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Part of the problem was that the left was too successful in casting things like HBD and culture being deep as unthinkably racist. They were extremely taboo on the mainstream right.
To put things in perspective, ousting the Soviets from Eastern Europe was largely successful. It was still highly taboo to talk about the problems in places like Zimbabwe and South Africa.
As a result it was impossible for anyone on the right to assemble an argument about how removing Saddam wouldn't result in a democratic revolution.
You'd sound too racist to be on TV.
Liberals from a more cosmopolitan background often have the attitude of "everybody knows X, it's just not polite to say it". But Republicans from small white towns frequently don't know it. They're going to go along with poor decisions if you don't let anyone tell them.
Edit:
I seem to be having some communications difficulties with this post. Back in 2009 or so HBD blogs were the only places having discussions about things like cousin marriage in Arab cultures leading to clannishness which caused problems when trying to impose individualist democracy on them.
I'm not even endorsing any particular theory. I'm just saying that the limits on public conversation made it difficult to fight a bad idea.
This is not what happened at all.
The Republican party chose it's name as an allusion to Plato and classical (pre-Imperial) Rome. A focus on individual virtue/responsibility coupled with a distaste for collectivism bordering on taboo have been consistent threads on the US right going back at least as far as reconstruction, and it is the US left that has been consistently pushing back against that taboo in an effort to promote collectivism/class consciousness.
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I assume your basic HBD-related argument here is that democratic transition was largely successful in Eastern Europe in 1989 because White Christians live there, as opposed to Zimbabwe and South Africa (or something).
Either way, I don’t mean this as an insult of some sort, I’d rather go ahead and nitpick.
The obvious commonality among the Eastern European nations that more or less successfully transitioned to democracy in 1989 is that they all have some past legacy of applied democratic norms, rule of law, parliamentary systems, Western orientation and (some differing level of) Germanic cultural influence. Belarus, for example, is a clear exception. (And the question of whether the area of the former GDR was ‘properly’ democratized or not is seemingly an ever thornier one on the minds of West German normies.) In contrast, the Russian, Central Asian and Caucasian republics of the former USSR clearly lack this and continued the norms of authoritarianism and repression accordingly. Whatever marginal democratic tendencies might have even been present at the beginning clearly went nowhere. This was already clear as day back in 2003, and was available as an argument against rosy neocon predictions regarding Iraq’s future.
I won’t argue about the basket case Rhodesia has turned into; with respect to South Africa though I’d point out that it’s easy to get dispirited about developments there instead of comparing what ended up happening to the absolute bloodbath and misery the country could easily have slipped into after Apartheid collapsed.
On one hand I'll repeat my broken-record line of "don't damn peoples down seven generations", and even though I think genetic group differences are a thing, I'm much more skeptical of sweeping statements about specific groups being incapable organizing in of specific political systems. On the other hand, this is a liberal just-so story that glosses over anything inconvenient, and invents several convenient "facts" to salvage it's own argument.
Ah yes, the long rich democratic tradition of the 20 years between the World Wars, that were imposed by Woodrow Wilson's deranged fantasies, and managed to revert to authoritarianism even within that short timespan. The attachment to democracy was so short that we were seriously debating if it's not better to take the Asian Tiger route, and only implement democracy after authoritarian reforms.
Which only shows how democracy is a luxury system. It can work if the stars align just right, but has the tendency of taking it's necessary conditions (like everybody having roughly the same values) for granted. The moment these conditions are not met the democracy enjoyers themselves will start begging for it's end, arresting opposition candidates, and seriously considering the banning of political parties, for the high crime of people voting the wrong way.
What is this meant to be a reference to please? Czechoslovakia? Because there was no reversion to authoritarianism in that case.
The Asian Tiger route was a strictly Southeast Asian (Confucian) phenomenon in the specific context of the Cold War and facilitated by generous and targeted American capital investment and the proto version of offshoring. None of that applied to Eastern Europe after 1989.
It was all a long-term consequence of German 'reunification' (the annexation of the former GDR into an unchanged federal state structure) being a complete shitshow which incidentally the Americans played no part in.
Estonia? Latvia? Lithuania? Poland? Romania? Bulgaria? Hungary? And yes, contrary to what you said below Germany also counts, of course. I'm almost impressed how you put your finger on the single country in the region that did not revert to authoritarianism, and are acting flabbergasted how I could possibly think they're not representative.
The "democratic tradition", the way the term is being used nowadays, of western Europe is more a result of the Cold War and it's alliance with the USA, than it does with anything that happened before the war. Even Spain and Portugal were dictatorships until the 70's.
Whether or not it would work is another question (and the explanation of why it worked for Asia is another liberal just-so story that they had to scramble for after the fact, as they do with many things), all I'm saying is that it was an idea floated by public intellectuals at the time, although ultimately not attempted.
First of all it's worth reiterating that the "it" is "people voting the wrong way", something that clearly shows the "democratic traditions" are a cruel joke.
As to the causes, I mean, maybe? I could imagine that if the reunification went well the east Germans could be bread-and-circused into complacency, and would be just fine with brilliant ideas like importing seven zillion Syrians and Afghans, putting people in prison for speech, but locking them in a women's cell after they declare themselves a woman, and fining people €10K for misgendering them, but it's not immediately obvious to me. The psyops ran by the Americans on their western counterparts are legendary, to the point that anyone coming from a country with any amount of healthy patriotism comes away shaken after seeing the end result of what they were put through.
Huh? France and the Benelux states had already been democracies for a long time before WW2, and France was already a republic to boot.
Spain and Portugal joined NATO only after those dictatorships fell, which I think bears mentioning here.
To be fair, 4 of these didn't even exist as sovereign nations before 1918, which complicates matters. Regarding Hungary I already replied in a different comment. The Baltics used to be ruled by German/Germanized nobles for a long time and thus have a shared legacy of Western orientation; that much is certainly relevant in this case. The Poles have a bygone but long and cherished legacy of being a republic with a parliament which, for example, is very markedly different from the Russian experience.
It could have probably worked but nobody even tried. East Germans have consistently been shut out from positions of power and influence in the 'reunified' German state to an extent that makes the past discrimination against African-Americans in the US pale in comparison. They were seen as hillbillies with poisoned minds who don't matter. The economic transition was also completely bungled.
Sorry, I phrased it poorly. "the way the term is being used nowadays" is carrying some weight in that statement, as that way involves ideas like "you're doing democracy wrong if you vote in the way we disapprove of".
The US had military bases in Spain with Franco still in power. Admittedly, I know less about Portugal.
Southkraut allready summed up what I think about the German democracy, but aside from that, If it worked like that, and if Poland's tradition was relevant (more on that later), Belarus should have been one of the better democratized nations.
Similarly to what German democracy looked like in practice, Poland was an "elite state" through and through. The nobles may have organized themselves as a democracy, but they'd scoff idea of having the society ran as anything other than a class based hierarchy. There's a throwaway line in Game of Thrones where Sandor Clegane says it makes as much sense to give the vote to his horse as much as does to give it to a peasant, and given their affinity for horses, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if the line was first spoken in Poland.
Sure they have a democratic legacy that is both cherished and long, with the caveat that the part that's long isn't particularly cherished - they literally see it as the proximate cause of the collapse of their empire - and that part that is cherished - a last ditch attempt at reforming their system - lasted all 4 years.
Like I said, I don't necessarily disagree, but it's hard for me to tell what the world would look like if things panned out differently. Is a Germany where Eastern ideas were taken seriously one where Easterners don't vote AfD because their ideas don't resonate, or because AfD-ish / BSW-ish ideas are already incorporated into the mainstream?
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Referring to Weimar Germany I assume.
Dude literally picked the only country in the region that didn't have an authoritarian "back"slide at the time.
Since you specifically referred to ‘Wilson's deranged fantasies’ I picked Czechoslovakia because if there’s one tangible Eastern European development that can be called the result of Wilson's deranged fantasies, it’s the creation of Czechoslovakia. Also, just to nitpick further: in the case of Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania there was zero democratic tendency after WW1 to slide back from towards authoritarianism.
You think Germany and Russia gave up so much territory between them, because they were such jolly old chums?
Pretty sure they all had some parliamentary system that got couped at some point between the wars. Hungary speed-ran it, but they still had it for a brief period after the war. The "zero democratic tendency" thing is my argument, thank you very much.
It’s a bit of a mischaracterization to argue that ‘Germany and Russia gave up [Polish] territory between them’, isn’t it? It wasn’t exactly a matter of choice in either case, especially not in the case of czarist (or Soviet) Russia. I’ll concede that Wilson probably had a significant role in the creation of Poland as well, although this is not a subject I’m familiar with.
Anyway, I agree with your point in the sense that Hungary did in fact have a bicameral parliamentary system as the member state of a dualist monarchy before and during WW1, and was as such exposed to Western concepts of rule of law, civil rights, freedom of the press etc. although to a limited extent indeed. The transitional period of 1918-21 in contrast was characterized by wars, unrest, socio-economic collapse, internment, pogroms, terror and the general brutalization of the population, which hardly constitute a breeding ground for democratization. The regime that ended up consolidating itself was clearly right-wing and authoritarian, but the bicameral parliament and the multi-party system remained, which was still something. In the case of Bulgaria and Romania, I imagine whatever political role their parliamentary system was equally or even more limited.
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There are two glaring problems with that. Imperial Germany had a legacy of democratic norms already - there was a legislative assembly, elections, political parties, political discussions in a free press etc. Also, Germany isn't in Eastern Europe.
And yet, somehow the state of Russia is explained by a lack of democratic norms.
If we consider the period before the outbreak of WW1 in Eastern Europe, we can absolutely surely say that the ideas of freely functioning political parties, democratic elections, rule of law, civil society, parliamentarianism, personal liberty, freedom of expression etc. had precisely zero influence in Russia, and that this was the case ever since the Russian state existed. And yes, this is true even when compared to imperial Germany.
Agreed except for the last sentence. You're taking token western institutions to pretend there were democratic norms, and (rightfully) dismissing the token Russian ones. Even if you want to carve out Germany as an exception that was somehow actually democratic, deep in their hearts (I can even give you "rule of law" as an institution that they had, to be a good sport), that still does not salvage your argument for why the democratization of the Eastern Block was a success. You even have to invent additional just-so stories to explain the relative "failure" of the democratization of the GDR, even though they it should have been the most successful of all, if "democratic traditions" were so important, and existed in Germany for such a long time.
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Whoa, whoa, hold your horses. Imperial Germany was absolutely an Obrigkeitsstaat (elite-state?) ruled by a small number of people with very token democratic institutions that were meant to channel republicanism into wearing itself out and discrediting itself via fruitless procedures conducted within a powerless framework. That "democracy" never amounted to anything, wasn't taken very seriously by non-activists, and got absolutely bulldozed over by the actual rulers whenever they didn't jump according to orders. The Prussians in general and Bismarck specifically had a habit of allowing seemingly republican instutions to take the wind out of activists' sails, only to pull the rug out from under them and have riot police beat the shit out of them a few years later. The counterrevolution was still very much going on in Imperial Germany.
So the "legacy of democratic" norms was really the legacy that democracy was a farce. Does that square with your perception of inter-war Germany?
As opposed to Russia, where the meekest similar attempts even at creating token institutions were likely to land you in a Siberian penal colony. Degrees of differences do matter.
And there's a very large degree of difference between what seems to have been the historical reality in 19th and early 20th century Germany and what I assume most people would imagine when they hear "a legacy of democratic norms".
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That distinction does not matter though. When Bismarck implemented social democratic policies “to undermine the social democrats”, that last part is irrelevant. When John Lackland granted the Magna Carta he didn’t do it because in his heart he loved the freedom of his subjects more than his own power.
Any ruler will face pressure from his subjects. If we call that "democratic norms" I'll be even more confused as to why some countries are said to have them, and others are not.
Like, ages ago I was listening to a libertarian podcast talking about the news, and they had this clip of a western journalist grilling the Saudi king about why he doesn't just give equal rights to women. "You're the king", she said, "can't you just declare whatever you want?". His responses were a stream of evasions, centering around the theme of how much he loves his subjects. The libertarian hosts of the show were utterly clueless and were just making fun of how he's not answering the question, but in my opinion he was giving a clear and obvious response - this is what my subjects want, if I overturn the social order in such a drastic way, they'll hang me from a lamppost by tomorrow morning. Is that a "democratic norm"?
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I thought Dradis was just saying that Westerners could honestly and accurately speak and reason about problems with Eastern Europe without sounding racist, so they were able to effectively deal with reality and achieve their goals.
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Also until about 2010, the Eastern European former Soviet states had a reputation for being corrupt war-torn economically depressed hell holes so I’m not sure they would have been held up as a shining beacon of the benefits of regime change. I think @DradisPing might be anachronistically applying the good reputations that countries like Poland have now, rather than how everyone saw that region fresh off the Balkan Wars.
Even by 2000 if you dove in to the numbers it was obvious in the band of countries running from Hungry to Estonia that things had dramatically improved. A lot of people hadn't updated their priors about how bad things there were in the 80s, we only started to get the real numbers in the 90s.
Certainly in right wing circles it was well known.
The former Yugoslavia was seen as it's own weird thing with a lot of ethic tensions we didn't understand.
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Really just said ~ "Only white people have a high enough IQ to form democracies".
I mean, I don't even find it useful to engage that assertion, but it is funny to contrast that with the take that I often see here that democracy in the west is now dysfunctional due to low IQ HBD dysgenics and only might concentrated in a single infallible strongman avatar can save us (Deus vult).
(+1 to aceventura's "History is longer than the last 70 years." which is approximately "read a book". I doubt the Greeks who invented democracy would've identified closely with your self identification on the HBD spectrum, you know, based on who they were geographically interacting with: southern Italy, Egypt, Anatolia, and Persia).
The IQ gaps have been investigated a lot more and the evidence regarding them is stronger. It is only natural to focus on them. The other things you mention are much more speculative, generally have a lot of room to plausibly be downstream of intelligence or culture, and are probably much less impactful than intelligence in any case. Sure we can acknowledge the possibility of genetic differences in other impactful traits, but that doesn't mean we can just assume that based on observing some difference between the population groups. In general I am wary about building castles of speculation on scant evidence, it might seem more sophisticated and cutting-edge but I think it's a much less likely to be true than something simple and well-tested.
As I suggested elsewhere in the thread, I think the burden of proof should be on the person who would argue that it works this way for every single animal except humans.
The real question is how strong the proclivities are and how effectively culture can enhance or curb them. That's a great question and I wish anyone were looking into it.
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Did I argue otherwise?
FWIW I don't have a position on European genetic tendencies to hygiene, though I'd guess orderliness does come in when the subject expands to such things as keeping one's house clean. Who can say?
Don't recall where but I remember being flabbergasted by descriptions of pre-industrial European cities where all the roads, yards, etc. were just constantly covered in human and animal dung. Sometimes even indoors! The French in particular were noted for their penchant for pissing on staircases, also even indoors. Germans meanwhile were noted for fastidiously keeping interiors spotless. How much selection has taken place in the last couple hundred years, I cannot guess.
I feel like people take the wrong impression from those stories of historical roads covered in dung. Back then, all humans were a lot closer to nature so they were less grossed out by it. That dung was a sign of wealth. Animals were one of the most expensive things humans could owb, especially horses. In most societies, owning a horse made you a weslthy man. The manure was carefully collected and used for crop fertilizer.
It would have been mind blowing for most historical societies to see a European city with so many horses they cant even pick up all the dung. It would be like living in an oil field.
The Great Horseshit Crisis of 1894 is apparently an early example of fake news, but the price of horse manure in London dropped below zero at some point in the late 19th century, probably slightly after Carl Benz filed his first car patent in 1886.
Had people tried to run a city the size of 20th century London on 19th century transport technology, eventually there would have been a Great Horseshit Crisis. But we didn't and there wasn't. Van exhaust stinks, but per tonne-km (or ton-mile if you have to be perverse) of goods moved it stinks orders of magnitude less than horseshit. The Great Smog Crisis is real, but emissions control technology (and eventually the shift to EVs) is keeping pace with it in well-governed cities.
For a constant population and a roughly-constant material standard of living, high-tech urban societies are far more sustainable than traditional ones.
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I think your idea here is plausible, but I have trouble seeing how you'd isolate nature from nurture here for these axes without some industrial-scale twin studies that seem implausible.
Well, I think the burden of proof is much higher for the person who wants to argue that it works this way for every single animal except humans.
To your actual point though adoption studies seem useful.
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A lot of HBD advocates in spaces like these do want it to just be about IQ, and a lot of people who call themselves pro-HBD will say it is just about IQ. It's one fracture on the DR regarding the Jewish Question, for example.
Arguing against specific highly spurious claims is very different to arguing that intelligence is the only feature of the mind that is inherited. In any case, you might add that the more anti-Jewish side of the DR is actually split between “Jewish IQ is a psy-op, see Unz, myth of American meritocracy, IQ stats from Brooklyn high schools in the 1930s don’t map to Israel” etc and “it’s real but it doesn’t matter because they’re also hereditary cheats, sex pests, clannish narcissists”.
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Well, that perspective makes no sense and I've never seen it advocated; only implied by those who don't seem to know what they're talking about.
One sees it everywhere, even by those who otherwise denounce HBD.
The basic formula is: [My ingroup's positive attributes] are genetic, set in stone, impossible to imitate; while [ingroup's negative attributes] are the random result of circumstance or interest or are entirely mythical. [My outgroup's positive attributes] are random results of circumstance or interest, or are entirely fake; but [outgroup's negative attributes] are genetic, set in stone, impossible to improve or mitigate.
As I said, it doesn't make sense.
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The Greeks actually wrote a lot about the conditions for democracy and what separated Greeks from barbarians in being able to do it.
The Virgin Nietzche vs ths Chads Aristotle and Plato.
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I don’t think that’s what the person was saying at all.
The implication is that the culture of Afghanistan and Iraq and most of Africa and numerous other parts of the world, along with substandard intelligence, means that those places aren’t ready to be part of the better world.
This seems true.
If you were to say ‘ white people are clearly the most intelligent people, and the most innovative ‘ I would also agree and just kinda point to absolutely everything that they’ve accomplished (I’m Slavic - I don’t count) and how they’re the envy of the world.
I do believe the rest of the world will catch up - and I do believe if you steal a baby from some shit he country and stick ‘em in an average American home that they’ll just be like everyone else.
But why pretend they won’t be flooded with bad culture on top of bad genes on top of bad environment where they currently are and won’t accomplish much ?
My understanding of the HBD hypothesis is that the differences in outcomes across the world are, by a wide margin, mostly explainable by IQ differences in population. My understanding is that it's not a hypothesis founded or invoked with nuance, which is what you're trying to insert here. It's just trying to simplify complex geopolitical, domestic, and historical dynamics with "well, they're stupid". So please excuse me if my response to its invocation is equally terse and lacking in nuance.
Edit: Also, the thrust of my comment was more that it's funny to see the contrast of "Only white people are smart enough to form democracy" alongside (presumably) white people begging for the boot of autocracy to save them from the boogeyman.
Disproof by example: I'm most favourably disposed to genetic explanations of group differences in a few specific cases.
Sub-Saharan Africans, because of longer timescales of the main, H. s. s. component (100,000+ years of relative isolation in some cases), and because of very low hybridisation with Neanderthals (whereas everyone else has ~3%).
Austronesians, because they're essentially the only group with substantial Denisovan ancestry.
Shitty immune systems from those that didn't settle down until recently, because of the massive and sustained selection for plague resistance since we started building cities. I'm normally sceptical of recent-significant-change explanations, but this one has actually met the high burden of proof given the Columbian Exchange and the similar effects on Australian Aborigines, and it's a relatively-simple tweak compared to stuff "upstairs".
What's not there? I'm highly sceptical of any attempt to explain differences within Eurasia by HBD; the timescales of divergence are quite short, with in most cases significant gene-flow for the entire period, and we've all been civilised for long enough. That includes people going on about Near Easterners (except to the - relatively minor AIUI - degree that there's sub-Saharan African introgression) and, yes, Jews.
So I'm not really with @DradisPing about Iraqis being genetically unsuited to democracy, though I will note that he did also mention "deep culture" and I don't see anything wrong with that claim.
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Oh, no, there are a lot of nuanced HBD people who will talk to you all day about mitochondrial haplotype this and Y-chromosome that. Or there were, anyway, I haven't seen them around in a while; they just got called racists like all the others.
I speculate that people who want to talk all day about haplotypes are too, well, boring to draw that much controversy. If you're very interested in the science of genetics there might be a good conversation there, but most people are not. Moreover, people who want to talk about that will probably learn that the Motte isn't a great place for deep dives into genetic science. That sort of conversation requires a lot of specialised knowledge that most Motters don't have.
By contrast, people who enjoy making edgy generalisations about this or that racial group seem like they're optimising more for drama and controversy, and this is a better place to get that. It's the culture war angle. Diving into the arcane complexities of genetic science is interesting, but it's not incendiary. It doesn't pick fights the way that its edgier cousin does.
Naturally get more of the latter type.
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I have a different hypothesis.
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If that's your definition of nuance, then I'm sure phrenology and alchemy are right up your alley as well.
There's the difference between HBD as-in "Human genetics drift over time as populations are isolated, let's explore those differences" and HBD as-in "The genetic differences between populations can explain why the world looks like it does today[1]." Too often the former acts as a Trojan horse for the latter, and I guess people can't be trusted with the responsibility of communicating with nuance so they get called racist.
[1] Nearly every grand-theory-of-everything of why the world looks like it does today gets laughed out of any room with people who capable of deep critical thought in adjacent topics (see how anthropologists feel about Guns, Germs, and Steel) - HBD is not unique in this regard.
Edit: To add, the invocation of HBD in this thread was of the latter type, and not of the former type.
My understanding was that GGS was deprecated because it got objective facts wrong about the subjects it purports to address, not because it was ambitious in scope.
The facts it got objectively wrong aren't accepted as objectively wrong by anyone except online far-right autists. My impression is that it got depracated because it was meant to be compatible with 90's liberalism, which itself got depracated.
Welp, that's outed me as an online far-right autist, I suppose. (tongue very much in cheek)
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Lol, whut?
You might want to read what /r/askHistorians thinks of Guns, Germs & Steel and if you think that subreddit is full of ”online far-right autists” I suggest you check in for psychiatric evaluation for massive delusions.
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This is not the difference between 'nuance' and 'not-nuance', this is the difference between 'crimestop' and science. It is in a way similar to the Catholic Church's acceptance of heliocentrism as a mere 'calculating device'. 'Nuance' does not require that what you are studying have no effect on the real world.
Alright Jordan Peterson, let's shift the debate to the definition of the word "nuance".
My core point stands uncontested. HBD the theory hides behind HBD the science in order to try to gain legitimacy as a "grand-theory of why the world is the way it is" despite every "grand-theory of why the world is the way it is" being half-baked and not capable of standing up to any critical analysis.
"Uncontested". I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Error on top of error. It is not enough to merely declare that every "grand-theory of why the world is the way it is" is half-baked. Nor does it matter that something does not stand up to "critical analysis", if you mean that in the postmodern sense. And certainly it is not a mark against HBD that it tries to explain aspects of the world.
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Many such cases: this is a generic problem, IMO, with several branches of science, maybe even every branch with immediate political impact (also economics, epidemiology, climate science, [group] studies). I don't think you're wrong that this even happens to HBD folks who are probably diametrically opposed to plenty of those other examples.
I don't know of a generic strategy to counteract this human failing: my first recommendation would be to reject claims that "the science is settled": the scientific process is never truly settled. But if you go too far in the un-trusting direction, you'll start questioning the concept of childhood vaccinations or jet fuel melting steel beams.
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Cool, I'm glad you found a way to dismiss a whole belief system based on how you imagine the relative status of people who believe in it compared to those who don't. I'm sure there's no need to engage with the object matter on this, your preconceived ideas are probably 100% right about everything.
Yes I often dismiss whole belief systems, because there are many quite shit belief systems - history is filled with them. I recommend you spend as much time engaging in the same practice, lest you become a lemming in someone else's schemes.
I don't know what this means, but yes, I do tend to hold those in lower regard who fall prey to believing in shitty belief systems. But, since I'm not a misanthrope, it's more of "pity" than "hate". I look at the pictures of cultists clutching onto empty goblets sprawled around tents and I feel sad, but then I see the children in the photo and I feel angry. It's more complex than what you're trying to paint me as.
I do engage. Like my example, I read Guns, Germs, and Steel - but then I also read the criticisms and appreciated those just as much if not more than the original source material. And then I adjust my priors.
And yet you hang on to socialism.
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I don’t think you can blame this on the naivety of republicans because it was an elite stratum doing the invading.
When do you hold the rank and file accountable for the policies they voted for, versus blaming elites?
Say what you like about Dubya, Lord knows I have, but he was the most sincerely religious president since at least 1920. He had support from virtually all protestant Christian religious groups and leaders across America. One has to do some of kind of two-step to place him and his actions and their consequences outside the conservative movement or Red Tribe more broadly.
Bush was genuinely pious, but he wasn’t some townie(which is what the poster I replied to was getting at). He was, literally, a coastal elite who was educated in the Ivy League. He may have had blinders from ideology or end times prophecy but he and his admin weren’t villagers who had no choice but to believe what the scribes pronounced.
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