To take one obvious example, do you treat conservative Christians who say terrible things about gay rights activists the same as gay rights activists who say terrible things about conservative Christians? Men’s rights activists the same as feminists?
We are all more attuned to the offenses against our own beliefs than we are to what may seem terribly offensive to others.
I would make the following observations:
1. Criticizing aggression from the opposite side tends to heat up the culture war.
2. Criticizing aggression from your own side tends to cool down the culture war.
3. Failing to criticize obvious aggression from your own side tends to heat up the culture war.
4. Failing to criticize obvious aggression from the opposite side tends to cool down the culture war.
These are difficult thoughts to keep in mind.
Moderate lefties Fredrick deBoer and Jonathan Chait have written a lot that contradicts 2. Often in-tribe criticism merely raises the stakes; the extremes become more extreme in the desire to purge the movement of compromisers. Moderates who can see both sides get treated as collaborators in the pejorative sense.
I think cooling down happens with moderates from both sides actually _do_ collaborate in their attempt to dominate public discourse.
Having observed this exact ‘extremism amplification’ phenomenon occur with these particular ‘moderate’, on-side-chastising characters, leads me to believe Adam is on to an important insight, and our host’s model requires some modification.
People are already only half-heartedly committed to general, universal principles of conduct. Sometimes they will engage in subconscious hypocritical violation of those principles to act against their opponents, but, without realizing the hypocrisy, nevertheless maintain some conscious support for the principle at stake, and defend it in other contexts.
However, when someone on your own side points out explicitly that either you must treat the enemy better and maybe give them a win once in a while, or abandon the general principle, then the duality becomes unstable and the wave function collapses, and the principle is dropped in the ensuing argument.
So, a salient example is civil tolerance of free speech. One of these guys will remind his own side of the value of the principle, and then the SJW hornets nest will dog pile on them for being traitors, and at the end of the mob action, the conclusion is “no platform for fascists!” which is worse than if no criticism had ever been made and no fight had even been picked.
When conservatives make this plea, SJWs just ignore it and mock them as if the conservatives don’t really understand the nuances of the concept (that the progressives still imagine they support) – “moron Republican says ” uhhh .. Muh free speesh.”
But when other progressives vouch for it as being a valid and legitimate application of the rule, then the ridicule of the other turns instead into civil war, which usually ends in more extremism.
Before a fight happens, there is a lot of uncertainty about how it would turn out and where everybody stands, so people hedge their bets and maintain a little balance and ambivalence. But when the fight happens, and everybody sees who won, who backed whom up, and who had to back down, then it triggers a kind of preference cascade as everybody uses the new information and clarity and resynchronizes to the new normal.
And abandoning principles of civility towards and tolerance of the other side definitely heats up the culture war.
I think politics is like a PSST story. For some reason the bigot label on Republicans is working like the closet communist label worked against Democrats for a while. Both sides are always doing the marketing for what narrative can last a few election cycles.
Btw, is anyone really ever offended? What I have noticed is someone on “my” side will say something outlandish and I’ll know he is exaggerating, be it hyperbole or in-group shorthand but I know the other side might take it seriously, or at least pretend to far enough to pretend to be offended or to craft the next strawman.
What a marvelously actionable set of thoughts. Thank you.
For these suggestions to be truly actionable, they must be coupled with basic game theory. In a way, some form of the Prisioner’s Dilemma game applies. All we can ask ourselves is to embrace tit for tat, may be with a slight bias to write off a couple of engagements. In that case, start by selecting your “friends-adversaries”. Avoid the Paul Krugmans and Anne Coulters of the world who are never going to “cooperate”.
Would I be heating up or cooling down the culture war to point out that I doubt that many people really take Ann Coulter at face value?