
Douglas Rushkoff – We Won: Get Used to It - miiiiiike
https://medium.com/s/douglas-rushkoff/we-won-get-used-to-it-3753eaf83f42
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belorn
A few weeks ago a court in Sweden decided on a defamation case where a person
had used the N word aimed at an prosecutor. The judges found that the accused
was not guilty because culture has shifted and now it is the person saying the
N word that looses reputation in public eye and not the person on the
receiving end. Basically they proclaimed cultural victory in favor of the
progressive culture.

------
wahern
> Back in 2000... I challenged the assembled renegades to accept victory. “The
> counterculture has won,” I told them.

Has he been in a coma the past 18 years? It's understandable that in 2000 one
may have discounted the importance of Gingrich's Republican Revolution and
Bush's election. But in 2018, two years after Trump's election, he's fooling
himself if he thinks a majority of the country shares the same values he does.
At _best_ a majority may share a commercialized, materialistic perversion of
those values; and a majority may _claim_ they share certain values. But what
people do, and in particular how they vote, says much more.

Hillary may have won the popular vote but it's a stretch to say 100% of
Hillary voters share counterculture values like radical inclusiveness. A vote
for Trump, however, is much more clear.

The author is living in a bubble. A very large bubble, but a bubble
nonetheless.

~~~
antoinevg
You are upset because you don't have a majority.

Which means you completely missed the point Rushkoff is making:

Winning did not require a majority and misguided efforts to establish a
majority are backfiring to the extent that it contributes to the unprecedented
political success of people like Trump.

~~~
wahern
He says, "The core counterculture values of environmentalism, women’s rights,
racial justice, and international peace were now simply accepted values.
'They’re looking to us for what’s going to happen, and how to be,' I
explained. 'We are not counterculture, anymore. We are pro-culture.'"

But nothing has changed to the degree he argues. The counterculture was _chic_
in the '60s and '70s, too. Counterculture values are "mainstream" only in the
sense that they've been partly internalized by the institutions of the elite,
and most thoroughly by the cultural elite. But the elite weren't antagonistic
to the counterculture, and the social elite were onboard from the beginning.
Unlike [historically] in Europe, the preferences of the social elite aren't
self-executing. So what has really changed?

If you look at the arc of history in terms of civil rights, the counterculture
had very little effect. The landmark Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, the
National Environmental Policy Act in 1970, and Title IX in 1972. These are the
pieces of substantive legislation upon which supposed countercultural values
have been concretely manifested; they weren't passed on a whim--they reflected
a popular if fleeting commitment to lofty ideals--yet they were passed long
before the counterculture supposedly "won". Roe v. Wade (1973) and Obergefell
v. Hodges (2015) are largely anomalous for multiple reasons, and using them to
bolster the notion that countercultural values have won (even in the sense of
aspirational morality) is particularly unpersuasive.

What's really changed between now and then is that liberals somehow convinced
themselves that they won. But the last 20 years has shown that they haven't
won at all. Rather, as the political dominance of the Democratic party came to
a close at the end up the 20th century, the Information Revolution
increasingly permitted everybody to silo themselves into cultural bubbles. So
liberals could believe they're winning

Real social, political, and legal changes are following the same trajectory as
they always have--halting and slow but generally improving. Some things have
gotten objectively worse, like the never ending wars in the Middle East;
ironically a recapitulation of the very thing that give birth to the
counterculture--Vietnam.

It's farcical, for example, to argue that an electorate who willingly and
knowingly elected as President a man who boasted about sexually assaulting
women _and_ _remained_ _unrepentant_ has somehow internalized countercultural
feminist ideals. Our society is more much inclusive of women these days, but
that's been a 200+ year arc. 1968 was _50_ years ago! If you stand back, the
advancement of women in society between 1968 and 2018 is comparable to 1918
and 1968. To argue that the progress of the latter 50 year period is somehow
uniquely reflective of '60s counterculture is rather short-sighted, self-
serving, egotistical, and naive; it exaggerates the progress and discourse of
this era and under appreciates the progress and discourse of previous eras.

