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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   32560 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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If we follow your logic at its word, the natural conclusion would be the total collapse of the Democratic Party.

Right now, the fringe elements of both parties are wildly unpopular. The question for most elections is who comes across as the most repulsive and who successfully tamps down on their extremists in public messaging. Since Democrats are better educated and hooked into their politicians, this has turned into a real advantage for the Republicans. The Democrat extremists are able to effectively pressure and primary politicians into following their worst ideas, which have a lot of salience right now.

So we have a civil war right now, between the Democrats from the Reagan days who want to relive that heady sense of resistance like they were young again and the young progressives who have been educated into mind-meltingly unpopular ideas. Out on the distant fringes are the swing-state Democrats like Fetterman who are effectively untouchable by the party mechanism but equally have no sway over it. Whoever wins is going to win based on their ability to signal #resistance to the equally extreme base, as voters on the edge increasingly disengage with the party. But the party does not compromise on its least popular tenets, and in fact broadcasts them as a matter of principle, and the way things are going, will stand absolutely no chance in upcoming elections (only exception being the presidency if Trump does something dumb like defy the law to run for term 3 and scare the normies way too much).

So we should expect to see evaporative cooling concentrating the heart of the overeducated party, keeping seats where urban Millennials and Xers dominate and hemorrhaging the rest. And then, probably, the Blue Dogs try to create their own party and recapture the many voters who really don’t like Trump but can’t find it in themselves to vote D.

There was a moment, after this election, where I wondered to myself: is this when the Dems will figure out what’s happening? Is this where they Sister Souljah the woke out and start trying to win elections again? But that moment passed in a heartbeat, and the old party mechanisms reasserted their dominance. I think this is a general pattern, not just for democracy but for every kind of human organization, where the mechanisms of power become too cleanly rationalized, too stable, and the possibility of an internal coup vanishes. The existing order loses the possibility of making mistakes and being replaced from within, as they control all the needed feedback mechanisms and are not vulnerable to it. It’s at this moment that the levers of power cease to be representations or formalizations of the real sources of power, and become sources of power in themselves. When that happens, the power structure itself is in dire jeopardy, as it’s lost all connection to reality and has become a sort of ouroborus, swallowing its own tail and growing smaller and smaller.

I suspect that part of this self-consuming behavior is related to class divides like the educational alignment of the parties, but that’s probably enough on this for now.

The Democratic machine is too good at generating votes to actually collapse. The voter's preferences aren't really relevant to that.

That won't save the party alone. It might save the name.

The Tories in the UK are basically in that spot right now. They have a machine and no shot at relevance. Therefore everybody expects Reform to essentially buy the machine and maybe the name attached to it, as has happened before (they are after all officially "The Conservative and Unionist Party").

I doubt that happens to the Dems because Americans have their two party system bolted down to the institutions pretty solidly so there's little path for a takeover, but you can't run a party on machine politics alone, not a government party anyways.

Another trajectory is what happened in Malta, another famous two-party system where one party just consistently wins and another consistently loses but not by large enough a margin as to make the loser party politically irrelevant. And essentially you just start seeing the winner party leadership make deals with the loser party to keep power, in a classic example of the high-low vs middle mechanism.

All that said, it seems very early to call the Dems permanent losers at all. They're in disarray but I don't think they've been dealt a killing blow the likes of which the Tories got. I can totally see a Clinton or Blair type figure come up with a novel coalition formula and reinvent the party.

All that said, it seems very early to call the Dems permanent losers at all. They're in disarray but I don't think they've been dealt a killing blow the likes of which the Tories got. I can totally see a Clinton or Blair type figure come up with a novel coalition formula and reinvent the party.

This I would consider a hostile takeover in the same vein as Trump. Someone on the outskirts of the party enters the running and totally shatters the central machine despite its opposition. I do not think that such an individual can come from the party center, due to their excessive purity testing and effective shadow networks. See the top-level for evidence there. Secondarily, the party center is attached to a convenient notion of a coalition that simply does not exist, or which exists in irrelevant form: the nonwhites plus the women plus the gays who specifically want to organize against white men. In reality, each group and subgroup listed has internal priorities that have nothing to do with targeted resentment (except, maybe, some of the women - which is a different and serious issue), and therefore have nothing to organize around. Gays in particular have already “won” their battle as a group in a decisive manner. Gay sex is legal, gay partnerships are official, and so any gay man or woman has everything required to live a normal life - meaning their own priorities take over and they vote as members of different blocs. Meanwhile, there is no real effort or ability to reach uneducated white men and the people who do not reflexively hate them.

So, how likely is a hostile takeover? In my eyes, not likely. Sanders tried it ten years back and was effectively frozen out after a serious grassroots effort. I remember there being a serious attempt to primary Biden last election which was totally shut down and the instigator punished - before he was eventually proven right. So the party is very powerful at self-policing. A potential challenger would have to break through all that, including an increasingly ideologically concentrated and radicalized primary voter base (the less committed have been driven off - because why would you hang around in areas where people scream hate at you for disagreement), to win. They would need to create a parallel mobilization network to capture disaffected voters for the primary, to weather unequal debates, to get their message out despite hostile legacy media, and to possibly even attempts to procedurally take them off ballots, which has become an actual practice of the Democratic Party! I consider this fairly unlikely, unless some cataclysm befalls the central hierarchy and renders them incapable of organized resistance. I guess a civil war that shatters any unity between young and old could do that, or mass prosecution by Trump, but I doubt it. Thus, a slow continuation of decline ending in irrelevance.

Another trajectory is what happened in Malta, another famous two-party system where one party just consistently wins and another consistently loses but not by large enough a margin as to make the loser party politically irrelevant.

Uhh, which one is which? The timeline here shows both Nationalists and Labour holding power for long stretches. I checked some of the recent elections and Labour seems to win bigger victories when it wins, but still, winning is winning.

Texas since ~2000 has had a de facto three party dynamic with moderates, conservatives, and democrats, and the moderates consistently the kingmakers in legislative coalitions while whichever wins the Republican primary holds unitary roles. That’s probably a better example of a stable two party system where one party always loses.

Younger commenters seem to consistently under overestimate how long the South has been "Deep Red" territory: the legacy of the Southern Democrats held on at the state level well into the '90s. I am frequently amused at local Blue commenters in my Red state complaining about (perceived Red) state laws and policies that were actually enacted by the Blue team 40 years ago.

Was Manchin the last of that breed? He just left office this year.

You can't blame them that much, as the South, politically, was weird. You had cases in the South where the governorship and local politics as a whole were deep Blue, as you said, well into the 90s, but the presidency would go Red.

It certainly made me raise an eyebrow or two when I stumbled across that knowledge.

Labour are the winners and NP the losers since 2013. The roles switch around every few decades or so. I didn't mean to imply that it's a one party state with some subsidized opposition like Singapore. It's just very stable for long stretches which allow for the dynamics I described.

They have a machine and no shot at relevance.

The UK Tory machine doesn't deliver votes any more. To the extent they are irrelevant, it is because nobody can see a scenario where they win a majority at Westminster and form a government (except possibly as a junior coalition partner to Reform, or heaven forfend as a junior partner in an anti-Reform grand coalition with Labour if they find themselves swinging that way). To the extent they are relevant, it is because people can see a scenario where they will continue to hold 100+ seats by inertia and hold the balance of power between Labour and Reform.

The Democrats are likely to take control of the House in 2026, and the 2028 Presidential election winning party market is currently a toss-up on oddschecker.com, which aggregates the big UK sportsbooks. (In contrast, the "Most Westminster seats after next UK election" market is a toss-up between Labour and Reform.) The Dem machine in its current state can deliver 48% of the popular vote for a poor candidate.

Right now, the party which is most likely to blow itself up is the Republicans, because they need to manage the succession to Trump. The MAGA GOP relies on Trump's reality-TV star charisma to turn out the down-with-everything loser voters who are now part of its core vote, and there is no obvious successor who has that. The Democrats OTOH have a decent shot at the 2028 Presidential election with a replacement-level candidate, just like they did in 2024 (where Trump was never as much as a 2-1 favourite after Biden dropped out).

Right now, the party which is most likely to blow itself up is the Republicans, because they need to manage the succession to Trump.

Yeah that's essentially what I have in mind with the Thatcher into Blair analogy.

That said, as a counter-counter-counter-point, succession fights can also be positive if they are sufficient free for alls instead of entrenched factionalism. We must remember here that Trump himself comes out of this kind of situation.

The way the splits in MAGA are shaking out though, I think we'll get factionalism. Techies vs Neocons vs Populists is just too clearly drawn with Trump the sole unifying figure. Unless Vance (or anybody else) manages to soften up the two other factions, it's going to be mean. There won't be any Dem radicals to sue the opposition into unity this time.

Rubio, Abbott, and Youngkin can all foreseeably unite the three factions with the always-second-string religious right. Desantis is also a strong maybe on that front.

I don’t see Vance doing this, I don’t see Cruz, I don’t see Hawley.

I wonder if we'll get a democratic collapse along the lines of the 1850s Whig party. I don't see any particularly salient issue that could divide the party like that. Instead, it seems like lots of really small fractures, which paradoxically keeps the party together. Which is unfortunate, because we need a collapse like that of the Whig party: the Democrats don't stand for basically anything other than grifting anymore.

The democrats do have a very unpopular wedge issue their party could easily fracture over- trannies. There’s a faction die hard opposed to any semblance of moderation that makes life hell for any democrats who say things like, you know what, schools shouldn’t keep this from parents.

I think we are going through a Whig collapse, if much slower and less of a split. The party is sloughing off working-class voters and refocusing on the educated elite. The “small fractures” in the remaining party mean little; the core agrees on everything but whose ass should fill which seat. The real fracture is between center and periphery, and in the years to come I would predict an increasing muscular fringe of swing-vote Democrats whose real selling point to voters is that they do not fall in line in front of Trump or Vance or whoever, nor the Democratic apparatchiks. There will eventually be a showdown of sorts between that fringe and the party center, and the result will either be a takeover of the party itself or the founding of a new party. Either way, the principles of that group will steal voters back from the Republicans and re-establish the unstable equilibrium of two-party democracy.

That’s my prediction, anyway, or possibly my hope. I’m real damn sick of the current political divide.

Or, in other words, the aisles are swapping underneath the parties, and the Ds are going to fully re-emerge into the collective consciousness as the right-wing/conservative party (the term "progressive-conservative" comes to mind, back when right-wing causes had the social license that left-wing causes do today). The Rs have very solidly positioned themselves on the left-wing/reform side, and Trump II exemplifies this.

Remember, Obama was the last time a D voter could logically/consistently claim to be on the side of reform, and [Rs voting in 2012 or 2016 for any non-Trump candidate] was the last time an R voter could do the same on the side of conservatism. This is what "right is the new left" was talking about. Biden was fundamentally a conservative pick, exactly what you want in a crisis (which said conservatives manufactured, but that's not actually important with respect to the actual dynamics).

While I think there are real concerns about what happens to the GOP Post-Trump, yeah, the Dem's issues are structural and the alliances they've forged by being maximally divisive on sex, on race, on religion, on class, and on age too, I guess, mean there's no way to please each of these disparate groups.

In fact, the post-Trump era might be harder on the Dems because opposition to Trump was like the one thing that united them!

Dems can't run another stodgy White Guy for President. I mean, they can, Biden proved that the party can get everyone in line and on task if needed, but it is impossible to imagine the guy who has the political juice to win the primaries at this point.

Likewise, Dem leadership is ossified and they've hamstrung any new blood from acquiring much power. AOC is popular but she's also been ground down by the party machine. Pelosi et al. will grip the reins of power right up until their dying breath. Trump, by elevating Vance, is giving the 'new Generation' a generous toehold on power which they can use to climb up.

David Hogg was stupid about it, but he had the right idea that there needs to be enough of a shakeup that young upstarts can compete for influence in the party and identify talented candidates. Kinda how Obama got into power (which, ironically, was probably what prompted the party to lock down that issue so Hillary could win next time).

On top of that, I don't see any possible way the Dems can attract young male voters back. They've gone way too far out on the "men are inherently evil" limb. Can't reel that back in without pissing off the unmarried white female demographic that is their backbone. But any guy who looks and sees how they force any popular young Democrat male through a struggle session, like with Harry Sisson, will balk at anything they say. There's NOTHING to offer them.

Whomever they nominate, it'll either annoy their base, or it'll alienate the median voter.

And all this is before we talk about how the extreme progressive wings are demanding concessions constantly.

But any guy who looks and sees how they force any popular young Democrat male through a struggle session

Heres the straight dope compadre, the new democratic party isnt the old boring rubes ya know? Dems spent 20m to learn how to talk like men do and in mens spaces. So get ready for the Committee Approved Male Representatives to drop a few f-bombs in mens spaces like a CSGO Lobby or a weight rack about how manly it is to support a woman and why toxic masculinity is just like the worst. Because clearly what men really want is for someone that simply drops a few swears and hangs out around them to gain traction.

Once the men are listening they'll automatically absorb all the lessons pushed by democrats because men automatically listen to their betters like the pack beasts they all are. Ideally the democrats can have their version of joe rogan. The emblems of democratic manliness, David Hogg and Dean Withers, should be good. Maybe that Hasan Piker guy could work too, but he has visible muscles so he might be a secret right winger.

Ideally the democrats can have their version of joe rogan.

I realize your whole post was sarcastic, but I'm reminded of something someone said here a week or two ago: Joe Rogan was the Democrats' Joe Rogan, they drove him and people like him away.

That said I'd love to see the dems put major support behind Hasan, the backfire would be hilarious and it would probably give Roach King Asmongold a year's worth of content from that alone.

Honestly I'm surprised the left hasn't tried to figure out Asmongold 's popularity with young men. He's a midwit at best on his good days, but his takes come across to audiences as "common sense" (regardless of if they actually are). He just has a disarming way of talking and presenting himself, and I think that's something shrieking feminist harpies are constitutionally incapable of.

Honestly I'm surprised the left hasn't tried to figure out Asmongold 's popularity with young men

"Doesn't look like anything to me."

The left is approaching the problem statement from the wrong direction: men aren't right wing because they listen to a magically popular midwit trash goblin, the roach king is popular precisely because he shits on leftist shibboleths. Its a literal blind spot for the left to see any positive value in the anti-woke and generally anti-identitarian rhetoric of Asmongold, which is one of many blind spots but the most pertinent one. The only time such data can be noticed is when it is a cudgel to attack enemies "the evil men like Asmon only because they are anti-woke" or "Asmon is anti-woke because he needs to appeal to chuds!"

Viewership stats seem opaque but my gut tells me the right wing anti social-justice creators have way more traction than social justice. I did a quick peek to see how Breadtubers are doing and I didn't realize how inconsequential they are, much less against Asmongold. This just reinforces the point that the left wing just doesn't have the sauce to keep audiences engaged, but the reason for that isn't the packaging its the message itself.

Leftists are hoping that they can infiltrate mens spaces to share the message, convinced that the gatekeeping is what keeps the message from being received. Its like they never learnt the problem is the message itself. Infiltrating mens spaces to spread the gospel of The Future Is Female doesn't create converts, it hollows the space. Shoving ugly they/thems in Concord didn't tap into Modern Audiences and for all the technicolor progressives populating Overwatch R34 still clearly shows skinny hot chicks dominate.

To give proper credit, the quote was originally from Shoe0nHead.

I'd guess that the quote or something like it was independently created by many people around the same time. The idea that Joe Rogan was a leftist who supported Democrats such as Bernie Sanders is just an obvious fact backed up by mountains of historical evidence that no one denies, and the idea that Democrats look for heretics to drive away is also a pretty non-controversial one (the only real controversy being on whether this is a good thing or not, perhaps because these heretics actually wanted to be driven away and were just looking for an excuse). And so putting those together into a pithy comment poking fun at the self-induced misery of modern Democrats bemoaning the lack of their own Joe Rogan to aid in their propagandizing is something that's almost trivial to do. Certainly the thought occurred to me long before I'd encountered the quote externally, but I'm not a public commentator who would state such a quote out loud and who wouldn't be noticed even if I had.

I'm reminded of something someone said here a week or two ago: Joe Rogan was the Democrats' Joe Rogan, they drove him and people like him away.

Was it this one?

https://www.themotte.org/post/2015/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/333055?context=8#context

I've heard this being said, well, everywhere since late 2024 at least. It's kind of an obvious point to make, so a lot of people made it.

That's the one

Not sure how sarcastic you are being, but considering that the last iteration of this was the fat beardy guy who claims to eat carburetors for breakfast, I'm not sure "democrat Joe Rogan" will be something they can pull off this cycle...

People think Hasan is like Rogan which is so telling. He's hot and fit and popular so it's the same thing apparently.

If you know anything about either creator's character and biography it's insane to think people who admire Rogan would look kindly on Hasan.

Whomever they nominate, it'll either annoy their base, or it'll alienate the median voter.

Does that even matter though? Harris still cackled her way to 75 million votes. Given her complete lack of appeal, that appears to be a floor as to what their organizers can gin up through harvesting, bussing, etc. And its enough for the party to maintain 40+ seats in the Senate basically in perpetuity.

Harris still cackled her way to 75 million votes.

There’s another upcoming structural wrinkle, and that’s the 2030 census and accompanying electoral college redistribution. Blue strongholds like California are set to lose electoral votes, and several increasingly red states like Arizona and Florida will be gaining them.

That can amend the Presidential computation, but it doesn't change the Senate, and in the House there still will be like a floor of 195ish.

Sure, but there’s plenty of states getting redder at the same time. Off the top of my head, it’s not implausible to add Rhode Island as a New England state in reach for the GOP in a good year, and Minnesota is a when not an if. If republicans really do work their way to single party dominance I’d expect Virginia to get much redder quickly, too. And if current trends continue in the Hispanic population NM is likely to be competitive for republicans again soon.

Agreed, Virginia probably will get redder as a bunch of deep blue government workers find greener pastures in other states (although that has knock-on effects depending on where these people wind up.)

But, where are you getting your thoughts on Minnesota? As great as it would be to have the land of our most “Uff da” saying people rejoin the Red fold, this seems like the reversed version of Blue Texas always being just around the corner.

Minnesota’s continued blue-ness is due, partly, to a highly unionized rural white population. But unions are shifting red, undermining a key advantage for the DFL. Additionally, Minnesota has been getting redder, just not as much as its neighbors, and it’s reasonable to expect current trends to continue. Finally, Minnesota’s blue is nowhere near as sticky as Texas’ red if you look at state level elections, the MNGOP is able to put up a fair fight in a way Texas democrats are not.

I wouldn't be above 10% predicting any of those things, all of them combined I'd be under 5%.

Democrats just resoundingly demonstrated they have an incredibly high floor. Harris-Walz got 75million votes. On those non-existent (probably negative) coat tails they were just -4 in the senate with a very tough map given the Montana and WV retirements, while actually receiving more total votes for their candidates, and actually gained 2 house seats. They also managed to hold steady in governorships, even with the crazy North Carolina guy somehow holding on in a reddish state.

They don't need popular policies or politicians. Those are outdated. They have vote-harvesting operations, which is what matters.

even with the crazy North Carolina guy somehow holding on in a reddish state.

In comparison to Mark Robinson?

And how many of those vote harvesting operations are functional without USAID? How many of them require a DNC not at its own throat?

If Republican candidate quality matters in a red state, the Dems aren't close to being down and out.

More comments

On top of that, I don't see any possible way the Dems can attract young male voters back. They've gone way too far out on the "men are inherently evil" limb. Can't reel that back in without pissing off the unmarried white female demographic that is their backbone. But any guy who looks and sees how they force any popular young Democrat male through a struggle session, like with Harry Sisson, will balk at anything they say. There's NOTHING to offer them.

I could imagine it. Much of the Republican coalition would also like to put the average young male voter through a struggle session for such crimes as watching pornography, playing video games, engaging in "devil worshipping" activities like D&D, and not being married. Trump won because he wasn't identified with that faction of the party. If the 2028 candidate decides to wrap themselves in conservative Christianity, those young men could decide to take a hike. Remember, it won't be BASED Christianity developed by and for young men, it will be the Christianity of boomer-brained Gen-X-er preachers and middle-aged church ladies.

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watching pornography, playing video games, engaging in "devil worshipping" activities like D&D, and not being married

Eh. We've heard enough about neckbeards, pick-me's, and incels not to buy that line.

Nobody's being honest here. Just waving the old carrot and hoping it's not rotten...

You are listing 90s and 2000s culture war topics. It just needs some "preserving marriage" talk.

In 2025 no one is getting a struggle session for DND.

In 2025 no one is getting a struggle session for DND.

Sure they are; the struggle sessions are just run by the left now.

You are listing 90s and 2000s culture war topics.

Right, and there are a lot of people who want to go back and re-litigate those same fights. Some of them are in this thread.

You forgot pushing Intelligent Design in schools!

Nobody has argued about embryonic stem cell research in a while. Although we have had left-coded arguments about HeLa cell line research.

"devil worshipping" DND? I wasn't aware of a sentiment against it around here.

Many young Christians I know, of various stripes, play DnD. I’m sure there are some boomers still railing against it but millennial and zoomer Christians are generally in agreement that fantasy stories are cool, and fantasy roleplay is a fun hobby.

Now something has to be responsible for the increase in Wicca and various forms of witchery over the past couple decades, but that seems concentrated within new agey women and not the geeky introverts who played DND in the 90s.

It turns out the real problem was the dawning of the age of Aquarius the hippies and their intellectual descendants after all, though I will certainly stand firm on the proposition that occasional atheistic/countercultural men were more than willing to invoke the occult if it meant getting inside some witchy panties.

I think the problem was social conservatives conflated several different countercultural groups who all rebelled against the moral majority, and couldn’t tell the fantasy roleplay apart from the new age cults. This hardened a lot of hearts, which was a shame.

But I still see the spread of witchcraft among women as an unresolved historical question. But I suppose people on the other side would say the same about the spread of conservative Christianity among men. Dissatisfaction with secular materialism is startlingly widespread, a fact I find hard to diagnose despite being a part of it. But if I had to make a diagnosis, perhaps it’s because technology increasingly feels like it limits human freedom rather than enhancing it. (Let’s not start another debate about the automobile or social media.)

The invocation of supernatural forces of any kind becomes a kind of trump (no relation) card that lets people feel like they have control over their lives, or at least have a direct line to someone who does. I suspect that magical thinking and superstition also load on neuroticism, because neurotic people often feel like the world is dangerous and they’re too weak to face it. Supernatural powers serve as a means of personal protection against a world they feel like they cannot control. Occultism spiked during COVID, where people felt like they had little power to control the situation (whether because of state authority or fear of the disease itself). Hence you get people panicking over the election of Trump (relation intended) and trying to trump (no relation) his political power by casting hexes on /r/witchesvspatriarchy.

Sometimes I wonder if being so morally concerned about the occult in the 80s and 90s actually was the cause of increased occultism. It certainly demonstrated that getting into occult things would really piss off conservatives! So if you're a young lady and you hate conservative Christianity, and you want to express in strong terms your contempt for it, well, you might go reaching for the very things they said were deeply wrong. In particular, this might go some ways towards explaining how massively popular these things are among gay people.

Perhaps if conservatives had mocked occultism and superstition the way a lot of skeptics did instead of getting incredibly angry and treating it like a real thing, we wouldn't live in a world where 40% of young women believe in astrology. Mockery and indifference kills ideas; outrage reifies them.

I am opposed to video games, porn, weed, fornication, rap music, and sports betting. I can’t say I have anything against DnD but I also don’t know very much about it and I’m certainly willing to be opposed to fictional entertainment in principle.

Now the difference is nobody believes that republicans will put me in charge of regulating these things.

That is rather the weakest part of his argument. Many people here absolutely do argue against video games, against pornography and in favor of marriage.

And are you certain that young men will be turned off by that message?

In my experience a lot of young men would actually like to get married, and recognition that excessive porn use or video games are actively emasculating them is pretty common.

They rely on cheap dopamine fixes and are stuck in perpetual adolescence because of structural problems in the economy and the education system, which republicans are the only party actually trying to address.

It’s a key psychological difference between young men & women; addressing these issues are more likely to actually feel supportive & empowering rather than making them feel “under attack”.

Talking to you young men like defective young women is how the Democratic Party got in this mess to begin with.

And are you certain that young men will be turned off by that message?

FWIW, my comment wasn't intended to comment on the actual issue. I just wanted to point out that the DND topic was the least salient point raised by @AlexanderTurok, and that his remark on the othe other points still being relevant on the Motte had merit otherwise. A meta-comment, if you will. I don't know what discourse looks like inside the "Republican Coalition".

Now to comment on the issue itself.

Porn, vidya and DnD are all forms of escapism, and in my view escapism is clearly associated with the "weak men" phase of cyclical history and with the "wireheading ourselves to death" end of linear history. Maybe small doses of escapism can be used for good, but I reckon that most people will be compelled to describe as adequate whichever dose they currently allow for their addiction, going from "playing vidya for an hour a day helps me relax" to "of course I spend all my waking hours playing games, don't you know I'm disabled and thus can't be expected to do anything else, and also playing games is good for you here I cherry-picked a study for you, and also I'm an up-and-coming semi-professional gaming content creator (4 subscribers, one patreon patron who is his mom)". The justifications will scale to the addiction. Porn addicts will blame the feminists or structural androphobia or will just fling themselves off a figurative cliff of self-pity. So at least DnD is a social activity, right? No. If all that a social activity accomplishes is encysting you and a bunch of like-minded degenerates in a bubble of hedonism, then DnD is no better than being a striped-stockinged furry discord moderator on a vidya modding server.

And while we're bashing young (and not so young) men's bad habits, let's not let young (and not so young) women get off unscathed. There are also numerous technologically-enabled anti-social addictions that women dearly love. Infinitely scrolling web content. Social media. Pretending to be an "influencer" but actually just producing content nobody needs. Compulsive online shopping. Eating sweets until they grow so fat they dread leaving the house lest they be rightfully judged. Feeding their neuroticism with ever-new diagnoses and imaginary dangers. While we tell young men to cut the cooming and gaming, man up, make something of yourselves, flourish in actual society! we should also be telling young women to put the phone down, clean up the mess they've made of the house, actually pay undivided attention to the baby for once and stop stuffing their faces with sugary crap. Women can be degenerates entirely without onlyfans pages.

Having this diatribe out on the page, let's get back to your question.

And are you certain that young men will be turned off by that message?

Depends on how far down the rabbit hole they are.

The ones who can't muster the strength to pull themselves far enough out of their hedonism hole to even see the "real" world, the ones who have bought into their own justifications and rationalizations of their degenerate behavior, will probably react defensively to the message that actually, their behavior is bad, will feel "under attack" as you put it. But having those people on your side is bad optics anyways; they're nothing but sad sacks who happen to have a vote. A vote they will certainly use for whichever party promises more gibs for the unproductive - so why bother worrying about what message reaches them?

The more casual hedonists who still interact with society at large, who can hold down a job and can credibly claim that they have their addictions under control, those might be receptive to the message. But what will they do with it? I suppose these are the target audience, and the ones that might appreciate support and empowerment in their daily struggle to balance their addictions and their more pro-social activities.

Young men who do not spend every evening in pursuit of escapism, who aren't at risk, might still appreciate the message as validation.

But really now, for long-term political implications I think that unless you either

  1. go full Taliban, ban all the things and administer beatings to the deviants, or
  2. eliminate gibs so that checking out of society to sacrifice yourself to your addictions will actually kill you

the wireheading-ourselves-to-death future is pretty much unavoidable. As technology improves, its ability to put claws into our brains and promote our worst instincts grows faster than its ability to help us get ourselves under control. The last 100 years of rapid economic growth and unceasing social upheaval have seen too much happen in too short a span of time for societies and cultures to learn how to deal with these new situations in sustainable and productive ways. An enormous amount of wealth that keeps most people afloat regardless of their bad habits, public welfare to sustain even the worst wireheads, and multiple generations of atomization and globalization to ensure that people are increasingly left to their own devices with their horizon limited to their personal pleasure, and technology ever evolving to make addictions go harder and faster...well where can it go?

[American political implicaitons]

lol i dunno

Also, I play too much vidya lately. Yeah I'm tired in the evenings and I have a cold and I just want to switch off and relax so that I'll be sufficiently re-charged for the next day, but if I take a serious look at myself I have to admit that I could just as well cut this relaxation phase in half and just go to bed earlier, get up earlier, and do something useful in the morning instead. Ask me tomorrow whether I actually did that.

How do you get women (e.g. an aunt) to address structural issues like TikTok dependency?

In my experience a lot of young men would actually like to get married

Yes, and they too would be alienated by the tradcon message that puts 100% of the blame for the decline in marriage on men.

They rely on cheap dopamine fixes and are stuck in perpetual adolescence because of structural problems in the economy and the education system

The unemployment rate is close to zero.

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Unfortunately Republicans have no solution to the problem of marriage. Neither party does, because the Overton Window only contains solutions that don't work.

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The chance of that is pretty low- not least because mainstream Christianity has gotten much better at appealing to young men, but also the religious right is just used to being a junior coalition partner.

It seems to me that you have failed to understand the current state of discourse in Conservative Christian circles, and have instead proceeded with basing your reasoning off cached data from a quarter-century ago.

The fundamental difference that you appear to have missed is that Christians lost these arguments decisively around the turn of the century, and their opponents got their way. As a result, Conservative Christians no longer need to argue what might happen if the other side gets their way, but rather what has happened, and what results the other side is accountable for. Christians can now operate as a genuine counter-culture, offering a cogent critique of the conditions we are all living in every minute of every day. We can offer meaningful answers to the myriad discontents created by our present society, and through those answers coordinate the systematic withdrawal from and dismantling of that society. The powers of compulsion no longer rest within our hands, and so we can focus on persuasion instead. And the worse Progressivism makes things, the more persuasive our arguments get.

But by all means, if you believe Conservative Christianity is going to enshrine the rule of boomer-brained gen-x-er preachers and middle-aged church ladies, say so, and show some examples of how this happens. Meanwhile, I'm watching Atheist stalwarts openly reject liberalism and its works.

From "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by AntiDem:

Let’s face it – being on the right is tough these days. The left has completed its long march through the institutions – media, academia, technology, government bureaucracy – and stands dominant in all of them. Through these, they have come to utterly dominate not only much of public policy and the mainstream news media, but also to act as arbiters of the mainstream culture as well. As Mencius Moldbug noted, in the Modern state, culture is downstream from politics, and public morals are set by whoever’s army is guarding the television station. Through their machinery of cultural control, the establishment left (which is by no means antiwar or against police statism on principle) has manufactured consent on all manner of issues. Not only that, they’ve created and sustained a culture of leftism – the propagation, whether explicitly presented as such or not, of leftist memes, not the least important of which is leftism as hip and intellectual.

This leftist culture has become the absolutely dominant mainstream culture in not just the United States, but all of the West. And there’s no hope of changing it anytime soon – not with the mainstream academic and media cartels enjoying the legal protections (not to mention the favor of much of the political system) that they do. And where does that leave the right? It leaves it in a position that’s…

…well, that’s a hell of a lot of fun, actually. Because we are the counterculture now. For the left, in all of its dominance of establishment culture, has now run into what I call Bakunin’s Corollary to Flair’s Law.

Flair’s Law states: To be The Man, you’ve got to beat The Man.

Bakunin’s Corollary states: Once you do beat The Man, then you become The Man, whether you said you were going to or not.

And as it stands now, the left most definitely is The Man. Not only that, but they act the part, down to the smallest detail. A more moralizing, censorious, hectoring, endlessly instructive bunch of tut-tutting know-it-all pearl-clutchers you could not find anywhere. The left, long ago, when they were out of power, once understood the sheer joy of sticking a thumb in the eye of people like that. They understood both the necessity and the power of creating a counterculture. Now it is time for the right, and especially the alternative right – all manner of traditionalists, reactionaries, right-libertarians, separatists, monarchists, and elitists – to drop out of the establishment mass popular culture and work on creating a counterculture of our own. Not just because it is necessary in order to maintain and pass on our values in the face of the ceaseless onslaught of that leftist popular culture (Note that there is increasingly nothing – nothing – in popular culture that is permitted to be happily apolitical; to not incessantly parrot the left’s memes. Not television, not comedy, not music, not video games, not football or basketball, not web browsers or search engines, not even chicken sandwiches or hamburgers), but because it’s just plain fun.

You are the counterculture now. You get to flip the bird to The Man, to be anti-establishment, to get off the grid of pop-culture garbage and live the way you see fit. Those of the alternative right are not just in the positions of being the Marxes and Nietzsches and Gramscis opposed to bourgeois mass-culture morality, but we also get to be Kerouac in San Francisco, to be Wyatt and Billy on the open highway, to be Ken Kesey on his Magic Bus, to be Lenny Bruce making people faint from the stage.

Nearly everything necessary for this is already in place. In many ways, the alternative right community reminds me of my father’s descriptions of Greenwich Village circa 1964. It is filled with all manner of eccentrics and thinkers and radicals and rebels and misfits. Some speak deep truths, some seem half-crazy; some are charismatic and charming, others seem scary and dangerous. Sometimes it is the scary, dangerous, and half-crazy among them who speak the most deep truth. All throughout, there is a feeling of throwing off what the establishment gives us, of finding a better way. There is also a feeling that something big is inevitable, and coming sooner rather than later.

How exciting!

Interesting quote; but isn't just copy-pasting a long quote (with a link to source), adding no comment of your own, pretty low-effort for the Motte?

But the obvious corollary to that is that if the "new right-wing counterculture" wins, it will then become The Man and there will be a rebellion against it, too, at some point, no?

One of the interesting things that the right wing in the USA is doing is working to destroy many of the institutions that can be deployed to be The Man (the Department of Education being perhaps the prime example).

I don't think this eliminates the chance that the right-wing counterculture suffers from victory (as seems to typically be the case!) but I do think, if successful, it makes it more difficult for the right to seize and hold the low ground of "mandatory and cringe" that typically alienates people. Banking on "diversity of thought" to skew right-wing is a bold choice that may not pay off, but if it does it is actually likely to help keep the right more diverse (and more tolerant) by ensuring that the right's "client base" (for lack of a better term) is diversified.

One of the interesting things that the right wing in the USA is doing is working to destroy many of the institutions that can be deployed to be The Man (the Department of Education being perhaps the prime example).

The right lacks the Elite Human Capital(TM) necessary to take over these institutions, and it knows it. Scorched earth tactics - destroying positions you cannot hold to deny them to the enemy - is the second best solution.

I'm not sure I actually believe this – the right runs a lot of parallel institutions that are better/More Elite than the state-run institutions. I think the actual problem for the right is a bit more subtle.

Some of it is that is because of how school systems work in the USA, local ideology often matters more than state or federal ideology – and since population centers are often leftie, figuring out ways to redistribute resources away from local school systems to the institutions (elite and otherwise) that are more right-sympathetic is a victory for the right. Uncharitably, you could argue this is school choice does (although the counter-argument it only works because, frankly, the generic-and-often-left-wing choices are often quite bad and many people would take their kids to right-wing parallel institutions if they could afford it).

Yeah pretty much. The party that controls the zeitgeist favours conservation, because they want to preserve the zeitgeist. The people in charge are in charge in one sense because the culture favours their politics, if it stops favouring their politics they'll lose power.

Edit: Added the rest of the post I meant to write when I accidentally hit send. God damn it I am getting worse at posting every day.

Meanwhile, I'm watching Atheist stalwarts openly reject liberalism and its works.

Online Politics Brain. Look at Pew data on religious identity instead of anecdotes.

But by all means, if you believe Conservative Christianity is going to enshrine the rule of boomer-brained gen-x-er preachers and middle-aged church ladies, say so, and show some examples of how this happens.

They're the ones who will be running for office in 2028. They won't live forever, but 2028 is what we're talking about here.

Look at Pew data on religious identity instead of anecdotes.

Which has largely shown the decline bottoming out in recent years?

2010s "don't be a dick" secular humanism is now right wing. Left wing atheism is witchcraft and social justice identitarisnism, right wing atheism is hedonic self indulgence. Split the irreligious into those 2 broad factions, make a 1 second guess on who is more repelled by who, and 'religious identity' is no longer the savior of the left. Maybe they can make a hard pivot to Islam like the European left did, the USA has a lot more runway before critical mass for sharia becomes unmanageable.

right wing atheism is hedonic self indulgence.

Well, this right wing atheist isn't exactly generating a bunch of hedons these days, nor indulging in much of anything (except being poor and miserable)…

Sure but youre not starving and your post nut clarity from constant procrasturbation is just introducing shame to the degeneracy you have devolved into, despite the objective chemical release from the momentary indulgence. As long as you get your satisfaction and dissatisfaction from your own life, you're not a "atheist" who needs to get their rocks off by being emotional vampires in empathetic secular humanist circlejerks.

The obvious GOP front-runners for 2028 and 2032 are Vance, Rubio, DeSantis, and Hegseth in roughly that order. All of them are currently under 55 and much closer culturally to what @FCfromSSC is describing than anything you have.

The obvious front runners are Vance, Rubio, Abbott, and Youngkin.

  • Vance is a ‘based Christian’ catholic convert

  • Rubio is a Hispanic cradle Catholic

  • Abbott runs ads on having become a Catholic to bond with his wife’s family. While she prefers to go to Latin mass governor Abbott definitely doesn’t. He has a good relationship with the Texas Catholic bishops(not the most based bishops around- the most based archbishops in the USA are, ironically, those of Portland, San Francisco, and Denver, in addition to military services and the ordinariate for former Anglicans).

  • Youngkin is a country club conservative picked, in part, specifically to be non offensive. The chances of muscular Christianity are low.

I’m counting one example of based muscular Christianity out of four.

Talking about GOP front runners at this point is more snail brained than usual: the odds that more than one of Rubio, Hegseth, and Vance are still in Trump/MAGA's good graces in 2028 are lower than the odds that none of them are.

I think that framing it this way misses some important alternative possibilities. Possibilities like "Trump doesn't survive to 2028" (even leaving aside the assassins, which will continue for the foreseeable future, he's less than four years younger than Biden), and "the gameboard has been flipped; this question is no longer relevant" (most obviously by WWIII or by AI).

I don't care how the board is flipped, Trump will continue to be petty and impossible to work with.

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I'll take that bet.

Sure. Give me a working definition of in good graces and a stake.

Online Politics Brain. Look at Pew data on religious identity instead of anecdotes.

...It seems to me that your arguments would benefit greatly from expansion into more than single-sentence, contextless dismissal. You appear to be arguing that the population as a whole is still moving away from religiosity. But my argument was not that people are moving toward Religion, but rather that they are moving away from liberalism and its axioms, upon which the Progressive edifice is founded. My argument is not that Conservative Christians will secure power, it is that power will lean somewhat more in our direction and very hard away from our most dedicated opponents, because our critiques are valid and theirs are not.

They're the ones who will be running for office in 2028. They won't live forever, but 2028 is what we're talking about here.

I am highly confident that none of the 2028 contenders will be Boomer-brained Gen-x-er preachers or middle-aged church ladies, in either party. I'm highly confident that the Republican 2028 contenders will be much more sympathetic to Conservative Christian social critique than they will be to Progressive social critique, and will consider protection of religious freedom for Conservative Christians as a winning political cause.

I'm weakly confident that Republicans will win in 2028, and I am highly confident that taking advice from the Hananiah set would degrade those odds, not improve them. The sort of reductive mental caching you seem to be deploying in this thread is a fair bit of the reason why. Rather than engage with what is actually happening, you consistently substitute factual realities for an imagined set more conducive to your axioms. Here, you are trying to round "Conservative Christians have persuasive critiques of our current culture" to "The Religious Right is ascendent, will try to jail people for viewing porn."

The problem with your claim, as I understand it, is that this is not actually going to happen, and the reason it isn't going to happen is not that people with power will take your advice. You can box phantoms for the next three years as much as you like; the world will proceed without you.

I will at least observe that Red states have been, even in this era, pushing back on the prevalence of online porn. Pornhub, notably, has blocked a number of states that have passed relevant legislation to require age verification. It's Very Possible Nowadays to circumvent such things or find sites that don't care about (American) jurisdiction quite so much, but it is happening.

Notably, though, the argument is less "this content is sinful", and more "this content is demonstrably poisoning the relations and sexual health of our children".

Notably, though, the argument is less "this content is sinful", and more "this content is demonstrably poisoning the relations and sexual health of our children".

What's the actual harm? I'm just not seeing it.

the argument is less "this content is sinful", and more "this content is demonstrably poisoning the relations and sexual health of our children".

What did you think 'sinful' meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?

Sin is definitionally injurious to individuals and societies.

All that's changed is that instead of warning people (and getting called crazy), we now get to say "I told you so" (and still mostly be ignored).

If "sinful" just means "harmful" then say harmful.

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What did you think 'sinful' meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?

Yes, and trivially. The problem with 'sinful' is the same problem 'misogynistic' or 'hateful' has in that it's thought-terminating and usually invoked as "fuck you, stop doing what I don't like".

I am happy that the traditionalists have figured out they actually have to make the argument without the short-circuit. Which should be easy, because they're unimpeachably correct, which is why they were right to pick up the thought-terminating argument from aesthetics in the first place and it didn't take them 60 years to come up with a workable counterargument.

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Usually, the word "sinful" is taken to mean an appeal to abstract, unfalsifiable moral commandments dependent on faith in some religious nonsense for even the slightest form of coherency, not "here is the solid statistical evidence that consumption of this media will make your life objectively worse by your own values."

It seems to me that the population is moving from seeing porn consumption less like saying "fuck" and more like smoking cigarettes, and that this is because porn consumption is in fact more like smoking cigarettes than it is like swearing. There are significant observable costs to consumption and the industry that supports it, even from within the Materialist frame.

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One might draw a parallel to (broadly speaking) Democrats and smoking tobacco. In the 90s, there was a claim around the Republican side of things that the Democrats were going to ban tobacco. One could believe this, because it was very clear that the Democrats as a group were not fond of the tobacco industry, and because the people who really did want to ban tobacco seemed mostly to be deep-blue democrats, and also because the people making this comparison somehow didn't mention counterexamples. But in fact, Democrats did not ban tobacco, nor did they make any serious effort to try to. Instead, they took numerous steps to paint tobacco consumption and the tobacco industry as sleazy, dirty, and dangerous, relying on coordinated social power and messaging to try to push people to drop the habit of their own volition, thus carving away the industry's financial base and reducing its lobbying power. What laws were passed were either focused on forcing the tobacco companies themselves into cooperating with this push, or else targeted attacks on areas where tobacco was framed in the worst light and where public support was strongest, such as the lawsuits.

I think this is a pretty good model for what an actual Red-Tribe attack on porn and the porn industry would look like.

There's an inherent problem with the political landscape right now continually asking sacrifices of young men but being very short on the rewards that are promised to them.

Nobody in power seems to want to acknowledge what these men actually want out of society and, by contrast, what they're actually getting.

I think this problem is going to become unavoidably salient as the Boomers die off and a lot of guys enter their 30's unmarried and with few prospects on starting a family.

The side that at least wants the men to stop watching porn and to start a family might come around to realize that this requires addressing those men's concerns and shifting cultural incentives.

The Dems are intrinsically unable to address mens' concerns.

So yeah, maybe they walk away from the Boomer evangelical coalition, but they ain't walking into the arms of the lefties.

Nobody in power seems to want to acknowledge what these men actually want out of society and, by contrast, what they're actually getting.

They will, but only long enough to say that it's disgusting or that them not getting it is entirely their own fault. The latter might be reasonable if it were actually true.

Much of the Republican coalition would also like to put the average young male voter through a struggle session for such crimes as watching pornography, playing video games, engaging in "devil worshipping" activities like D&D, and not being married.

This just isn't true nowadays, I don't think. The religious right has never been weaker or had less cultural sway. The Republican coalition nowadays isn't a bunch of disaffected people united by Mother Church's guiding hand -- the religious ones are just a small part of that coalition themselves, and need make concessions to other people, not vice versa.

Plus, they got their destruction of Roe v. Wade.

What large issue do they have to animate them to action and grant them leverage over the national GOP, after that?

They still have abortion, which they want to ban at the federal level.

I am constantly reminded day after day that although the right has a very good understanding of what the left wants and thinks, the opposite is not true.

Suppose I told you that Democrats want to make abortions of unrestricted term legal on the federal level. Then, you would say, that is not true: that only certain extreme activists would say so, that they are a minority within a minority: that democrats in general absolutely do not celebrate abortions or attempt to sacralize it as some sort of female right of passage.

But yet, knowing this, you apply the broad brush to Republicans without the nuances or the understanding. All of the logic and reason of the previous paragraph falls out of the back of your head, and you say: "Republicans want to ban abortion federally."

Be honest with yourself. Are you being generous with your political enemies, or are you close-minded and prejudiced?

(After writing this out, I realize you could be referring 'they' as evangelicals, but the basic observation still is the same. Which ones?)

I'm maybe somewhere in the middle of Alexander, faceh, and you. I think the left has the progressive and center factions, and the right has the evangelical and libertarian/populist factions. Right now the populists are winning so hard you barely even hear the evangelical faction any more, but that doesn't mean the evangelicals have stopped existing. They're a minority, but they absolutely would push for a federal ban if they thought they would succeed. The moral framework of pro-life demands it, because if the neighboring state legalized murder the median person would be outraged by the decision and wouldn't care if someone else tried arguing about state's rights. That's why you have things like Texas outlawing traveling to another state to get an abortion. And if they succeeded in it, I doubt the pro-choice right would defect because of it.

The better way to think about it is that the religious right is the second string faction in the coalition ruling thé GOP, regardless of who’s on top. Populists on top? The Christians are #2. Libertarians? Again, Christians are #2. Thats part of why GOP infighting is relatively less destructive of the party- thé second most powerful faction will literally never lose their coveted #2 spot.

If they can't get bans at the state level when they have control of the governments, it'd be a real tough sell to make it happen Federally.

They can of course push for it, but winning the fight to remove the Constitutional 'right' to abortion was the gift that also made it so the issue doesn't need to be fought at the Federal level.

The Republicans will not ban abortion at the federal level. Neither will they commit significant political value to attempting such a ban.

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