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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.
Sure they are; the struggle sessions are just run by the left now.
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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.
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"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 Aquariusthe 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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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How do you get women (e.g. an aunt) to address structural issues like TikTok dependency?
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Yes, and they too would be alienated by the tradcon message that puts 100% of the blame for the decline in marriage on men.
The unemployment rate is close to zero.
"100%" is doing a lot of work there. I see a lot of "Women often suck, but you can only work on yourself, so fix that first", and it seems like it's resonating fairly well. There's a reason Peterson blew up with "Clean your room". "Get good" is a message young men are primed to be ready for.
That's good advice for individual men, but it's also a poor response to criticism of systemic issues associated with a promoted lifestyle. If Republicans want men to buy the house, they need to be willing to come up solutions to poor inspection results.
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Where are you getting this? I’ve seen zero conservatives squarely blaming men for not getting married.
Low employment rate by itself doesn’t actually achieve much in terms of upward economic mobility for working class young men, which I do believe has a serious effect on family formation.
For that you need to end the wage stagnation / decline as it relates to the biggest expenses for young people dating, forming relationships and attempting to start a family; housing costs.
How much do you hand around old school church-going (Protestant) conservatives — typically age 50+ — IRL? Because that's the main place I've seen it. Also preacher blogs. (And some younger religious conservatives blogging from the Eastern European or Latin American country they moved to.)
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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.
Agreed, although the old adage comes to mind; “When you’re in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging.”
Fixing or at least freezing the decline of the economy for young men without advanced education is the “stop digging” part by at least making the economic landscape not maximally hostile to family formation.
If you’re able to get housing costs to stop rising or even fall, do the same with the asset bubble, and put upward pressure on the lowest quintile or two of wages by creating a tight labor market, and you’re in for a good start.
Deportations, crackdowns on illegal immigration, a robust industrial policy, Reindustrialization, tariffs on China, checking the power of the academy, renegotiating trade deals, all this gestures in the direction of not celebrating open hostility to young working class men.
I live in a deep blue state and I can tell you personally that the accumulated effects of standard deep blue policy preferences on my life has decreased the amount of children I will have had in my life by at least one. And I’m one of the lucky ones; intelligent, healthy, strong, no criminal record, no significant addictions, came from an intact family.
"Family formation" is not an answer to the question of "what do men get out of this". Under present conditions, men are not offered an ownership stake in the families that they form. They are at most leased a family on a month-to-month basis conditional on the wife being kept happy. Republicans have indicated little capital of any kind earmarked for changing this.
I will give credit to Republicans for offering the first non-token resistance against discrimination toward my kind of human being that I've witnessed in my lifetime—and for that they've earned my vote. But if they want further buy-in to the lifestyle, they will need to offer more.
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Do the Republicans have a credible plan for that? I haven't seen one. (No, tariffs aren't going to do that)
The good news is housing costs are set to turn around for demographic reasons. The Silents and older boomers are already dying.
Creating a tight labor market drives up inflation and erases the gains.
No one has a credible plan for that. Because the solution to the problem of 'We need to make young men rich and successful so they can have families and children' is a multi-facet plan that needed to be implemented 20 years ago, not today.
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