lack ideological coherence. Using the government to punish businesses who oppose your social policies is not at all laissez faire. At best, they can say they are still free market capitalists insofar as they are just revoking anti-market government favoritism (ie: the current Disney situation). Libertarians support these policies only inasmuch as they decrease government favoritism, but they are otherwise not so eager to actively punish "woke" businesses through the state. This disconnect is going to be a serious problem for the fusionist coalition that has defined US conservatism for the last 50 years.

Given political deadlock and the weakness of organized labor as an extra-legal force for economic change, ideological conflict is mainly settled in culture: what is shown in media, what is taught in schools, what is treated as acceptable in polite society. Social conservatives are losing on all three fronts. Realizing they cannot roll back this slow, steady retreat in the social arena, they are forced to seek political solutions to social defeats. Hence the use of court-packing, gerrymandering, mass incarceration, and voter suppression legislation. Even with all this, they are barely hanging on in the political arena by virtue of the simple fact that they don't have the votes they need to stay in power. Whether they recognize this or are in denial (eg: belief in stolen elections), this has motivated the right's open flirtation with authoritarianism.

This shift towards social issues in discourse has contributed to the hollowing of the political center and "both sides" (-gags-) polarizing. The more the left wins in the social arena, the more emboldened they become. The more the right loses, the more embittered and reactionary they become. Moderates grow scarcer. They either: move left with the times, decide the left has gone too far and become reactionary, or they try to push a "both sides" social narrative which pleases no one and lacks an ideological core.

If we want to move on from the overfixation on social issues, we need to be more vocally critical of establishment capitalism. The Right and Center do not have the ideological coherence on economic issues to provide a clear alternative to the capitalist status quo. Only through worker organization and activism can we bring economic inequality and stagnation to the center of political discourse. Condemning corporations for not supporting conservative nationalism is not going to fix those problems. Applauding corporations for supporting left social causes is not going to motivate them to treat their workers or consumers with basic dignity. It is not going to lead us to collectively question the ways the capitalist establishment has shown the seeds of inequality and environmental destruction. It is not going to lead to the collective realization that economic inequality exacerbates social inequality and vice versa. If we want to bring back economic politics, we need to embrace collective action and organization of the working class.

I'm just curious if there ever was an age of cultural enlightenment to begin with?

The cultures war in the current era stem from the "Empire striking back".

There is always a push-pull between conservatives and progressives and it doesn't neatly follow left-right political spectrums.

DeSantis is an idiot. Remember, he's the one who declared WWE wrestling nonsense "essential" in the middle of a pandemic. And stupidly enough, I know people in Florida who blindly supported that.

This is how they react when people don't bend to their will: