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I remember the Obama era narratives of the “Coalition of the Ascendent.” If demographics were truly destiny, Republicans wouldn’t touch the Presidency again. Obama’s “resounding” 2012 victory prompted the infamous Republican “Autopsy.”
This narrative ignores the numbers, though. 2012 wasn’t a triumph for Democrats, but a warning – while the Republican candidate had gained just under 1 million more votes than the 2008 Republican candidate, the Democrat had lost a little over 3.5 million voters. While Hillary Clinton eked out a plurality of the popular vote,* this trend continued in 2016: the Republican candidate gained about 2 million more votes than in 2012, while the Democratic candidate lost ~60k votes. A minor number, to be sure, but a trend nonetheless. 2012 wasn’t a victory lap, but instead a demonstration that the “Obama coalition” was a mirage, a flash in the pan – a demonstration that we all missed at the time.
As the 2024 election is mulled over by pundits to see what, exactly, went wrong, I wonder if we are missing similar “warning signs” in trends. The Bernie-Bro-turned-Trump-supporter pipeline a la Joe Rogan could be symptomatic of voters aligning more along an axis of “insiders vs. outsiders” instead of policy preferences, education, age, or race; while there are correlations with each of those things to an “insiders vs. outsiders” axis, none of them are definitive. Are we similarly looking at the 2024 election the wrong way, especially as we make judgment calls while several million votes have yet to be counted?
Some of the most prominent Republicans right now identified as Democrat-aligned during the Obama era (Trump, Vance, Elon, Tulsi; I’d throw RFK in there too but I’m not sure that he views himself as a Republican). Republicans are winning over tech bros and unions, and bleeding college-educated voters. There’s talk about this just being a Trump thing, it’ll go away. It was a big anti-incumbency year, worldwide. The elite will reclaim their rightful place as the only right, correct, egalitarian way forward. Etc.
*Talking heads bicker about how Trump “only” receiving a plurality of the popular vote decreases his significance, even while clinging to Clinton “winning” the popular vote in 2016 despite also receiving a plurality, and not a majority. The semantics are amusing from a culture war perspective – the war on language continues – but ultimately meaningless.
People have at least discussed this, although I don't know how much it's been internalized yet. Matt Yglesias had an article about the crank realignment, Hanania had an article about voters who see conspiracies everywhere, and Meskhout had this article.
In short, both sides have become dominated by delusional partisans screaming in echo chambers. The left have become experts in infiltrating institutions and corrupting them to woke ends, while the right have become eternal dissidents who are great at critiquing the left but terrible at actually building better replacement institutions. The left was a bit ahead of the right when it came to radicalizing, but it's also deradicalizing now in a way that will likely happen to the right in a few years. Around 2020 was "peak woke" after which things slowly calmed down. Now we're approaching the summit of "peak crank" on the right, which will also hopefully calm down.
All these articles about "cranks" to me are just wordgames. Radical/progressive/woke left believes in their own conspiracy theories, the main one is what I call as universal leftist conspiracy - courtesy of James Lindsay. It is really simple:
There are two groups of people: purple and beige. Purple people have access to some special attribute or property - let's call it purpleness. Purple people use this property to oppress beige group. Purpleness also helps purple group to create and reproduce system of purpleness, which reproduces oppression over to the next generation. Liberation from oppression and true equity will only happen if we dismantle the system of purpleness.
This is the most simple and primitive form of conspiracy theory which you can apply to mainstream ideas that for some reason are not considered as low status conspiracies. Some examples:
There are men and women. Men have access to male privilege which they use to oppress women. This system is called patriarchy and women will never be free unless we dismantle it.
There are heterosexual people and the rest such as queer people. The former group has ability to define what is normal, they have access to heteronormativity which they use to oppress nonheterosexual people. We will not have true liberation until we will not dismantle it.
There are white people and the rest, especially Black people. White people have access to whiteness to oppress other races. There can never be true equality until we will not dismantle white supremacy.
There are capitalists and workers. Capitalists have access to capital and they exclude workers from access to it, reproducing the system of capitalism. There can never be true equality unless oppressed workers have access to means of production which is the first step to dismantle capitalism.
These are all the simplest and crudest forms of conspiracy theory which if applied to anything else would be identified as some uncouth theory only stupid people believe in. Except these conspiracies are high status so they are fine to utter even in a good society. This universal conspiracy can also be applied to many other popular leftist systematic conspiracies, just define new groups and systems of oppression be it handicapped people or fat people or tans people or many more. This type of "analysis" is in my opinion absolute farce, people who believe in these things can identify racism and sexism everywhere - from knitting to hiking. Which is the point - once you are woke to this systemic conspiracy thinking, then you will see sexism, racism and white supremacy even if you see somebody throwing a bugger from his car as he waits on a red light.
A conspiracy theory typically involves some shadowy group doing something in a centrally planned way. Your bullet points are all just badly worded versions of perfectly reasonable observations about uncoordinated human behaviour.
A conspiracy theory such as flat earth or Qanon are in a completely different category.
What is the patriarchy or whiteness except the ultimate in shadowy central planning? With it white men crushed and destroyed the natural inclination of society to employ black women in every leadership role and it wasn't until about a decade ago that we finally realised that and ushered in the current age of milk and honey.
Uncoordinated behaviours wouldn't involve making up entire branches of science to trick people into thinking your ethnicity and sex is superior, and yet that is apparently one of two possible reasons white men do better than their counterparts on iq tests and tests of strength - either a shadowy cabal of evil white men engineered hyper specific tests that look like general knowledge testing or a strict measure of weight lifting while actually biasing these tests on behalf of other whites and guys, or every white just knows in their racist hearts how to pass an iq test the same way every man knows the secret sexist trick to win at arm wrestling.
The only reason q anon or flat earth is different is because it doesn't have the backing of the so called experts. But the experts have been peddling conspiracy theories for decades and the right have been pointing it out the entire time. Don't confuse holding institutional power for actual expertise. Progressives do not deserve endless charity and conservatives do not deserve endless scrutiny.
Depends on how it's cashed out and elaborated on. I believe it to be patently obvious we live in a patriarchy that has been making slow-motion improvements, but that this fact is just a reflection on millions of people's net behaviours over time rather than something anyone has ever nefariously discussed in a group.
Yeah but when people are railing against the patriarchy they aren't taking issue with patrilineal descent, they do assume nefarious motives.
They rely on the same blurred understanding of intent and agency as the q anon types, in that the more thoughtful among them will, when you really get into it with them, call it a prospiracy in the ssc sense of an aligned group having the same motives and therefore moving towards the same goal without the need to coordinate, but then go to back to using language that implies deliberate action when speaking generally.
You present the 'prospiracy' as the machinations of society and I agree, but the crank sees it as the reason their life didn't live up to their expectations. In my experience that is a better delineation between the crank and the conspiracy theorist than the status of their conspiracies.
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