Sometimes I find myself wondering what "thinking" even means. Someone proposes a frame, and then people who buy into that frame rally around it and work to reinforce it. Is that really thinking?

I keep coming back to this article's whole framing around the "culture war." Maybe it's because I'm not sharp enough to fully follow what smart people are saying, but this piece feels less like thinking and more like its arguments are running wild. The article ends up repeating the very error of the identity politics it sets out to criticize. It takes aim at identity centered interpretation, yet its own argument sets up class and identity as rivals in a zero sum game.

On the mechanisms of imperialism that the article lays out, I think it overreaches. Yes, we need to examine how relative status security works, things like class anxiety fused with racial superiority and imperial citizenship, and how material class anxiety gets politically channeled through identity hierarchies like race, nation, nationality, and gender. That's a worthwhile line of inquiry.

But the article seems to be offering a reductive, first order causal explanation of imperialism. The main drivers of imperialism were numerous: interstate competition, capital accumulation, bureaucratic organization, and more. The notion that the metropolitan working class and lower middle class derived psychological compensation from imperial status looks less like a cause of imperialism and more like a legitimizing mechanism after the fact. I suspect the author is channeling Orwell's own perspective as a socialist here. If not, then the level of analysis is simply too shallow.

And can we really pin the rise of the modern far right on economic anxiety alone? I don't think so. Not everyone facing similar economic conditions turns to right wing populism. What matters is how political leaders, the media, the collapse of local industry, generation, education, the loss of cultural status, and the party system organize that anxiety into a particular political language.

Forces like MAGA are fundamentally rooted in the Bible Belt. Their lives are bound up with religious community, and they become right wing based on those values. In the end, it's a complex entanglement of cultural and geographical positioning. That said, I do agree that some political demagogues use cultural codes as fuel.

So honestly, I don't really know.

It's frustrating not being able to write logically in English, as if I've been muzzled. It's not my native language. But here's the core of it: even if we assume AI was behind the exclusion, we don't know the premise behind that decision. So how can anyone call it a "purge"? It could be an AI hallucination. Or maybe the AI judged that dystopian novels don't fit the modern context. Without any account of the process, I find it hard to follow the logic that just leaps straight to framing it as class warfare.

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autoexec 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Forces like MAGA are fundamentally rooted in the Bible Belt. Their lives are bound up with religious community, and they become right wing based on those values.

I think this is very clearly not the case. MAGA acts in direct opposition to christian values and Trump's actions demonstrate that he proudly rejects the teachings of Jesus. Whatever it is that attracts Christians to MAGA it isn't their religion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ2L-R8NgrA

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jdw64 2 hours ago | parent [-]

>MAGA acts in direct opposition to christian values

I agree with what you're saying, but personally, I think this is what the corruption of the Christian faith community looks like. Church communities may not actually take Jesus's teachings all that seriously, but they have Christian broadcasting, schools, the historical view that America is a Christian nation, and a sense of crisis about certain progressive ideas like abortion and such. At this point, I think Trump comes across not so much as a messiah but more as a kind of "warrior" for them. He has moral flaws, but he fights against the forces that are attacking us. In other words, the role of group protector takes priority over personal piety.

Historically speaking, whether a form of religion survives isn't determined solely by how pure it is, is it? In the end, it comes down to what kind of explanation it offers for the anxieties of life. First of all, I want to make it clear that I have absolutely no intention of dismissing your Christian faith. I want to emphasize again that I agree with you that they are violating Christian values, and that devout believers like you are the ones suffering the consequences.

Every time real world communism fails, people say "that wasn't true communism." And every time Christian communities repeatedly support political forces that go against the teachings of Jesus, people say "it's not because of the religion." If we keep doing that, we end up arbitrarily severing the relationship between ideology and reality. Just as we call the state of the modern world the corruption of capitalism, I think the MAGA movement shows what happens when a Christian community follows the wrong shepherd.

First of all, I'm sorry if I unintentionally attacked your faith. But I also respect Jesus. He was a remarkable person. It's just that, as you know, I'm criticizing the act of leaving a stain on his name.

	▲	autoexec an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I should have been more clear. I myself am not Christian, but I did grow up in a Christian household and have studied the faith. I think there is a worrying amount of idolatry in MAGA, but I'd agree that Christian nationalism plays a huge part (as does Christofascism). While ultimately Christianity is whatever its followers say it is, I think it's still worth calling attention to the clear contradictions. Not only out of acknowledgement/courtesy to those who really do try to follow the bible's teachings, but also on the off chance that it causes some MAGA supporter enough cognitive dissonance that they're forced to really think about what it is they've been supporting.