How sure are you that your enemy is committed to total war?
Because even if he’s not, once you start waging total war “in response,” he will be.
For reasons I don’t totally understand, this kind of basic not-even-game-theoretical modeling-of-counterparty-incentives seems to have gone out of fashion, at least in the realm of culture war. If I had to pick a culprit, I guess I’d go with the instant gratification that we’ve all gotten used to in the Diamond Age. You try playing nice, and a week later it hasn’t totally changed the way your enemy does things, so you sigh and decide that it’s useless and that he’s just totally implacable.
But culture does change, and it changes in response to things that happen in the discourse. It even changes reasonably fast, in these hyperaccelerated days. It’s just that even “reasonably fast” culture shifts take place on the scale of years or at least months. (And, needless to say, they tend not to involve splashy satisfying victories where your enemies grovel in atonement.)
This is generally the *most* disturbing thing I see in “annoying gun control discourse.”
This is a very dismissive way to put it, but I think a major factor here is that culture total war is easy because culture war doesn’t matter. There’s both nothing to compromise over and hardly anything to lose from the fighting. When it comes to actual policy decisions that determine who lives or who dies, it’s institutional actors coming to cold crooked compromises, same as ever. Mostly powerless actors screaming total war at each other is hardly new either.
This is a tempting thing to think, at least when the local culture war seems especially ugly and pointless, but I’m pretty sure it’s dangerously wrong.
“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence…”
– OK, sure, that’s a too-cute quote. And there may be a few big-decision arenas where the realpolitik of the realpoliticians can be counted on to sideline everything else and carry the day. Big-money commerce stuff, maybe granular-level military choices, etc.
But all those powerless actors screaming culture war memes at each other define a society.
The abortion issue, which is life-or-death in a number of senses and which cemented the present major American political coalitions, came out of nowhere when a bunch of religious culture warriors decided to care about it. Brexit was culture war, Buddhists massacring Muslims in Southeast Asia is culture war, pretty much everything about the way popular Egyptian politics works is culture war. Our president basically got elected on the strength of culture war ressentiment. People getting doxxed / threatened / fired for being insufficiently-woke / too-woke is prototypical culture war.
These things we spew at each other on the Internet aren’t fake. They matter.