Thoughts on the Culture War

In the current culture war we cannot expect "the other" to understand our point of view. That is because, as Christopher DeGroot writes, all living things live by prejudice. He quotes anthropologist Mary Douglas, who points out that we all need to evaluate new experiences in the light of what we already know and believe.

In other words, it is a waste of time to start from the beginning whenever something new shows up. Life goes on, and we use our experience and our knowledge, and our cultural inheritance, to navigate past each new event in our world.

So it is not surprising that our Democratic friends are fit to be tied by the Trump phenomenon. Remember, from back in the 2000s, Democrats have believed, with John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira in The Emerging Democratic Majority, that they owned the future, with minorities, the educated, and women all coalescing in a glorious new political hegemony.

Their notion, their ideology -- prejudice if you like -- saw them ruling wisely and well over a populace of diminished ability, partly of prejudice and superstition in the religious middle class, and partly of ignorance and marginalization in the lower orders. No problem, because our educated rulers were notably free of prejudice and superstition and also notably full of care and compassion for the marginalized.

But here comes Trump with "tropes" from another era: nationalism instead of cosmopolitanism; protectionism instead of free trade; insult instead of urbanity. Our Democratic friends thought all that was well and truly buried with Hitler and the disaster of Smoot-Hawley.

Of course, in the comfort of their ideology -- their prejudice if you like -- they cannot see how they have replaced the us-and-them of nationalism with the us-and-them of identity politics. They cannot see that they practice their own form of protectionism with the help-our-friends activities of the administrative and regulatory state. And they cannot see how their activism culture licenses them and their clients to insult anyone they please while criminalizing their opponents for "hate speech."

Thus, for DeGroot, "winning the culture war" will not involve what our liberal friends like to call "a conversation" but the usual incidents of war: "strategy, manipulation, and, perhaps, sheer force."

After all, that is what the whole Russian collusion operation of the last two years has been about: the current ruling class trying to overcome the cognitive dissonance of the Trump presidency by combining to undermine President Trump and demoralize his supporters.

As DeGroot writes: "all moral systems and all political systems require some concept of an enemy". It could be the Devil; it could be the Jews. It could be the "robber barons." It could be illegal aliens; it could be white nationalists.

But in a world of enemies, there must be friends, the bonds of trust that we call social capital.
According to sociologist Robert Putnam there are two types of social capital:

bridging capital refers to trust between groups, between people who have different values and identities, while bonding capital refers to trust within groups.

And, according to Putnam, "diversity" tends to reduce both "bridging capital" and "bonding capital." In other words, people need to be secure in like-living-with-like communities if they are to start building social structures of trust, both within their community and without.

But, of course, the whole point of identity politics and political correctness is to create distrust in the national community.

The only good thing about our ruling class is that they are idiots. Imagine if they really knew what they were doing!