Three Simple Rules for Discussing Politics

“I would also add that it is best to avoid the tendency toward what I would call know-betterism, where we take the role of a parental figure trying to guide our political opponents to the light.”

There is a strong tendency to view the culture war in explicitly binary terms, with two clear sides of partisan enmity waging rhetoric warfare, while the rest of us oscillate between the gravitational pull of each political tribe. It can certainly feel this way in the midst of an argument or when scrolling through social media (as though every minor disagreement were symbolic of the broader political struggle between “us and them”). But reality is more complex.

In a long article entitled “The Memetic Tribes Of Culture War 2.0,” Peter Limberg and Conor Barnes assert that the new culture war is not binary but multipolar, made up of a multitude of digital tribes with their own set of political views and cultural memes, beyond just Left and Right. As mainstream media breaks down into digital and social media, cultural markers are less defined by which TV station we watch than which podcast we are listening to, what YouTube channel we like, or whom we follow on Twitter, and, thus, our cultural identity becomes increasingly specialized.

To be clear, there is certainly a major chasm in our politics, which the writer Uri Harris characterized as being increasingly split between whether we support or reject social justice ideas around privilege, identity, and structural oppression. However, in terms of the culture war, there are many gradations along this overarching political spectrum. Focusing on what divides the Left and Right can muddle the disagreements that exist within them. Both have fractured into smaller subgroups: There is the “Dirtbag Left,” the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW), the Christian Right, the Social Justice Left, Progressives, Optimists, Neoreactionaries, The Alt-Right, White Nationalists, Black Lives Matter etc. This helps explain why it is often the case that we most vociferously argue with people with whom we already agree on most things, a phenomenon that Freud called the narcissism of small difference, which is then amplified tenfold by social media. The perception that the culture war has only two major factions makes disputes between the spanning gradient of digital tribes seem like irresolvable conflicts of interest when often, in fact, they are not.