Culture Wars and the rise of ‘Fake Politics’

Much intellectual, emotional, and social resources in the modern world have been put towards fighting various culture war battles in recent years. I think this has been mostly a waste of time. I believe we should spend more energy focusing on the actual policy challenges faced by our societies.

Defenders of the culture war will point out that culture is important. That “politics is downstream of culture” as many of them like to say. This is correct, but I believe it is a Motte and Bailey argument. It uses something that is true, “culture is important” to argue for something quite different.

While culture certainly matters, many actually existing “culture war” battles are minor petty extremely online feuds over matters of no real significance. Even worse, these arguments then create rival camps that then react to each other’s reactions. Creating an infinite outrage loop. Something happens, group A reacts, group B reacts to group A’s reaction, rinse and repeat.

A classic example of this is the conservative outrage industry that has been built up around calling out “liberal media bias”. They aren’t actually mad about anything. They’re mad about the state of political discourse. They are having arguments about arguments. Ideas about ideas. And what’s even more bizarre is that they treat the fact that the liberal media is liberal as some kind of amazing insight. But who cares? It's not like this crap changes anyone’s mind. People who are not already conservative find this kind of politics obnoxious.

This leads to what I call “fake politics”. Political discourse that is not actually about what politics is actually about: what government does. Fake politics does not address any of the actual problems a society might be facing. But it has two advantages:

First, it is highly entertaining. The actual details of how government works is pretty technical and pretty boring. Fake politics has drama, outrage, and excitement. You don’t have to learn a bunch of bland details about statutes, budgets, public finances, departments, or any of that crap. This is why we couldn’t take our eyes off the Trump Presidency. He was a master of fake politics.

Secondly, it is much better for building an identity around. It is pretty hard to get people to get emotionally invested in tax policy or zoning reform. But fake politics has the distinct advantage of allowing one to appeal to seep seeded cultural grievance. It allows you to say “Those people, they hate you. They’re laughing at you. They despise who you are and everything that you believe in.” That resonates. It's demagogic nonsense and dangerous as all hell. But it resonates.

And that’s why I think fake politics is growing. It’s a better business model. It gets more eyeballs. It gets more clicks. And in the hyper-competitive environment of modern media, that's what matters.

So that’s my argument against the culture war. That it’s mostly pointless, mostly cynical, and mostly about getting attention and making money. But what do we do about it? Well, I think trying to at least somewhat decommodify journalism would help. Public broadcasters are more insulated from market forces, and this can help them resist the trend towards fake politics. I actually think the relatively larger role government broadcasters play in setting the tone of Canadian media has allowed Canada to be less impacted by fake politics than the US has. So, we should be war of plans to marketize or privatize government broadcasters, especially as it regards news content.

But beyond that, we should just be increasingly aware o the danger of this intellectual sinkhole for ourselves and those around us. Time is a scarce resource, and we should avoid being sucked into various intellectual rabbit holes that lead nowhere. So instead of culture war battles, we should instead devote ourselves as much as we can to real tangible things in the world that we can change. This is why I usually recommend people take more of an interest in more local politics. It affects people in more tangible ways and is actually an area where you (yes you!) can make a difference.

So to reiterate: Fake politics bad. Culture war bad. Tangible issues good. Local politics good.