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Notes -
How do the majority of Trump voters and flip-flopping independents think about such things? How do right-wingers like Auron think about them?
It's getting more popular amongst Republicans but I think that's wholly because the gays have either abandoned their movement or refused to Sistah Soulja the trans side.
If they totally surrendered today and treated trans like NAMBLA...maybe Republicans would give up and rebound. But that's impossible (the best they can manage is just silence) so who knows when the backlash will bottom out?
Wow, that’s… massive. Is it just party coalitions reshuffling? But such a massive drop in such a short amount of time makes me want to assume the null hypothesis, measurement error.
The machine that produced the previous consensus on Gay Rights has largely broken down. At the same time, the movement and its core supporters went all-in on trans, and by my lights have pretty clearly suffered a catastrophic defeat.
But I know moderates who strongly oppose a lot of the trans stuff but are firmly in support of gay marriage. Have people with this viewpoint just flipped away from identifying as Republican en masse?
Looking at the Gallup data, independents don’t show much of a change. My supposition is that a lot of moderate Republicans have left the party since 2020, leaving more firm conservatives. I’m not convinced this change is due to a massive number of people changing their minds.
I'm... hesitant to go with any of the easy answers. The Bulwarkist side of no-longer-Republicans-if-they-ever-were exists, but it's tiny. The Republican minority outreach should expect to see incoming demographics who don't like The Gays, but the difference just isn't that big. Measurement problems are endemic to modern polls, but there's a lot of reasons to suspect that they'd result in these polls going more toward the demographics most gay-friendly (younger, more urban, more online). And while it's possible for some number of people to be rounding 'gay marriage' and 'trans stuff' together, either out of confusion or treating the movement as a whole, there's too big of a difference in poll numbers on gay marriage and trans stuff for that to shake out right either.
I think there's some genuine disagreements on policy that have become a lot more apparent in the last three or four years. MacIntyre likes to Darkly Hint in ways that wouldn't be accepted (or even necessarily understood) by a lot of Red Tribers, but matters like surrogacy, limits of workplace conduct, interactions with media, the bake-the-cake movement, these are things I see from not-especially-online people in the real world.
I'd like to think that there are workable compromise positions, but they depend on actually understanding and respecting the other side, and I thought the same about trans stuff.
But the changes have happened since, Gallup says, 2022 — I just don’t know what’s happened since 2022 that would make such a big shift make sense! Except for Trump 2. But Trump has shown no indication of reticence about gay marriage.
Elon bought Twitter?
It feels like a pat explanation but now I'm honestly wondering why. Maybe an instinctive dislike of Great Man theory on my part?
There's an entire criticism going around right now from people who would know like Ezra Klein that Twitter was especially bad for progressives in that it made the links between journalists, activists and politicians way too tight and allowed very easy coordination (this is how you get people providing arguments that rioting is bad getting fired during the Summer of Floyd because ??) . This allowed liberal cancel culture to reach a fever pitch but also led to overplaying their hand on culture issues and it naturally backfired when someone else took it over.
It was the regime's coordination center and the rebels got it. Of course it should go badly.
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