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Since the complaints about Trump are growing ever more shrill in Western Europe as well and there’s an increasing level of liberal doomposting about him online, I think it bears asking the question how exactly average Blue Tribe normies believe Trump’s political ascendancy could have been averted, assuming it wasn’t some inevitable turn of events. I guess most of them agree that Hillary should’ve won in 2016 but was undermined by manufactured scandals and whatnot, but I’d put forth the argument that the US culture war was already getting so heated by that point that liberals weren’t going to secure long-term political gains through such a victory. After all, Congress was still going to be majority(?) Republican, and it was always going to be possible for Trump to win the candidacy in 2020.
If we observe what dissident right-wingers describe as the Gramscian long march through the institutions, it’s fair to conclude that the way for liberalism to win is through incremental but irreversible gains, completed while real and potential enemies remain complacent and clueless, distracted all the time by issues that are ultimately irrelevant. Thus the interest of liberals normally isn’t to escalate the culture war, no matter how good it makes them feel about themselves, but to deescalate it, and win small victories without generating too much public hostility and alienation. There’s a time for humiliating your enemies if that’s what you want, but only when they’re fatally weakened and on the ground.
Concluding from this I’d argue that the time to avert the current mess which horrifies the average liberal was in 2012, either through a) not running an uncalled for and unbecoming smear campaign against Romney, which I guess would have entirely been possible had Obama’s reelection chances not seemed slim, and which wouldn’t have ended up paving the way for someone like Trump b) Romney or someone similar winning the election through not actually being a timid cuck but not being as polarizing as Trump, and ending up governing for one term.
What do you think?
I mean I think that the culture is slowly but surely disempowering those institutions. How many people, still, in 2024 get any significant news from “mainstream” news outlets? When is the last time you heard a conversation with coworkers, friends or family about a news story shown on network news or from a large circulation newspaper or magazine? How many kids are now not interested in four years of woke nonsense in the university and opting for trade schools instead? How many are turned off by forced diversity in their workplace?
The future isn’t in those institutions. People get their news and general information from podcasts and blogs or streaming. They choose trade school for job skills and use online MOOCs if they want to get book learning. They’d have to basically retake a completely different set of institutions, except that because the barriers to entry are pretty low and the audience is much more likely to leave if they smell an overt political agenda.
Much more than you would think. Its not always the NYT from its website, its a clickthrough from Twitter/Facebook. Its not always CNN, its a CNN clip posted to youtube that autoplayed after the football highlight clip they were watching. But that is the simple stuff. People still watch broadcast TV, particularly for sports. The news-magazines that are on before/after? Heavily biased. The random updates at halftime/quarter? Follow the mainstream narratives. The narrative for large swathes of the population is still set by these legacy outlets. The fact is that is is much easier to live your life that way. It takes a certain amount of dedication to realize the stuff that filters in through to you in the background of your favorite soccer team's games is all lies about the border when you have been listening to said broadcast since you were 10.
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