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-- Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows
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.
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)
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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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