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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.
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.
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.
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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).
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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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...
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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.
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!
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"devil worshipping" DND? I wasn't aware of a sentiment again it around here.
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.
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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.
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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:
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?
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.
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Online Politics Brain. Look at Pew data on religious identity instead of anecdotes.
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.
Which has largely shown the decline bottoming out in recent years?
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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.
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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.
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...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.
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".
What's the actual harm? I'm just not seeing it.
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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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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.
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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.
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.
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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?)
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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.
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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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