Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
2mo ago
The most obvious point against this is that the Christian nationalists (or whatever you want to call them if that term displeases) don't want to be cultural secessionists (for the most part). They generally see themselves as the rightful heirs to the American legacy and to give that up in favor of being the Amish mk II is to abandon their birthright. People like Rod Dreher have advocated for separation from secular society, but somewhat tellingly, Dreher lives in Hungary now, not the United States.
Logistically, it is problematic as well. The Amish aren't very numerous and are able to isolate themselves from external influence via technological proscriptions as well as the hard division their beliefs create from everyone else. You can't really be Am-ish. By contrast, Christian nationalism encompasses potentially tens of millions of people in the US. At that scale, you can't really wander off into the wilderness to start your own society, even if you could persuade people to do so.
Alabama already exists.
Although frankly, that jibe could be applied to a lot of red states. Conservative Christianity is an extremely powerful political force in Republican-dominated states. What it isn't, that it sort of used to be, is a cultural juggernaut. The opprobrium of the religious right carries very little weight outside of the religious right. They have virtually no influence over trends in media/entertainment (outside of internally produced media that is largely considered a joke by outsiders). Increasingly, young people aren't interested in the story they tell about the world and are shedding their religious affiliations. Etcetera. A lot of recent conservative political priorities are fundamentally about trying to remediate cultural defeats with state power.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
It's a technical term.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
If it makes you feel any better, your opponents feel approximately the same way about you.
Does anyone actually get any pleasure out of this? Does anyone think it's doing any good?
Consider reading the sacred texts:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
This idea sounds plausible on its own
Does it? That seems like it doesn't pass the smell test to me. The correlation between things like personal liberty + economic prosperity and how aristocratic a given society was/is seems quite negative. If nothing else, contrast the US or Britain (no/vestigial aristocracy) with the Russian Empire (deeply aristocratic and reactionary, also bringing up the rear in terms of economic development and personal liberty). Nor would we expect aristocratic societies to do well on this front - landowning elites are primarily concern with the extraction of land rents and the preservation of their privileges. A merchant class threatens their power base and letting a peasant sue his lord undermines their elite status.
it co-exists in the DR with a ravenous hatred of "elites" and "globalists". How does that make any sense?
They see themselves as temporarily embarrassed dukes.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
North-easterners didn't like seeing them drive up in nice cars throwing money around. They saw them as uppity. So various federal policies were put in place to economically devastate the region.
That is a very bold claim.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
One might consider them elite heretics or counter-elites
They're probably grifters aiming to extract money from regional gentry in exchange for validating their feeling that Harvard journalism graduates are ruining America and the country could be saved if only they were allowed to dump toxic runoff in the creek.
Anyway, they define elite as postgrad urbanite with 150K per year income. They further split elites into those who went to 12 top colleges and the ‘politically obsessed’ (definition unclear but I imagine it means they spend a certain number of hours reading/watching/discussing political media). For instance, I imagine we would be considered ‘politically obsessed’.
This seems like a gerrymandered category. They've pretty much defined elite in a way that precludes anyone conservative from being included while sweeping up a lot of people who are mildly successful professionals. If your definition of "elite" captures an MIT graduate with a twitter problem but not Richard Uihlein, it's probably deficient.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
You can call me pedantic, but, ultimately, I think your idea that Trump "expanded US involvement" in the Middle East can only be true in a pedantic sense.
It is true in the literal, material sense that in a number of places, Trump continued or substantially expanded US military involvement in conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, e.g. US involvement in Syria under Trump was by no means limited to an isolated bombing. The US was heavily involved in the Battle of Raqqa. The Battle of Khasham saw US forces killing Russian troops. In Somalia, US involvement went from nominal to almost weekly strikes. Similarly, strikes in Yemen were massively expanded (Trump also vetoed disengagement).
Certainly, nobody in the MAGA coalition feels all that betrayed by Trump's promises in the Middle East that he bombed an inconsequential airport tarmac in Syria
Perhaps they're not as anti-interventionist as they claim? Or maybe they just don't pay much attention to foreign policy?
Skibboleth
2mo ago
It seems like an incredibly pedantic distinction to say that Donald Trump expanding US involvement in Middle Eastern and African conflicts doesn't count because the US was technically already involved. It doesn't support the notion of Trump the peacemonger.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
is this just more journalists trying to spin straw into gold?
Correct. For the first time in a while, we have a dead primary season with, effectively, two incumbents. Election coverage has gotten used to circus primary campaigns that last forever and have tons of candidates. This is also why you get people making hay out of Haley's primary performances pretending that pulling in 20% represents a serious threat to Trump instead of admitting that 95% of them will vote for Trump in the general. They need something to talk about.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
okay, majority rules, you get basic decent treatment but you don't get to have screaming fits in public about being a real woman/real man
That's not on offer and never has been. If it was, it would probably undermine the more radical trans activists in much the same way that the normiefication of homosexuality undermined the weirdest and most radical elements of the gay rights movement. However, until trans Bismarck comes along and sabotages the trans left by offering a compromise that aspiring transnormies can tolerate, trans activism is likely to continue to be defined by the angriest and most radical voices.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
Quite frankly, I hold the left to higher standards than the right, and I think that the left should be above such behavior.
Why? If you think the right shouldn't be expected to behave when they lose, why do you think they should be trusted with power?
There's a pretty clear reason for this though, right?
There is, but it's not that American conservatives love freedom more than American liberals. Trump was president at the start of Covid, which made his response a natural angle of attack for Democrats. Rather than defend his performance, Trump argued that Covid was actually not that big a deal. That more or less set the partisan alignment on the matter.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself.
You've already got it:
They could just stop, but that would amount to a capitulation. Rightly or wrongly, the
redblue tribe won't accept that, so they continue they culture war.
Suffice to say that liberals do not share conservatives' assessment about the balance of power.
Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively?
Yes. The red tribe's hate for the blue tribe (and vice versa) is fundamentally normative. The red and blue tribes hate each other because they have values that are not in alignment and which they are not willing to compromise on.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
if you fail to convey the things that actually made the gospel powerful
I am positing that this had little to do with the details of Christian theology, most of which weren't even settled until after a particular sect of Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire and resolved its disagreements in the traditional way. Conveying the good vibes is more important to attracting converts (or just avoiding deconversion) than being theologically sound. Is the ad in question theologically dubious? Yeah, probably. Is it any more theologically dubious than other modern (or ancient, for that matter) variants of Christianity? Probably not.
(Also, you're producing for an American audience. The Good News is not news for most of them them, so that's not a very strong angle of attack).
Skibboleth
3mo ago
the theological ground of these ads is spurious
Does this actually matter to anyone? Religion as practiced by most adherents is a loose collection of rituals and superstitions that serves chiefly as a tribal identifier; to the extent that such people follow their own religious doctrines, they tend to pick and choose what already fits their values while selectively ignoring anything that doesn't. This is why, for example, you can have an explicitly pacifist faith that decries the accumulation of wealth serve as the official religion for a bunch of bling-obsessed warrior aristocrats without everyone's head exploding or decamping to a better aligned belief system.
In the last iteration of the thread, someone articulated the point that right now Christianity is very heavily right-coded and enjoys a fairly poor reputation with young people (not unrelated). These commercials seem best understood as attempts to challenge both of those perceptions. It may not be true to some platonic ideal of Christian theology, but you can say that about most Actually Existing Christianity (it's only relatively recently that they mostly chileld.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
I'm not sure if you intended this question as a joke or some sort of "gotcha" but the obvious answer is Donald Trump.
I guess it was a "gotcha" insofar as it was extremely predictable that you'd say Trump despite the absurdity of that claim. "Tear the rotten edifice down" is not and cannot in any meaningful sense be a center-right ethos because the core principle of the center-right is that the status quo are basically fine. Trumpists are shouting that things are emphatically not fine - that the Federal government is hopelessly corrupt, the Democrats are stealing elections, the Mexicans are invading, the trans are corrupting the youth, globalists are stealing our jobs, etc... and that radical action is needed to fix it.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
I'm not complaining that conservatives are too conservative (at least not in this context); I'm offering a theory for why conservatives are really bad at playing the role of counterculture. Your garden-variety normiecon does not have the mindset to be an effective counterculture member. They're too uncomfortable with disorder and nonconformity. The types that do suffer from being intolerably crankish - the type of person who thinks a pop star dating a football player is a Pentagon (?) op.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
Who of actual political relevance would you describe as center right?
Skibboleth
3mo ago
better organized in terms of transportation, porta-poties, trash pick-up etc
See, this is the crux of it. Even if this was true (of which I am skeptical), none of this is relevant. The goal of a protest is not to stand around politely, then leave with your trash in an orderly fashion. It is either to be such a colossal nuisance that you can get concessions for stopping or to build sympathy for your political movement by baiting the police into kicking the shit out you. Conservative protestors occasionally try to cargo cult left-wing protest tactics, but tend to be either too docile (zero impact) or too aggressive (generate negative sentiment).
Skibboleth
3mo ago
Just, what the fuck guys? Can’t we just be the normal ones? It shouldn’t be hard by comparison. But instead we’re attacking normality. We’re doing goofball shit.
The world is turned upside down: conservatives and liberals are extremely confused because they are accustomed to and expect to be setting and rebelling against norms respectively. Obviously, this is far more discomforting for conservatives than liberals. They lack the mindset, the institutional capability, and the practical knowledge to be good counterculture rebels. (This, incidentally, is a major reason why conservative protests are usually incompetent). The coalition members with the most energy for this kind of politics are the people you least want to hand the microphone.
Normies are the natural constituency of the center-right - the sort of people who think "life's good, don't rock the boat too hard". Swifties are generally weapons-grade normies and the female equivalent of grillo-centrists. Yeah, they're "feminists", but it's an extremely anodyne feminism whose practical beliefs are probably mostly shared by a lot of conservative women (e.g. I have a hard time imagining what my mother or her sisters would say if their husbands suggested they shouldn't have careers). The problem for the American right is that the center-right is dead and the Republican party is (or is at least perceived to be) dominated by reactionary populists and religious conservatives. Not only does this coalition want to rock the boat, many of them are saying the boat is rotten and needs to burned down and replaced.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
That is a fully general argument for never letting anyone into the country, ever (also unfalsifiable, since when you don't turn up any foreign agents you can just say they're really sneaky) Far more people enter the country legally every year, and some of them are definitely spies. If Russia or China want to send an agent into the US, they can just... put them on a plane. Give them a bullshit job at the embassy (or just overstay a tourist visa). Being "undocumented" isn't a feature for a spy. It's a hindrance.
Imagining myself as an adversary of the United States, I could covertly send unarmed soldiers across the open border, have them obtain weapons on the other side, and then attack.
Teeth of the Tiger was not Clancy's finest work.
I mean, seriously, why? Going to stage an attack on a military base with a few dozen guys using civilian smalls arms? A terrorist attack to put yourself in the top spot on America's shitlist?
Skibboleth
3mo ago
A conservative male role model with progressive political and social views :V
I'm only being slightly facetious. I think you can point out some culturally-specific differences on the margin (e.g. conservatives are more likely to idealize aggression and embrace sharp gender divisions in interests, progressives are more likely to praise emotional openness and lean away from idea of a man as protector/provider), but I would posit that (at least in the American context) the behavioral ideal of manhood isn't that far apart. And even some apparent political splits are more subcultural than partisan (e.g. compare and contrast Mormon and Southern masculinity)
quoth @dr_analog on conservative* role models
We could strike the word "providing" and have a list that is agreeable in practice to most progressives. Their bigger issue is a more generalized discomfort with openly articulating an ideal of manhood for fear of harming both women and not-traditionally-masculine men, so instead most of these go unstated and you have to infer them.
*normiecon rather than redpill con
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