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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.
It doesn't 'just' mean harmful, but it's always 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.
This reminds me of the guy I met who couldn't believe that I described something as heretical. "'Heresy' is, like, something fundamentalists scream while losing their minds!" His only experience with the concept was from media hostile to Christianity. Had no idea that within the tradition we use the word matter of factly; dispassionately.
Sin has only ever meant one thing and at least in my experience it's been used consistently. Via (hostile) media portrayals I have a vague caricature in my head of an ignorant Southern woman throwing the word around to suit her biases, but all such types I've met in real life have instead been progressives.
Where's that CS Lewis poaster when you need him?
There has never been a shortage of Christian intellectual tradition for those willing to engage with it. Except, I guess, in Protestant backwaters isolated from that tradition. But even they generally had access to Lewis.
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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.
Any polling data showing this?
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Then bring those porn studies that are comparable to tobacco harm studies. Are you going to die early because of porn? Has science re-discovered that it does indeed make you blind?
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I think you have been well trained by enemies of Christianity.
Solid statistical evidence is a pretty recent invention, and its accessibility to the public even more recent. The ability of the public to competently evaluate such evidence we can, heh, call a work in progress. In the meantime humans live human lives and require human guidance.
I was raised evangelical and converted to Orthodoxy and have never heard it suggested that swearing is somehow implicitly sinful. An argument sure can be made that it is in most particular instances, but that would be according to logic that would, as you'd have it, be coherent to materialists.
Apart from failing to cultivate a relationship with Christ I'm unable to think of any behavior typically described as sinful that doesn't have observable material costs. And even that one is arguable given mental health and life outcomes. The question is how aware one is of those costs, and how seriously one takes them, not whether they exist.
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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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