A Worsening Culture War

The craziest part of this american culture war, to me, is that it seems to spill over to the rest of the world.<p>My sister and I, living in Germany, have a very loving relationship, but we absolutely disagree on almost everything political and basically are stuck in our seperate bubbles.<p>This gave us an interesting observation: 5 years ago it took us about two to three months, to have a fight over something that started to become a hot-topic in the US.<p>Over time, this has shrunken to about 48 hours. This is not because our bubbles are particularly US centric, more that it has become envogue to simply discuss whatever gets &quot;the other side&quot; going.<p>In particularly, it is very interesting that &quot;the other side&quot; is aligning ever more so with the US political spectrum, where in the past such a thing was unheard of, atleast here in Germany. I&#x27;ve heard similar stories from Friends in other Non-US Nations, be it in Asia, Africa, aswell as other european nations. Does anyone else have similar stories?

<i>&quot;That&#x27;s all the media and the politicians are ever talking about, the things that separate us, things that make us different from one another.<p>That&#x27;s the way the ruling class operates in any society. They try to divide the rest of the people. They keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other so that they the rich, can run off with all the fucking money.<p>Fairly simple thing. Happens to work.<p>You know, anything different, thats what they gonna talk about. Race, religion, ethnic and national backgrounds, jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality. Anything they can do, keep us fighting with each other so that they can keep going to the bank.<p>You know how I describe the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep them showing up at those jobs.&quot;</i><p>George Carlin had us pegged ages ago.<p>So did Doctor King:<p><i>The other day I was saying, I always try to do a little converting when I&#x27;m in jail. And when we were in jail in Birmingham the other day, the white wardens and all enjoyed coming around the cell to talk about the race problem. And they were showing us where we were so wrong demonstrating. And they were showing us where segregation was so right. And they were showing us where intermarriage was so wrong.<p>So I would get to preaching, and we would get to talking—calmly, because they wanted to talk about it. And then we got down one day to the point—that was the second or third day—to talk about where they lived, and how much they were earning. And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, &quot;Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us. [laughter] You&#x27;re just as poor as Negroes.&quot;<p>And I said, &quot;You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor, because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. (Yes) And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white.<p>And you&#x27;re so poor you can&#x27;t send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march.&quot;</i>

Social media has made it wildly easy and incredibly cheap to propagate any misinformation. Head over 4chan and you&#x27;ll see a factory line of ideas being thrown at the wall to see what sticks - which is then further spread across social media.<p>If you were a foreign power and wanted to sow discord in a rival country, you had to buy off dozens of journalists and funnel money to media houses and hope that they&#x27;d at least be secretive, if not effective.<p>Now you can just pop open Photoshop, come up with 10 memes in 30 minutes, and use your sock puppet accounts to spread them everywhere - an operation that a single person can handle all by himself.<p>It&#x27;s incredibly naive to think that social media is not absolutely flooded with propaganda and counter-propaganda by malicious actors. And it&#x27;s only going to hasten the collapse in democratically minded countries across the world.

The cause of culture war, as with all wars, is at bottom boredom, and the cure is to find intrinsically motivating pursuits that engage you so much that you look upon the culture warrior the same way you look upon those who spend all day playing videos games.

The wealthy as the plotters in this article overlooks a change in the last 50 years. A century ago, private industrial wealth and power were in effect synonymous, but today the industrial wealthy are relative front men to a core of institutional players with considerably less wealth, but who have the levers of policy that pervade every micro aspect of life now.The wealthy people I know are not running the culture wars, they are toeing the party line as an appeasement plan to what they perceive as the mob. In this sense, any opposition they might have had has been neutralized.<p>The taboo I think is it&#x27;s not a culture war, it&#x27;s a class war that sets largely publicly employed people against mostly privately employed ones. For all the rhetoric around race, this is mostly a Girardian schism between white city &quot;burghers&quot; and their country &quot;redneck&quot; complement. The former see their role as global, and the latter see their identity as national.<p>I don&#x27;t think even a model with predictive power can do much to mitigate the consequences. It may have festered too long. If you destroy what a culture has built, it will have to contend with you and your organizations to rebuild afterwards.

The real question to me is whether FaceBook and Google are _deliberately_ complicit in creating devisive bubbles through recommendation systems or whether that’s just an unfortunate byproduct that’s unfixable?<p>In Taiwan they have social media designed to reward agreement - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2020&#x2F;sep&#x2F;27&#x2F;taiwan-civic-hackers-polis-consensus-social-media-platform" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2020&#x2F;sep&#x2F;27&#x2F;taiwan-civic-h...</a> - whether it’s truly successful or not I can’t say but if so, then Facebook and Google could adapt

I agree with the central thesis -- we should be shaking hands with our neighbors and looking to take back power and wealth from the rich.<p>But how do you get neighbors to shake hands when one believes that gay marriage is truly evil and another is gay?<p>Both sides in America constantly fight bitterly over identity politics and it seems like many of those identities are irreconcilable with one another.<p>I&#x27;m non binary and use singular they, and I&#x27;ve had some absolutely incredible vitriol directed at me for nothing beyond, &quot;hi, I&#x27;m name. I use they&#x2F;them pronouns. Nice to meet you!&quot; How do we get past the part where people decide it&#x27;s ok to tell me I should be sterilized or committed, and get to the point where we start turning towards the capital class together?

Some of the responses here are amazing examples of this very thing.

This thing is phrased in a really weird way. First: &quot;The left believe the right are dumb and don&#x27;t have values&quot; followed by &quot;Evidence the left are correct&quot; then &quot;They&#x27;re as bad as each other&quot;.

I generally agree with the notion that the parties raise money off this rhetoric. However the implied group in the title, “America’s wealthy” isn’t covered here. The DNC fundraisers benefit a group of people who don’t generally fall into that category. They’re rich, and powerful sure, but they’re not Jeff Bezos. Americans would do well to be able to tell the difference between the oligarchs and their lackeys.

was making sense until the bs &quot;both sides&quot; conclusion: &quot;We have two donor-fattened parties that across decades of incompetence have each run out of convincing pitches for how to improve the lives of ordinary people.&quot;<p>I find the ideas of fixing healthcare, reinvesting in our economy and infrastructure, and shoring up our social programs highly convincing. And I&#x27;m pretty sure the polls show those ideas resonate across the political spectrum. And I only hear those ideas coming from one party.

So both sides identify the problem and have different ways to solve it. Keeping the two sides focused on their own method of solving the problem prevents any meaningful change. This keeps the rich ruling class in place as-is for now.<p>Sounds like they are doing short term self preservation well.

Maybe it&#x27;s time to realize that the &quot;culture war&quot; is just the realization that we&#x27;re all living inside bubbles of information, and that there&#x27;s no way to reconcile that with a centralized &quot;democratic&quot; government ruling people on the basis of narratives and coercion.<p>We&#x27;re most likely heading towards a society of private laws, but the path to that is likely to be very painful.

The working class is the largest voting block their is. How do you keep them reliably voting against their own economic interests and maintain your position at the top of the economic ladder? Turn one half against the other and divide and conquer. It’s pretty easy to push people into fearing some ‘other’ and tap into that inherent tribalism we have in our primal instincts.

This article seems to imply that the wealthy don&#x27;t have any stake in the culture war, and stand to benefit most by maintaining the status quo. But that seems to ignore the fact that two of the issues at the heart of the culture war are taxation and government regulations - and one side&#x27;s stance on these issues is far more beneficial to the wealthy than the other&#x27;s.<p>One of the few major pieces of legislation that Republicans actually passed while in power over the past four years were tax reforms which were very beneficial to the wealthy. And the Trump administration changed several of the EPA&#x27;s environmental policies to be more business friendly (and less friendly to the environment).<p>Democrats, on the other hand, are in broadly favor of increasing taxes on the wealthy. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in particular had some policy proposals that would have taxed the wealthy quite significantly. Democrats in recent history also passed the Dodd-Frank act, which imposed a number of regulations on the finance industry (and was partially repealed by Republicans in 2018).<p>These issues are front and center in the culture war. Remember Joe the Plumber and &quot;Drill baby, drill&quot; in 2008? Or Trump&#x27;s vows to save the coal industry in 2016? And how many times did Pence bring up the subject of fracking in the 2020 vice presidential debate?

Ironically, the idea that ethnicity and other signifiers are used to divide the working class against itself has been a pillar of socialist thought for over 100 years- it’s not a centrist position.<p>Edit: you don’t have to agree with the position I just stated but it is a fact that that it is a socialist position and has been since the days of Marx. I’m just pointing out that the author is trying to paint it as a middle position, and it’s not, it’s a left position. In its most extreme form it has a specific name: class reductionism.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;amp&#x2F;s&#x2F;www.urbandictionary.com&#x2F;define.php%3fterm=Class%2bReductionism&amp;amp=true" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;amp&#x2F;s&#x2F;www.urbandictionary.com&#x2F;define....</a><p>Now I think you can make the case that this is too ideological and not good HN material. That’s fine. But if it is HN material is it not fair to make basic points about the topic of the article itself?

Much of the discord would be fixed by banning Twitter, where group hatred gets organized into political platforms. And on top of it, their content editors have a very particular slant, that so far has brought a lot of whining, and nothing positive.

This might be slightly offtopic but related to this article: what sources of conservative opinion would American conservatives on HN recommend to a liberal who genuinely wants to see things from the other perspective?<p>Are there any right leaning bloggers&#x2F;talk show hosts that you would recommend?

<i>&quot;False consciousness is a term used—primarily by Marxist sociologists—to describe ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation intrinsic to the social relations between classes.&quot;</i> [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;False_consciousness" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;False_consciousness</a>

<i>Essentially, in the wake of Trump, the political class is accepting the inevitability of culture war, and urging it on, as something preferable to populist revolt.</i><p>In a rare inversion, the headline is more correct than the article.<p>The wealthy (really, the elites: a wealthy small business owner has nothing to do with this) want culture wars because they want the middle and bottom fighting with one another, rather than with the elites. They aren&#x27;t accepting anything, this is what they want, and they have the means to achieve it.

Despite there being no quantitative evidence of cultural divisiveness being profitable for the wealthy as a whole, it&#x27;s a popular narrative because it&#x27;s a simple deflection of blame. Maybe the author should reflect on their own writing rather than point a finger at the rich.<p>I&#x27;m sure Bezos would be happier if the Trump adminstration wouldn&#x27;t rig a multi billion dollar defense contract in response to his newspaper. Youtube, would make a lot more advertising dollars if they weren&#x27;t pressured to demonetize so many videos.

This is just another blame-the-rich piece without any evidence. I guess blaming the rich is very popular right now.<p>The article is really interesting, so it&#x27;s too bad he mars it with this kind of unproven, cruel and vitriolic thesis.