CrispyFriedBarnacles
No bio...
User ID: 2417
CrispyFriedBarnacles
10d ago
I'm not positive, but my impression is that this was a conscious turn by really important elite factions in the 80s, though. I don't believe it was "how politics was prior to the 2010s" - it was more like, what politics looked like once the Reagan detente offered up grill-pilling as an option for exhausted voters who were ready to move on from disruption and political struggle. No more fighting over politics - instead, America is great, nationalism is great, Wall Street is great, money and capitalism are great, religion and families are great, no more inflation is great, Hollywood images of peaceful race relations are great, local religious observances instead of national politics is great, Cosby Show instead of All in the Family is great. And especially, Boomers finally leaving their disruptive twenties and settling down to be stable and raise their families is great.
If you go back and read, say, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 72" by Hunter S. Thompson, or "Days of Rage" by Bryan Burrough, or really anything about the rise of the New Left in the 70s, there is a whole lot of familiar archetypes, topics, and styles of rhetoric.
I guess at this point I'm coming to believe that breaking the brains of a certain amount of people is an overtly desirable feature, not bug, of certain kinds of political agitation. Making people unreasonable can actually be a really effective strategy for forcing certain kinds of change through, because then powerful leaders can't (by definition) reason with those people, and thus have to give in to demands instead or find some other way of dealing with them. I feel like that's what I've been seeing, at any rate - people who would naturally be somewhat unstable having that massively amplified by forces that appear to be attempting to accentuate exactly those tendencies for a variety of reasons.
I absolutely agree with your prescription about what would be better, I'm just not sure if there's a way to get there from here. I think there were a bunch of factors that made Reagan exactly the right affable messenger for that turn in the 80s for a turn away from politics of a certain sort.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
10d ago
When I was a kid, in the 80s, where I lived, Ronald Reagan was the good czar, and all the lingering bad old strife from the 70s was going to be put behind us, because it was all a great misunderstanding, with the government getting way too out of line with the real Americans and needing to be put back in its place. And liberal was a dirty word to tar people with. I didn't understand what had happened, of course, but I could just feel it, overwhelmingly, from all the adults in my life.
As I got older and further from that past, it seemed less and less real, like some sort of giant ridiculous propaganda coup... especially by the Clinton years (New Democrats didn't look anything like what I had been told, right?) And especially by the awfulness of the George W. Bush years. It got really easy to think that all the adults in my life, back in the 80s, had just been misled by propaganda and that era's equivalent of Fox News.
All of which made the 2010s deeply harrowing and shocking for me, especially as I had already steered my adult life in the assumption that much of what I had been told as a kid wasn't true. But early in the 2010s, it dawned on me, watching the mounting personal wreckage of political radicalization from people in my own personal life, especially women of a certain sort, exactly why those adults I had grown up around had loathed the 70s so intensely. "The personal is political" might be an interesting airy political theory, but as a lived practice, it clearly utterly breaks a lot of normal people into quivering, non-functional shards who can't recover from it.
I have a half-sister, twelve years younger than me, who went very much through a similar arc to Lana (I have never been especially close to her). She started out quite conservatively religious. And now she's got three kids, lives in a polycule and her various gendered lovers with her despairing, rather unwilling cuckold husband, has gone down the double mastectomy route, is mainlining T and showing off her beard and armpit hair on social media, and writes borderline suicidal posts from time to time about how the only people who will respond to her at this point are online activist LGBTQ friends, as everyone in her normal life is done with her. I'm probably "misgendering" her here, but I blocked her a while ago on Facebook, so I really only get updates second hand through my sister. And my half-sister has a litany of internet disabilities and conditions, can't leave the bed most days, and has made nasty allegations about several members of her family about abuse in the past, none of which are backed up by any of her many siblings. It's horrible to watch, especially given the children involved. I think she would have had a rocky mental health experience in life no matter what, as it runs in the family. But she's clearly been stewing in social influences that make everything far, far worse, and amplify her hardest tendencies... And I've seen milder versions of this play out the last several years in other cases, too!
It's vaguely interesting that there's this "public" conversation about incels and online radicalization of young guys (which, I mean, sure, there's a plausible discussion there), and then meanwhile, there's this giant elephant in the room.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
11d ago
Oh, totally. But I think I'm trying to get at something slightly different. To go with a slightly strained metaphor...
It's more like George W. Bush was a basketball team, everyone knew it and knew that the communal sport seemed to be basketball, and so the Democrats trained to play and beat a basketball team. And they arguably got really good at violating the spirit of basketball while staying in the letter of the rules of basketball (or so it seemed, if you were not sympathetic to Democrats).
And then they show up to play basketball, and Trump is there, announcing that the actual sport is boxing. And the refs angrily shake their heads no - we play basketball here! - and then Trump cheerfully gives them the finger and sells ticket to the upcoming boxing match, a giant crowd shows up for the boxing match, the crowd gets rowdy and ignores the refs, and then the refs shrug and the boxing match starts.
I think that's roughly what I'm getting at. Democrats couch it in moral language, but as you well note, it's extremely difficult to see how Trump (especially earlier Trump) was morally worse that Iraq War era George W. Bush. But it is easy to see that Democrats really liked the social, cultural terms of debate they had against the Mitt Romneys of the world, and they really don't like the terms of debate they have against Trump.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
11d ago
Here's an extension of this theory that I've also been kicking around.
I remember, during the 2016 primaries, when Trump was still being treated as a joke, him racking up surprisingly big wins (in a Republican primary context) in places like Massachusetts. And I was reading something at the time that noted, essentially, that there was a surprisingly big, untapped demographic of voters all throughout New England and places like Illinois (or other Midwest places with dominant progressive cities ) that wasn't particularly religious or pious or prissy, and wasn't large enough to win local elections, but that sounded a LOT like Trump and was really receptive to Trump. But neither major political coalition had had anything to say such people for a very long time.
And ever since then, I've gotten rather stuck on this notion that the older 2 party system, the one that was stable for a while, was really two coalitions that were, especially, catering to two regional sets of winners. The Democratic party had turned into the party of coastal winners, and the Republican party had evolved into the party of sunbelt winners. And that meant Democrats were more attached to old money prestige cultural institutions like universities, and the Republican party was especially connected to new money success like booming California and Texas and Florida population growth and business (although over time, the political culture in California shifted from the ur-Sunbelt model to a much more coastal, entrenched model). And this bifurcation was comfortable and made a lot of sense to all involved - of course the two parties are going to be heavily utilized by various winning elements of society and work as their megaphones and enact their interests. And the winners of the Democratic coalition were morally prissy about PC stuff, and the winners of the Republican coalition was morally prissy about evangelical and personal sex stuff, and so that go reflected in how they became annoying in public discourse, and how they got attacked rhetorically.
But the George W Bush years, and Iraq, and the 2008 financial crisis, were very bad for the Sunbelt winners coalition. It was badly weakened. And a lot that coalition, particularly the parts that had gotten wealthier and were more drawn to the cultural attraction of the Obama story, really didn't want to be associated with the culturally low class (but still economically booming) Sunbelt model any more.
And that coalitional weakness opened the door to a new faction, one that wasn't really getting any representation or being courted... the Northern (and Midwest / rust belt) losers faction. And the Northern losers faction is a nightmare for the Northern winners faction, because 1) they aren't prissy like the Sunbelt evangelicals, 2) they've embraced counterculture energy to a more serious degree than even the Northern winners had (which had always been a cultural Achillies heel for southern evangelicals), 3) they're actually way more racists and tribal than sunbelt winners have been for the last several decades, and much more unapologetically so, which morally horrifies Northern winner sensibilities, and 4) on a deep and profound level, their condition is in many ways the FAULT of northern winners, their own local expert class who has been much more interested in growth through globalization than the economic fortunes of their downscale neighbors.
I get the sense that Democrats really, really, really wish they could just run against 2006 era George W Bush again, or Mitt Romney. That's a very self-flattering world for them, where everything makes sense and they get to fulfill their role of being cool. But quite frankly, the 2016 campaign was the first time in my entire life where I was seeing campaign material for Republicans, at least online (much of filtered through 4chan anarchy), where I recognized the Republican side of political rhetoric being, unambiguously, much cooler in a countercultural sense than what Democrats were doing. I found it fascinating, to be honest.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
11d ago
There's an idea I've been toying with for a while that connects with this. I saw some comment a while ago (I can't recall where) that Obama had said he expected some macho, manly, John Wayne type to be who Republicans settled on in 2016. And so Trump blindsided him.
And lurking in the background there, you can see, I think, something like Obama's (ultimately disastrously flawed) theory of how progress happens in society. Namely, you get a bunch of hardcore radical leftist activists to get agitated up like an agitated bee's nest. And then kind-hearted liberals publicly portray themselves as simply responding to the people's will as they enact progressive change. And then, after enough of that, eventually stern dad John Wayne gets back in office and spanks the radical activists who have overreached - and he gets considerable public support in doing so. And so those activists are forced to have their more extreme edges get sanded down. A certain amount of liberal capitulation happens - but meanwhile, quite a lot of the previous change sticks, too. And liberals get to console their radical activist fringe and say, "I know, I know - what a dick that guy is! We fought for you, and we'll fight for you next time, too! Show up at the polls and organize! But I mean, what can you do? Reactionaries and fascists, am I right?" And notably, in that story, liberals never, ever, ever have to be the bad cop and police their own crazies. They really want to be the cool uncle who still listens to Nas on their ipods (but wear mom jeans).
But Trump threw a massive wrench in this theory of social change. Because of course actual Trump is intermittently pretty radical himself, or at least is quite comfortable with radical rhetoric. And because the actual populist forces that Trump taps into are frequently fairly radical too (but a radical strain that is utterly terrifying to American liberals who really don't want to accept the reality of their own social position). And because American liberals secretly want stern dad John Wayne to reassert reality and normality after their radicals go too far and temper those radicals a bit while leaving the hands of liberals clean and letting them chafe against the repressions of normality... and Trump really didn't do any of that. Trump loves chaos. He doesn't have any of that energy that George W. Bush or Mitt Romney have, trying to be a beleaguered dad from a 50s sitcom holding the line and reinforcing norms in a prissy, stuffy, uncool way.
In 2017, the old, comfortable script got thrown out. And that meant that nobody was there to police liberals' radicals for them - and indeed, liberals were busy being utterly frantic themselves because of Trump, so policing their radicals was the last thing on their mind. They were coming to feel pretty radical themselves. So there ended up being no breaks on the train, and the radicalism of the left ended up growing way more pronounced and unchecked. And so that's grown and grown...
But by 2025, 1) it's turned out that some of those radical edges are absolutely electoral poison (and increasingly make even normie liberals uncomfortable), 2) some of those radical edges are tearing the Democratic coalition apart, 3) intersectionality has proven a lot more adept at making fervent enemies (like nearly all young white men in America) than friends, and crucially 4) a lot of those radicals REALLY, violently hate the Jews, and given how the current Democratic coalition is structured, that simply can't be allowed to continue. And because of the way Trump rolls, they simply can't wait for the stern 1950s dad to show up and reinforce norms and boundaries for them. So (or at least in this theory) some American liberals (or their powerful institutions in the background) are finally reaching the point where its dawning on them that they're going to have to do the policing themselves, as deeply painful and unpleasant as that may be. And that's going to require theorizing their erstwhile allies in Latinate language and casting them in pretty unpleasant lights via rhetoric rewritten as social "science".
Back in 2010 and 2011 and 2012, all of the liberal news opinion sources that I had read when I was an I AM VERY SMART New Atheist suddenly shifted on a dime, and they started repeating an intersectional line of politics that none of them had evinced back when all of us were extremely mad about Bush. It was the early rumblings of the politics of wokeness, essentially. And for several years, I found my blood pressure going up more and more every time I would read these formerly sympathetic sources. I found them painting with broader and broader brushes, and casting more and more groups that I still identified with in a worse light, and I kept wrestling with the "why bother" question... until a point finally came, in 2014, where a discontinuous break happened. And all of those voices suddenly went from being an "us" to a "them", and I was no longer a sympathetic reader of those voices.
But what I want to say is... that process of me reading, and getting more frustrated, was an essential part of the process of me shifting my perspective, and realizing a whole lot of things about politics and ideology that I had been totally in the dark about. That was, for a time, an actual answer to "why bother". It led me to a lot of much smarter, sharper reading (mostly in the form of actual, rigorous books) than I had done when I was coasting on anti-Bush vibes and Obama charisma. In retrospect, I would say, interacting with those conversations was really important, because it was interacting with it that led to the point where I could be confident that that conversation was entirely over. You could say that's sad, I guess, but I think it's just pragmatic, and possibly healthy, too. If you're blithely in a Schmidt-ian relationship with powerful forces, much better to remove the scales from your eyes, accept reality, and move on (possibly reconfiguring your life so your surface area is minimized as much as possible) than to be a gas lit cuckold, if I can haul out a fraught term.
So there's that. And unfortunately, this cycle feeds on itself - at this point, I simply can't and won't give progressives much of hearing unless they really bend over backwards to repudiate most of the last 15 years of politics and culture. And that's extremely unlikely, so I'm not particularly reachable. And that's too bad, I guess - but I already went on this rodeo before, back when I was being activisted out of my home conservative culture between 1996 and 2008. Fool me once, shame on me...
And of course, and I'm far from alone in this, I'm socially still surrounded by highly presumptuous, true-believing progressives for professional and class reasons, so at least in my case (and I think I'm far from alone in this), it's not like I no idea what evolving progressive thought looks like these days.
I believe, and I think this was once a much more common American belief, that there are much, much, much worse things in the world than different groups with different world views and different values giving each other some generous space. If we are lucky, maybe America will return to that form of organization. But it's going to be very difficult in the interim, because we have all sorts of institutions in place (the New Deal state, universities, Hollywood, multinational corporations) that assume a degree of integration that is possibly no longer supportable given how America is drifting. Or maybe other blacks swan events will conspire that restore a sense of unity - but if so, they'll almost certainly have to involve a massive amount of suffering and death, just like the Great Depression and World War 2 did.
So, to return to your original question, why bother? Well, pragmatically, it's likely that Trump and the new version of the right will overplay their hand in certain key ways. And as they do, there will likely be people who are receptive to new arguments again. You can only make those arguments if you're mixing it up in mixed communities and have gotten good at doing so rhetorically. And the old wisdom I've always seen is, far more people read than write, so if you make good arguments on a forum, even if you're downvoted, you might be reaching an audience that's invisible - that's a thankless road to hoe in the short-term, but if you time it right, and you're fortunate in picking where you participate, you could well reach people that way. I mean, even for me, there is no possible future where I'm reachable by American progressives in a positive sense... but I could be persuaded that whatever gets called the right is more or less supportable, depending on what's going on. But this is all about "what's politically effective", not "what's a fun way to spend my evenings".
More options
Context Copy link