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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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Scott Greer writes about the differences between the millennial "Online Right" and the Zoomer right:

The youth are primarily on TikTok and Instagram, two platforms which the Dissident Right has little presence on. The Online Right is a Twitter-based phenomenon. The youth prefer streaming and clips. The Online Right, by contrast, prefers text over video. The Online Right's content still centers around writing posts, while Zoomers obsess over videos. The Online Right mostly hates TikTok as either slop or a tool for Chinese subversion. Meanwhile, the youth love it.

Much of the big conservative content on TikTok would be mocked by the Online Right. Videos of black influencers proving that that Dems R The Real Racists get millions of views on there. It's mostly basic bitch conservatism that would get dunked on by the Dissident Right–if it were posted to Twitter. But it doesn't, and proves popular among right-leaning Zoomers.

{snip}

Most young Trump voters share more in common with FanDuel Americans. As I wrote last year of this group:

There are many things that blackpill right-wingers that don't upset FanDuel Americans. Eroding WASP norms and new ones that approve of visible tattoos and smoking weed in public? The FanDuel American doesn't know what a "WASP" is, doesn't mind tattoos, and smokes weed himself. Radically changing demographics that's making America less white? The FanDuel American doesn't care, brags about his black friends, and thinks diversity makes his favorite team better. Nobody going to church? The FanDuel American doesn't go either. Everyone wasting money on sports bets and OnlyFans? So does the FanDuel American.

The FanDuel American has some conservative instincts. He likes the free market. He supports the troops. He stands for the National Anthem. He doesn't list his pronouns.

But this isn't what he truly cares about. He cares about distractions, and he strives to make enough money to pursue them.

https://www.highly-respected.com/p/we-are-the-youth

This is essentially the Richard Hanania low human capital theory. While Hanania screams it from the rooftops with the subtly of a hammer pounding on an I-beam, Greer packages it more carefully, reminding his readership that the tatted-up MMA guy podcast-ranting about 5G giving him cancer is not a historical part of the Right; the Right needn't tribalistically defend his antisocial behavior.

Isn't this just a normie vs. fringe problem? Greer and his politics are fringe. Whatever appeals to millions of normie zoomers is almost by definition going to be normie, just like with all generations, millennials included.

I've sometimes referred to what Greer calls "FanDuel Americans" as "lifestyle conservatism", ie. conserving a certain lifestyle that was common and aspirational in, say, the 90s, perhaps the 80s depending on generation. Apart from anti-immigrationism this sort of a thing seems to form the bulk of the politics of the local right-wing populists.

Support a (relatively, compared to the local baseline) free market, since this offers an aspirational vision of being wealthy enough to obtain a good lifestyle and material goods (a nice car, nice housing, good food, beer and sports, trips to the Mediterranean in the winter etc.). Oppose environmentalism, since a lot of environmentalism is about restricting your access to those things, whether it's limiting driving or making flights more expensive or advancing veggie food or whatever). Oppose feminism, since it restricts (men's) social access to other things, like worry-free casual sex or naughty jokes and so on. And so on, and so on.

The more fringe right-wingers commonly dunk on this sort of lifestyle conservatism, noting that it poses a natural limit to how far they can go, eg. it can be combined with "can you BELIEVE what they're trying to do in Brussels now?" style light euroskepticism but not actually going as far as to leave the EU since that would make travel harder, it can be combined with restricting asylum seeking but not actual They Must All Go style total anti-immigrationism since that would mean no Filipino nurses to keep the health system underpinning the unhealthier parts of the lifestyle (and as potential marriage partners for some). For others, the problem is it can at most be combined with cultural Christianity but nothing more hardcore (let alone more esoteric doctrines) and so on.

Not to mention that if one really believes that this country might be facing a WW2 style war in the future, well, the stated numbers of willingness to fight are high (even higher than before 2022), but if one's politics are based on good living, how far will they actually be willing to go to endure the required amount of hardship...?

but if one's politics are based on good living, how far will they actually be willing to go to endure the required amount of hardship...?

In Finland haven’t almost all of these guys actually been in the military before?

Sure, but that's still different from wartime, and is usually done around 19-20 when you have yet to be used having had decades of personal freedom and independent income.