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Waiting for the cavalry to ride over the hill doesn't work if society has spent fifty years making sure no one like you learns how to ride a horse. Conservatives face the same problem when it comes to boycotting large companies that don't agree with their values. I started replying to @coffee below, where he wished that conservatives would launch a serious boycott in response to social media/tech companies targeting conservative viewpoints, the post expanded to the point where it felt like it ought to go separately to avoid jumping down anyone's throat.
Conservatives talking about launching mass boycotts of any company with liberal values immediately throws me back to Ferguson and over-exuberant BLM protestors shouting "They have guns, we have guns, let's do this!" "Have" and "Guns" being, here, relative values although superficially similar, it is rather important to note how many guns each side has and if they know how to use them. Just as I roll my eyes at antifa types claiming that they're ready for a violent revolution when the majority of their side steadfastly refuses to own or know how to use a firearm and the security services are on the other side; I giggle at Christian conservatives thinking they have the moxie to force a boycott on every industry with liberal values. Because every industry with liberal values is, at this point, virtually every industry that makes the world modern. There is no non-luddite path to an offensive boycott against liberal corporations; there are too many liberal corporations, and if any of the corporations tried to veer right-wing their employees are too left wing and would exit.
Call it the Long March through the Institutions and blame the enemy if you like; or note that Mao's physical Long March was a work, that Chiang Kai-Shek (foolishly, as it turned out) let it happen, practically escorted Mao out of town without too much of a fight or too many efforts to undermine Communist columns on the way. The supposed socialist Long March through the institutions has been mirrored, or exceeded by, a Republican Long Retreat from the Institutions; this started long before Rudi ever wrote about the Long March. God and Man at Yale came out in the fifties, when conservatives still dominated among college graduate voters and colleges were still seen as broadly conservative institutions. Republican skepticism of academic credentials and intellectuals dates at least back to Eisenhower as a political strategy; and accelerated under Bush II, culminating in the Palin nomination. What we see today is downstream of seventy years of anti-academy politics. Just as BLMers' desire to reform police departments will be futile as long as virtually no blue tribers want to become police officers; conservative efforts to reform the commanding heights of American culture will be futile when it is virtually impossible to assemble a critical mass of conservatives in important professions.
In the academy, Democrats are estimated to outnumber Republicans something like 12:1. While studies note that the concentration is highest in Northeastern elite colleges, those are also exactly the colleges that set the trends the rest follow. Is it any wonder that Democrats rack up ever larger leads among college graduate voters?
In the film industry, the biggest conservative political group "Friends of Abe" counted 2,500 members out of more than 300,000 workers in the film colony. And while I loved Gary Sinise in Forrest Gump and in CSI; he's like a C or a D list star. In the music industry, the vast majority of donations go to Democrats, with A-Listers like Bon Jovi and Springsteen and Jay Z shelling out for blues, while Reds get warmed up leftovers like Toby Keith and Ted Nugent. Overall, the entertainment industries shelled out 87% of their money to Dems in most cycles.
In the tech industry, the vast majority of donations from employees go to Dems. The FAANGs in particular all gave over 80% to Ds. Tech entrepeneurs aren't much redder than their employees as a class. Research scientists, somewhere between Academics and tech workers, also lean overwhelmingly left, with 80% Dem/Lean Dem as far back as the Bush admin.
The upshot of all this is that there is no critical mass of workers for red tribe coded projects in the commanding heights of American culture. As long as Blue tribe workers are sufficiently organized to do things like walk out to protest their corporate masters failing to take the correct positions, even a single CEO deciding to give it a try won't work. All the corporations will hold the line on blue tribe cultural values, because if they don't they'll lose their talent, and without talent they are nothing.
Consider the fix Ottowa found itself in from the trucker protests: tow truck operators turned out to be on the other team, and refused to tow protestors. Turned out, basically nobody on team blue knew how to drive a big rig. That control allowed the truckers to shut down a city, and force concessions; the government was forced to seek out blue coded allies (banks) to strike back.
Similarly, blue tribers dominate tech and culture to such an extent that red tribers will be perpetually unable to produce content that is nearly as good quality. As much as I might despise mainstream culture, there's a lot of craft and skill that goes into making a Marvel blockbuster, and it can't be knocked off by amateurs.* I don't know that you can make a Marvel type movie, a workmanlike blockbuster product, without a lot of blue tribers. As long as that is true, the theory that companies will fold to Red tribe boycotts because they don't want to lose 20% of their customers doesn't work, because a united blue tribe labor revolt will cost them 100% of their products. Disney might fear losing customers, but it is terrified of losing talent that it uses to produce products to sell around the globe. And the talent is much better organized than the customers will ever be.
If Red tribers want to play hardball, it must be on their own turf. I said I doubt a Marvel film could be made without blue tribers, I don't know that a cattle herd can make it to a farmer's market in NYC metro without a whole lot of red tribers. The Canadian truckers succeeded for a long stretch because there aren't blue tribe truckers to oppose them, there are a lot of industries in the USA that are the same. An energy strike would be fascinating, fine you want to decarbonize here we'll do it all tomorrow. Or a police strike. The reds are decades behind the blues in the organizational sense, but the second best time to plant a tree is today and all that jazz.
Simultaneously, conservatives need to be building institutions alongside and parallel to blue tribe dominated institutions, producing beautiful cultural content to compete on talent. If cultural production is denigrated as blue tribe, and no red tribers go into it, that's permanently ceding the field, slow suicide. Both compete on quality with blue tribe, and shifting paradigms away from blue tribe framing. But never attempting to stand up inferior red tribe knockoffs, like Turks I have a lot of thoughts on how that would work, but you've read enough of me for now.
TLDR: A conservative boycott of liberal companies would fail because in competitive industries the top talent is all blue tribe, or such a strong majority that it is doubtful red tribe talent can even man a ship together.
*Moreover, making conservative knock-offs of mainstream products has a strong Christian Rock problem. Christian Rock is bad because it affirms the dominance of the secular rock music paradigm.
This line is frickin amazing
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I strongly disagree with this prediction. The vast majority of people value politics very little in monetary terms. If the pay remains safe and secure, and the extent of labor remains static, people will stay whether or not the corporation celebrates Pride Month or Hitler Day. What actually happens is people who are money saturated (rich) take issue and start materially harming any right-wing business (see Twitter advertiser conundrum for instance) which has downstream effects on the labor pool (Musk had to increase hours and do layoffs to cope with the advertiser conundrum). Also a truly right-wing corporation would be sued under Civil Rights laws which would cause immense material harm and force reversion to leftism if the company isn't totally destroyed.
Some of your links seem at first glance to disagree with this. But what you have found is that among workers who are willing to make political donations in fields that discriminate against right wingers and right wing populations (white men), the majority of those workers donate to Democrats. You also posted an NPR link talking about how <0.5% of Disney's workforce in California took an authorized walkout to protest a bill in Florida. This reminds me of the astroturfed, performative high school walkouts after the Stoneman High shooting https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/stoneman-douglas-high-walkouts/
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Normally I'm against nitpicking, but I think it's warranted in any case such as this when some off-topic example is brought up to support another larger point.
Considering that you seem to have more than just cursory knowledge of the Long March, I assume you're also aware that Chiang's only biological son was in Moscow at this time, practically as a hostage. That alone I think was enough reason for him not to try eliminating the Communists completely. Also, the reason the Long March out of the the Jiangxi / Chiang-hsi Soviet was decided in the first place because the area was successfully attacked and surrounded by the Kuomintang. Chiang was also aware that any warlord whose area of control was entered by the Communist columns would reach out to him for assistance, which would in turn let him grow his power base; and that the Communists were likely to to become convenient co-belligerents in a war against Japan if they were compelled by the Kremlin (which was likely); and that the Communists were effectively playing into his hands by leaving Central China and retreating to an insignificant corner of the Northern Loess Plaetau.
I agree that US Conservatives were and are likely to be quokkas, cucks, short-sighted, naive, complacent etc., and that they have little excuse for their actions, or more precisely, lack thereof. But Chiang or anyone else in 1935 had precisely zero reason to believe that the Long March will eventually, more than 10 years later, provide the Communist with a suitable base to start out from and conquer the entire country.
Compare and contrast, Stalin, who upon his son being offered in a prisoner swap for the German Marshal Paulus after Stalingrad famously replied "I will not swap a lieutenant for a Field Marshal." His son would die in a concentration camp in 1943. It is a matter of priorities:
Simon Sebag Montefiore, "Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar", p. 1003
To engage directly with the comparison between the Long Marches...
I do agree that one can't slag off the KMT leadership too much for failing to anticipate facing a world-historic leader who would successfully rally a multi-decade struggle to take control of the country. Hence "foolishly, as it turned out"; not "idiotically" or "inexplicably." It's a black swan event, one can't be shocked that people were caught off guard. But, the same can be said of US Conservatives! That's what makes it a good instructive parallel! Both chose short term advantage (support of the warlords, support of the white working class of the former Confederate states) which opened up opportunities for their opponent's to inflict long term defeats. Conservatives did not think that liberal dominance of cultural institutions could reach this point; the KMT did not realize that Communism was a virus that would spread if not entirely eliminated.
Chiang would repeat this mistake when he chose to align with Mao against the Japanese. Mao kept his eye on the prize, avoiding conflict with the Japanese and preserving his forces, while KMT forces were worn down in conflict with the Japanese army, setting the stage for the resumption of the civil war after the end of WWII on better ground for the ChiComms. Repeatedly underestimating the determination and ability of Communist leaders was a calling card of the countries that fell to Communism.
Yes, I was meant to write "at THIS time", thanks for the correction, I made the edit.
That's a good story, but unfortunately there's no documented evidence of this. In all likelihood, it became popular because it appeared in the famous but otherwise mostly unwatchable Soviet multi-part epic war movie Liberation. I wouldn't trust anecdotes of his daughter, or some supposed Georgian confidant. According to Russian Wikipedia, neither Molotov nor Zhukov were aware of any such plans of prisoner swap.
On the other hand, the two situations aren't exactly similar. The USSR wasn't the sworn enemy of the KMT, in fact it was mostly a benefactor and convienient ally, excluding the period between the anti-Communist purges of the KMT in 1927 and the start of the Japanese invasion ten years later.
I think it's more accurate to say that they didn't care i.e. they never noticed that it's an issue in the first place.
Chiang simply didn't have that option, however. Since his aspiration was to become the national leader and unifier of the nation, he had to oppose the Japanese attacks which targeted areas he controlled - the Communist were never in such a situation.
You know, I didn't even notice it in your original comment I read it "correctly," but then when I quoted it I didn't want to confuse any readers.
Which was extremely foolish and shortsighted on the part of the KMT! The USSR were avowed backstabbers of anything that smelled like capitalism! The USSR had a long track record (albeit not as long at the time) of using, then liquidating, putative allies who were not under the party umbrella. Unless Chiang intended to ultimately swear allegiance to the comintern, the USSR should always have been an enemy; the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but the friend of my enemy is my enemy. And the guy who says he has an absolute ideological aversion to every aspect of your existence is definitely an enemy. Trusting ComIntern Communists was a really bad idea, they are never long term reliable allies for any capitalist state or organization. I disagree with Kulak's overall point but the basic idea stands: trusting Communists while being anything other than a loyal communist is extremely foolish and shortsighted.*
Which is the same thing, just phrased differently. They never thought it would be an issue that the left was slowly gaining control over the mass of cultural institutions, because they never thought it would reach the extent it has. Watching old movies or reading old books, the wild and ideologically extreme student is present in Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile, in Golddiggers of 1937 (or maybe it was 38, it was late and i was stoned watching TCM), in La Boheme, in Victor Hugo's great novels. The disappearance of the stern and staid professor, a fixture from Faustus to Belushi, is a remarkable cultural innovation. But they should have seen that coming if they wanted to rule America!
And because it's remarkable you can say "Well, who can blame them, no one could have known!" Just as you can't really blame the KMT leadership for not realizing that Mao was Mao until it was too late. But when you aspire to rule the world, or at least one of the largest countries in it, you have to know these things, or you lose to someone who guessed right. You've got to be looking out for black swans. Second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is you're fired.
*Trusting them while being a loyal communist is merely very, rather than extremely, foolish and shortsighted.
It's not like the KMT had many options in that regard either. No nation was willing to help their armed struggle against the Japanese besides Weimar Germany and the USSR.
Sure, I'll take that, but recognize that now we've negotiated down to "it seemed like it was the best of a series of bad and worse options." It turned out to be a really bad idea, but I appreciate that there wasn't an easy sacrifice free "win now" button that Chiang refused to press.
If the KMT had chosen to trade land for time against the Japanese, murdered the ChiComms, then turned against the Japanese and hope they'd overextended themselves and pissed off America by then, there's a better chance the KMT or a related government rules china today.
Same deal with the conservatives in the USA. Maybe the anti intellectual turn was the best call, maybe trying to play literate and skipping the southern strategy costs them a term of Nixon or Reagan or Bush II. But they're paying the cost today, with dissident rightists trying to scheme to start whole new universities. Hopefully not as steep a cost as the KMT has paid.
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That's one of the few anecdotes I've heard of Stalin apparently having feelings (along with sparing Boris Pasternak). Quite interesting.
See my comment above.
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He was quite lively, I don't know why people buy the Man of Steel persona – is it the paranoia of the last years, or the sheer volume of his terror? Georgians are emotional and gregarious in general, and he was not much of an exception. In this specific case I assume he had some lingering feelings for Yakov because by all accounts he loved Yakov's mother.
The strongest 20th century leaders truly were larger-than-life, anime characters compared to our oh-so-professional Goldman Sachs analysts with frozen HR-approved grimaces. At least Sunak won't be deporting entire peoples into Kazakhstan.
Isn't this him saying himself that this event basically turned him into a sociopath (except maybe in regards to Yakov who was his last connection to it)? Wouldn't that explain his later ice cold behavior?
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You know, in the 00s there were a bunch of Christian rock bands that seemed to break into the mainstream without most people thinking of them as Christian rock.
Maybe I'm telling on myself, but I unironically like Switchfoot (though they're only like half Christian).
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If you're thinking of like, the Killers; Mr. Brightside their most popular song is hardly drenched in Mormon values, it's all about casual sex between young strangers at a bar. I guess maybe you could read it as, like, oh I could have saved her from that sin if I had married her, but most people wouldn't get there, it's implied that the problem isn't having fornication it's fornication with someone else who isn't the singer. A Christian performer doesn't necessarily make Christian Rock, my criticism primarily applies to the latter.
If there were a bunch of big Christian Rock bands in the 2000s, look at the top 40 today, and that's making my point for me. The paradigm of sex and drugs and rock and roll working its way to absurdum gives us hits like WAP, Girls, and that great teenage love song Treat me like a Slut. Buying into that paradigm just enhances the dominance of that paradigm, when conservative creatives should have been trying to build new paradigms.
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Why wouldn't tech and entertainment industries be donating overwhelming Dem? They're clustered in urban, cultural centers. They need prestige and financing. Can you imagine how difficult it is to arrange a shoot in downtown LA, involving an exploding car?
With union workers? With police acting as security? Buses re-rerouted?
This shit takes permits and political approval.
The elites will say anything it takes, so let's not take everything they say seriously.
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I think there are some trends that might help conservatives in areas like Hollywood. China is increasingly important for making a profit with films, games etc. The Chinese government insists on Family Friendly entertainment, while comic book hero-style stories are what Chinese audiences apparently likes from the West.
One precedent is 80s action movies. Home video, plus a Hollywood system that had grown sceptical of indulging "genius" New Hollywood directors after flops like Heaven's Gate, led to the production of a lot of conservative-leaning action films. Think Cobra, Rambo, Red Dawn, Conan the Barbarian, Red Heat, Death Wish etc. etc. Even Aliens has a heroine who is appealing to both conservatives and liberals: the warrior mother is a figure in conservative iconography that goes back centuries; her violence stems from protective maternal instincts that conservatives laud, and she confronts men only insofar as they are weak. Similar women are a stock figure of Western culture, at least in Northern Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Douglas
There's also e.g. the Rocky films from that period, which are some of the best examples I know of traditional working-class American conservative values: nobody owes you anything, work hard, respect your elders, family comes first, don't forget where you came from, stand up for yourself etc. These values are popular among high-orderliness people in pretty much every culture, including China.
Of course, as some people here have already noted, the problems for conservative culture production seem to be more supply-side than demand-side. However, I think that 80s action has lessons here as well. Stallone wasn't consistently a big star until the 80s: Rocky and Rocky II were exceptions in a career of failure and disappointment. Ahnold, Dolph, Church Norris, etc. came from outside the standard Hollywood system. Charles Bronson was a salty veteran and Michael Winner (the Death Wish director) was a sleazy Limey:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=efl5pFTFnBU
So a conservative director looking to make an action movie should try to make something Chinese friendly and go outside the box for the star, e.g. a wrestler, MMA fighter, or boxer as the lead.
I think red tribe dominates podcasts. I guess this is akin to red tribe dominating talk radio in the 90s.
Yeah, I’m always a bit confused by the claim that all of cultural production is blue tribe stuff.
Podcasts and comedy are typically not super progressive blue tribe areas, and actually that’s where much of the thinking and cultural production goes on in our society.
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There are still some red-flavored entertainment products, and some do very well. The Fast & the Furious franchise jumps to mind, as does the new Top Gun.
They're all still made by blue-tribers, of course, which means that entertainment is either made to appeal to both tribes or just blue, never just red. (with a few exceptions that prove the rule, like The Terminal List)
Wasn’t LOTR rather explicitly red tribe? The source material is inherently conservative.
Tolkien was English, not American, and the cultural groupings don't entirely translate. LOTR is conservative, across a great number of definitions, but different aspects of Tolkien's creation have resonated with various groups across the political spectrum.
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Is it?
LOTR seemed to have pretty universal appeal as far as I’m aware.
red tribe and universal appeal are not mutually exclusive.
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It did have universal appeal but that doesn’t mean the messaging wasn’t red tribe.
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How popular is the Fast & Furious franchise in China?
John Cena has been a runaway meme in certain corners of the Chinese internet after a video where he talks about eating ice cream in broken Chinese (while also pushing F&F 9), which I think generated ample buzz for it.
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Very popular in China and basically everywhere. Interestingly, in the US, Hispanic audiences like it especially, and African Americans disproportionately so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F9_(film)#Box_office
I have only watched a bit of one of this series briefly, but my impression is that it's the ultimate working class young man film.
Hispanics and African Americans also really like fast cars, so it makes sense it’s popular with those demographics.
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Re: building institutions, conservatives need to begin with things that 1) have a market among their own ranks and 2) are doable without mass blue tribe defections.
So for movies, this would probably be things like making comedies(which are relatively cheap and simple, compared to something like a marvel blockbuster, and red tribe humor is generally popular when it's available, and mormon production companies exist and have experience doing this). For music, they need their own recording studios that can liberate red-leaning music artists from blue shackles(you can find nearly anything labeled "country" these days).
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Let Hollywood have their blockbusters. The right can compete at other things. Not just alt-tech, but anti-woke people gaining ground on mainstream platforms, like we see with Elon and Twitter or Rogan and Spotify. Instead of Hollywood, there is YouTube, which despite being owned by Google, seems to have more conservative or neutral viewpoints than TV or cinema. There is no charismatic left-wing counterbalance to someone like Jordan Peterson or Elon Musk. On YouTube, videos by un-woke people are frequently viral and show up in recommendations, suggesting they are popular (and confirmed by high view counts and lots of comments in agreement).
Agree. I think the worst the right can do is brand their entertainment as an alternative. It should stand on its artistic merits alone.
Meh. Elon isn't "gaining ground'. He was just the richest man in the world and straight up bought himself a platform.
Rogan was famous long before Spotify and he faced cyclical waves of pressure that led to minor concessions (iirc Spotify took down some episodes and had some fact checking). But the fact that they got that is illustrative: Rogan is the biggest podcaster around, and they couldn't just ignore the squeeze.
To me, this is akin to when people say "Rowling is still around so cancel culture isn't a thing/is weakening" (without the bad faith) - yeah, a few incredibly atypical people can resist the headwinds.
What about the median celebrity? What about the person who is just starting out? Where is the pipeline for them? "Find someone rich and hope they're anti-woke" is not a plan.
So what, when the wokes can maintain a steady drumbeat of negativity about them and then just straight up ban them from the big platforms like Peterson and Twitter or Tate with Youtube?
Andrew Tate is popular.
Popularity is irrelevant when the enemy controls the infrastructure and will periodically cull enemy voices.
Even if he is is sorta cringe, this is still better than young people idolizing Hollywood celebs, who tend to be left-wing .
I think YouTube ,podcasts, and other media is the pipeline. People are making $100k+ more with substack..not just well-known pundits, but even obscure people who get hundreds or thousands of subs.
Yeah, she is also the most popular author in the world , at least as measured by sales. It's one thing to say that the non-woke are outnumbered, which is true, but when consumers have a choice, the non-woke people tend to be the most popular, either Rogan, Musk, Chappelle, Kanye, etc.
His popularity has been growing since 2018, when he began going after woke journalists. This is not just buying popularity. He was popular well before buying Twitter. Bill Gates is only half as rich as Musk but considerably less popular outside of the insular left-wing elite and some neoliberal types.
This is a bit far afield, but Tate doesn’t exist as an online figure absent the blue tribe. He leaned all the way in to outrage farming in a no-publicity-is-bad-publicity approach. It all depends on how you feel about Wahhabism — it’s certainly traditional and opposed to globohomo — but is he actually helpful to the Western red tribe, as an ISIS-praising supposed Islam convert (who still likes alcohol)? Tate also started up his own MLM/affiliate-marketing program. At least Alex Jones just sells snake-oil supplements as a standard retail operation. I don’t think the enemy of your enemy is always your friend.
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Except the problem is this pipeline is controlled by the woke.
Andrew Tate is a great example of someone who exploited the algorithm to become super famous and...they just snuffed him out on most major social media sites. He can't make money on Youtube right now.
Now, he may have some suckers follow him to wherever so it may not be totally devastating, but how many Youtubers are seeing that and learning a lesson?
And who's to say they're not fiddling around in the back, trying to stop the next Tate?
This is the fundamental problem: you cannot trust these platforms.
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What I don't get is why Reds aren't better at punishing blue dominated industries when they get power, copyright reform that drastically shortened copyright terms would be a good way to threaten a rich industry dominated by the other sides donors, and could have made a lot of normies happy during the napster/you wouldn't download a car era.
Or siccing anti-trust on tech when the government was unified during the early Trump administration, would have been another target rich environment.
The other side does it to energy whenever they get power. It should be an obvious action.
Because the red tribe has had no functional fight with its leadership, and developed no ways to pressure them to actually implement policies which favour them when the corporate donor class would rather not.
Its incredibly assymetric. The new deal and civil rights act have created decades worth of administrative and academic muscle to grab corporations and institutions by the throat and make them enforce left wing social norms.
ESG scores are backed through blackrock and co by the full force of the feeral reserve. You creditworthiness and stock value will drop by billions if you are insufficiently woke.
And right wingers are just now developing influencers networks and intellectuals to even notice this is happening because these tactics were so effective they killed even right wingers ability to organize for 50 years outside deep state approved National Review channels, so now everyone has to rediscover shit the John Birch society understood back in the 50s and the old right was actually organized to fight against in the 30s before FDR declared himself god empreror (actually he got SCOTUS to back down to him by threatening to just pack the courts, and made sure voters couldn't hold him accountable through aggressive FCC strongarming of any who spoke against him)
.
Conservatism is a mistake.
By the time the conservative movement happened there was nothing left to conserve, the 50s were just the dying embers of the pre-new deal world the FDR had already killed. Ya you respected proffessors in the 50s, they had gotten their degrees in the 20s and 30s when actually would just be straight denied entry if you didn't know Latin. Not that you'd be failed if you didn't learn Latin, you were expected to show up at 18 practically fluent, and then start work harder than most modern professors don't even rise to doing, and you'd do that on day 1.
Of course all that had to go in 45 with the GI Bill, you can't enforce standards on uneducated war heroes...just make em read an English translation.
Every institution was degraded in this way. The modern university has the IQ required to graduate that a high school did in the early 40s.
Bank managers used to personally know everyone in town or the neighborhood, and be esteemed on par with the Doctors or Lawyers, and issue loans off his expert knowledge not only personal finance but the trustworthiness of the guy across from him... Imagine how conductive that is to building hightrust communities, and getting good actors established... fucking gone.
Everything the right valued: Community, high trust institutions, standards of excellence, opportunity matched with responsibility and consequences...
All these things had been attacked and killed or were just clinging onto life by the 50s...
A war was waged on the constitution, civilization and the idea of community itself... and "conservatives" are still sentimental that instead of fighting that war for basic decency itself, Americans went to die in France and adopted the exact same economic system as the fascists to do it.
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The Republican Party would need to do this, and it is not a unified, populist party. And the Democrats would be of little help; Al Franken paid back his Hollywood donors by co-sponsoring SOPA/PIPA (I forget which, specifically).
Ron and Rand Paul aren’t particularly influential with the rest of the party when they (or at least Ron did?) speak Austrian about how intellectual property laws are the state asserting ownership over your private, real, physical property. The MAGA wing don’t hold any strong opinion on IP for its own sake.
A culture warrior like DeSantis would have to take this on not at a state level, where in Florida he’s benefited from political migration surrounding COVID and tax policy, but at a national level where both parties get donations from large corporations as the latter seek to prevent/influence/shape regulation that impacts them.
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In part because red tribe is predisposed to be against government meddling. Look at how many got upset when DeSantis introduced anti masking rules despite the upset people being anti masking?
They believe effectively an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. But what they don’t argue well against is that often these rules are necessiti restore the status quo ante that existed prior to state intervention (in this case the CDC).
I do think republicans if they take power should remove tax exempt status for NGOs and actually tax them heavier than corporations. At the very least, most red tribe could get behind taxing NGOs similar to corporations which will make Left Inc. use more resources to push their policies (thereby decreasing their reach).
What’s the difference between NGOs, nonprofits, charities, and 501(c)(3) churches in your plan?
It is a hard line to draw. One way to get 50% of the way there is make college endowments taxable.
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Our institutions weren't polarized like this when George W. Bush was in power, and the only Republican president who has taken office since then was Donald Trump.
So basically another way of phrasing your question is: Why was Donald Trump so incompetent? And the answer is that he's a narcissistic flake.
I think it's a bit of a mistake to blame Donald Trump for this. The capture of institutions by woke ideology took pace under Obama's reign. Trump took advantage of a party that had already lost support among the intellectual and creative classes. In addition, the shift of college-educated professionals to the left has occurred in most western countries, not just the United States.
The President does have significant executive authority, and it can be used to advance an agenda even in opposition to the legions of bureaucratic lifers in DC. DeSantis does this in Florida on the regular; it can be done, but it's hard, and Trump didn't do it.
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More like why isn't congress passing copyright reform and daring a Democratic president to veto it instead of passing the 74th repeal of the ACA only to not pass one when there was a president who would repeal it.
Copyright reform seems like it would be pretty popular and mostly harms industries that are heavily aligned with the other party. It should be on the chopping block whenever the GOP gets power, both as direct you oppose us and as a threat to all the other industries out there.
If you're arguing that they should do copyright reform because it "hurts people on the other side more", then you're arguing for copyright reform as not being a terminal goal for whoever is doing this, and they'll always lose to people for whom it is. Namely, the corporations who, without any reference to politics, will pay large amounts of money to persuade politicians against this idea.
Most people don't give a fuck about copyright reform. Go on Youtube and you can easily find clips of movies floating around that the channel uploader most certainly does not have permission to upload, but they do it anyways. Twitch streamers steal hundreds of thousands of dollars of copyrighted content and no one has gone after them, even when they do it to mainstream TV shows like Master Chef.
There are better ways of fighting the Democrats and their supporters than trying to do copyright reform.
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Hey, I'm with you. Thirty years ago I was complaining online about the Copyright Term Extension Act and was devastated by the result in Eldridge v. Ashcroft.
But you need a strong and charismatic GOP leader to reorient the coalition in that way. The issue hasn't been polarized. The GOP electorate needs to be persuaded to support a term restriction.
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Shouldn't Trumps competence be judged controlling for the much higher level of polarisation, and the media and cultural headwinds against him?
Why should it? He doesn't seem like the kind of person to take anything seriously in the first place.
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The good news is they're learning how to do this- Desantis and Hegar are starting to figure out how to disincentivize wokeness.
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DeSantis seems to be one of the few who's shown even a basic understanding of how the game is played.
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The red public ethos is a grounded and comprehensive peace, not radicalism, extremism, punishment, or other forms of veiled civil war.
Which is the party of "tough on crime"?
If I were to blame the Right's ideology for this I think the better scapegoat is the right wing's predilection to be more pro-business and anti-regulation.
Wokeness is, after all, a regulatory regime.
When was that? Everyone was in the 1970s
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Crime is the exception which proves the rule. Red culture decries direct punishment of people who’ve committed no illegal actions to achieve their objectives, and criminals walked straight toward their punishment.
You’ve made my point for me: business is sacred, regulation is bad, arbitrary regulation as punishment doubly so.
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It is an action but likely to be an unsuccessful one. Trump could have done more but was heavily constrained by time and having other priorities, like immigration, Covid, tax cuts and fending off the FBI.
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Good post, and I’m sympathetic with the conclusions. Part of why I think American cultural polarisation is so damaging is that both tribes desperately need each other, all the more so now given that political polarisation is on urban/rural lines rather than northern/southern or other contiguous geographical ones.
Red tribers sometimes like to portray themselves as doing the “real work” of America, while Blue tribers are sometimes wont to portray most of the US outside the major metropolitan areas as sad, economically stagnant, and in decline. Of course the truth is somewhere in the middle, with urban areas concretely dependent on rural areas for things like food and fuel, and rural areas dependent on urban areas for things like finance, communications, and media. I’d like to hope that things like your suggestions — energy strikes, police strikes, transport strikes — could help get convey that fragile interdependence to more Blue Tribe folks.
Also, I do think it’s still vitally important for the Red Tribe to maintain at least some representation in elite spaces like academia and highbrow media. Every mass movement needs its intellectuals, wonks, and diplomats, and you don’t get to ignore the realities of cognitive elite power simply by calling yourself an anti-elitist movement. Moreover, it seems to me — as an academic who’s flitted between a variety of institutions — that there’s a vast difference between 5% conservative and 10% conservative institutions. In the latter, a small set of people are comfortable being openly conservative, and can voice conservative talking points at meetings and lectures (even if they don’t get invited to as many cool parties). By contrast, in 5% institutions, conservatives basically live underground; they don’t have the critical mass to be accepted as a legitimate dissident community. So I think keeping that narrow corridor of elite conservatism open is critical for mutual understanding and acceptance.
Technology, logistics, military too! That severely understates the dependence (also, the 'rural' population of america is ~ 15% iirc, rest is urban + suburban).
Although, does a WFH stripe employee living in the woods count as 'rural' here?
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